SWAMP:Smart Water Management Platform Overview and Security Challenges

The intensive use of technology in precision irrigation for agriculture is getting momentum in order to optimize the use of water, reduce the energy consumption and improve the quality of crops. Internet of Things (IoT) and other technologies are the natural choices for smart water management applications, and the SWAMP project is expected to prove the appropriateness of IoT in real settings with the deployment of on-site pilots. At the same time, the more intense the use of technology is, agriculture turns new security risks, which may affect both crop development and the commodities market. A security breach may irreversibly compromise a crop and data eavesdropping may compromise price and contracts exposing sensitive data such crop quality, development or management. This paper discusses security challenges and technologies for the application of IoT in agriculture and indicates that one of the most relevant challenges to be handled in SWAMP project is dealing with the multitude of behaviors from IoT application and what would be considered as normal and what would be considered as a threat

An architecture for QoS control applied to heterogeneous networks and convergent services.

Um dos objetivos das próximas gerações dos sistemas de comunicação é permitir que os usuários acessem e distribuam um ou mais serviços a qualquer hora, em qualquer lugar, independentemente do tipo de terminal (telefone convencional, telefone celular, assistentes pessoais digitais, notebooks, dentre outros) ou da tecnologia da rede de acesso utilizados. Esse cenário é denominado convergência de serviços utilizando-se redes heterogêneas, e em tal realidade, as arquiteturas de qualidade de serviço existentes em cada uma das tecnologias dos sistemas de comunicação não oferecem mecanismos de interoperabilidade e em diversos casos não há controle sob os fluxos de dados uma vez admitido na infraestrutura do sistema de comunicação, assim como questões de handover heterogêneo não são tratadas. A tese propõe uma arquitetura para controle de Qualidade de Serviço para um ambiente heterogêneo composto de backbones IP e redes de acesso de diversas tecnologias, sendo tal arquitetura composta de agentes autônomos e distribuídos nos equipamentos de um sistema de comunicação; assim como.controles baseados no comportamento de uma região de um sistema de comunicação e apoiados na teoria e princípios de sistemas complexos. Os agentes da arquitetura proposta utilizando o princípio de preferential attachment mostraram-se eficientes na determinação do caminho de melhor condição de qualidade de serviços. Os componentes da arquitetura proposta estão localizados em cada equipamento de comunicação, desde o dispositivo do usuário até o provedor de serviços. As medições realizadas pelos agentes e utilizando um algoritmo baseado no conceito de preferential attachment permitiram ao agente alterar o caminho de um fluxo de dados durante sua transmissão para outros caminhos que apresentaram condições mais adequadas de acordo com os parâmetros de QoS. A decisão é baseada no contrato de qualidade de serviço especificado entre usuário e provedor de serviço e, considerando sob controle todos os elementos envolvidos na comunicação; tem-se controle distribuído de qualidade de serviço fim a fim.One of the targets of the next generation communication systems is to provide access to any service, to any user, anytime, anywhere, regardless the access network technology or type of user device (mobile phone, PDA, personal computer, and so on). This scenario is called convergence of services by heterogeneous networks, and in such scenario quality of service mechanisms presented in legacy communication systems do not provide mechanisms for interoperability between communication systems nor control data flows after control admission in the border of the communication systems. The heterogeneous handover is also not handled by such QoS architectures. This thesis proposes a QoS control architecture for an heterogeneous communication systems composed by IP backbones and several access networks for several kind of technologies. This architecture is composed by a multiagent system and has controls based on the local behavior of the communication system and supported by complex systems theory. The agent decision algorithm is based on preferential attachment concept and the experimentation results indicate that agents could identify a better path to handle a data flow according to QoS parameters. The agents decided to change the path used to transmit the flow data autonomously and according to quality of service contract between user and service provider. The measurements in the test based on preferential attachment algorithm was useful in order agent change flow data path during data flow transmission to other paths with better conditions according to QoS requisites. The agent decision is based on the parameter values defined between end user and service provider. Considering the control elements from proposed architecture it was achieved end-to-end distributed control

IRRISENS: An IoT Platform Based on Microservices Applied in Commercial-Scale Crops Working in a Multi-Cloud Environment

Research has shown the multitude of applications that Internet of Things (IoT), cloud computing, and forecast technologies present in every sector. In agriculture, one application is the monitoring of factors that influence crop development to assist in making crop management decisions. Research on the application of such technologies in agriculture has been mainly conducted at small experimental sites or under controlled conditions. This research has provided relevant insights and guidelines for the use of different types of sensors, application of a multitude of algorithms to forecast relevant parameters as well as architectural approaches of IoT platforms. However, research on the implementation of IoT platforms at the commercial scale is needed to identify platform requirements to properly function under such conditions. This article evaluates an IoT platform (IRRISENS) based on fully replicable microservices used to sense soil, crop, and atmosphere parameters, interact with third-party cloud services for scheduling irrigation and, potentially, control irrigation automatically. The proposed IoT platform was evaluated during one growing season at four commercial-scale farms on two broadacre irrigated crops with very different water management requirements (rice and cotton). Five main requirements for IoT platforms to be used in agriculture at commercial scale were identified from implementing IRRISENS as an irrigation support tool for rice and cotton production: scalability, flexibility, heterogeneity, robustness to failure, and security. The platform addressed all these requirements. The results showed that the microservice-based approach used is robust against both intermittent and critical failures in the field that could occur in any of the monitored sites. Further, processing or storage overload caused by datalogger malfunctioning or other reasons at one farm did not affect the platform’s performance. The platform was able to deal with different types of data heterogeneity. Since there are no shared microservices among farms, the IoT platform proposed here also provides data isolation, maintaining data confidentiality for each user, which is relevant in a commercial farm scenario