A sensor node soC architecture for extremely autonomous wireless sensor networks

Tese de Doutoramento em Engenharia Eletrónica e de Computadores (PDEEC) (especialidade em Informática Industrial e Sistemas Embebidos)The Internet of Things (IoT) is revolutionizing the Internet of the future and the way new smart objects and people are being connected into the world. Its pervasive computing and communication technologies connect myriads of smart devices, presented at our everyday things and surrounding objects. Big players in the industry forecast, by 2020, around 50 billion of smart devices connected in a multitude of scenarios and heterogeneous applications, sharing data over a true worldwide network. This will represent a trillion dollar market that everyone wants to take a share. In a world where everything is being connected, device security and device interoperability are a paramount. From the sensor to the cloud, this triggers several technological issues towards connectivity, interoperability and security requirements on IoT devices. However, fulfilling such requirements is not straightforward. While the connectivity exposes the device to the Internet, which also raises several security issues, deploying a standardized communication stack on the endpoint device in the network edge, highly increases the data exchanged over the network. Moreover, handling such ever-growing amount of data on resource-constrained devices, truly affects the performance and the energy consumption. Addressing such issues requires new technological and architectural approaches to help find solutions to leverage an accelerated, secure and energy-aware IoT end-device communication. Throughout this thesis, the developed artifacts triggered the achievement of important findings that demonstrate: (1) how heterogeneous architectures are nowadays a perfect solution to deploy endpoint devices in scenarios where not only (heavy processing) application-specific operations are required, but also network-related capabilities are major concerns; (2) how accelerating network-related tasks result in a more efficient device resources utilization, which combining better performance and increased availability, contributed to an improved overall energy utilization; (3) how device and data security can benefit from modern heterogeneous architectures that rely on secure hardware platforms, which are also able to provide security-related acceleration hardware; (4) how a domain-specific language eases the co-design and customization of a secure and accelerated IoT endpoint device at the network edge.Internet of Things (IoT) é o conceito que está a revolucionar a Internet do futuro e a forma como coisas, processos e pessoas se conectam e se relacionam numa infraestrutura de rede global que interligará, num futuro próximo, um vasto número de dispositivos inteligentes e de utilização diária. Com uma grande aposta no mercado IoT por parte dos grandes líderes na industria, algumas visões otimistas preveem para 2020 mais de 50 mil milhões de dispositivos ligados na periferia da rede, partilhando grandes volumes de dados importantes através da Internet, representando um mercado multimilionário com imensas oportunidades de negócio. Num mundo interligado de dispositivos, a interoperabilidade e a segurança é uma preocupação crescente. Tal preocupação exige inúmeros esforços na exploração de novas soluções, quer a nível tecnológico quer a nível arquitetural, que visem impulsionar o desenvolvimento de dispositivos embebidos com maiores capacidades de desempenho, segurança e eficiência energética, não só apenas do dispositivo em si, mas também das camadas e protocolos de rede associados. Apesar da integração de pilhas de comunicação e de protocolos standard das camadas de rede solucionar problemas associados à conectividade e a interoperabilidade, adiciona a sobrecarga inerente dos protocolos de comunicação e do crescente volume de dados partilhados entre os dispositivos e a Internet, afetando severamente o desempenho e a disponibilidade do mesmo, refletindo-se num maior consumo energético global. As soluções apresentadas nesta tese permitiram obter resultados que demonstram: (1) a viabilidade de soluções heterogéneas no desenvolvimento de dispositivos IoT, onde não só tarefas inerentes à aplicação podem ser aceleradas, mas também tarefas relacionadas com a comunicação do dispositivo; (2) os benefícios da aceleração de tarefas e protocolos da pilha de rede, que se traduz num melhor desempenho do dispositivo e aumento da disponibilidade do mesmo, contribuindo para uma melhor eficiência energética; (3) que plataformas de hardware modernas oferecem mecanismos de segurança que podem ser utilizados não apenas em prol da segurança do dispositivo, mas também nas capacidades de comunicação do mesmo; (4) que o desenvolvimento de uma linguagem de domínio específico permite de forma mais eficaz e eficiente o desenvolvimento e configuração de dispositivos IoT inteligentes.This thesis was supported by a PhD scholarship from Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia, SFRH/BD/90162/201

WECO - wireless ecoponto

Dissertação de mestrado integrado em Engenharia de ComunicaçõesActualmente, a sensibilização por parte das pessoas para com os problemas ambientais tem vindo a aumentar. A recolha de resíduos urbanos constitui uma dessas preocupações, fazendo já parte do nosso quotidiano a separação dos resíduos sólidos produzidos diariamente que são posteriormente depositados em contentores próprios com destino à reciclagem, os ecopontos. Contudo, o enchimento dos ecopontos, ocorrendo aleatoriamente, torna difícil a tarefa de recolha, visto ser difícil a previsão de quando é que este se encontra cheio. Esta dificuldade tem como consequência o deslocamento de veículos de recolha a uma ilha de ecopontos que se encontra cheia e que justificava intervenção há algum tempo (a zona circundante pode ter lixo abandonado que já não cabe no contentor), ou a uma ilha de ecopontos que se encontra com baixos níveis de enchimento, traduzindo-se num desperdício de recursos e tempo visto que não se justificaria a sua recolha. Com o objectivo de aumentar a eficiência da recolha de resíduos e reduzir os custos associados, foi implementada uma plataforma de monitorização do nível de enchimento de ecopontos, o Wise Waste, desenvolvida pela SOMA do grupo Auto- Sueco , encontrando-se actualmente em funcionamento em vários municípios do país. Contudo esta plataforma apresenta algumas limitações, nomeadamente a necessidade de cabos de ligação para alimentação e/ou comunicação entre os vários elementos do sistema, o elevado consumo energético e o facto de não poder ser usada em todos os tipos de contentores existentes. Nesta dissertação é apresentada a plataformaWeco, uma plataforma inteligente de monitorização do nível de enchimento de ecopontos que pretende actualizar, apresentando vários melhoramentos, a plataforma actual Wise Waste. A plataforma Weco, devido à sua natureza sem fios pode ser usada em todos os tipos de contentores existentes e introduz uma gestão de energia mais eficiente, entre outras vantagens, contribuindo para uma recolha mais eficiente e programada e amiga do ambiente.Nowadays, people have became more aware about the environmental issues, one of these is the waste separation and recycling. Waste is separated at home and later deposited in outdoor recycling bins located at a recycling spot. Consenquently, the number of recycling spots has been steadily increasing. However, and because the recycling bins are randomly filled, it’s a hard task to predict when they are full and the collecting company has dificulties in defining collecting routes for the vehicles. This often results in collecting an empty recycling bin, one with a very-low fill level, or even one that was full a long time ago (generally meaning that the area surrounding the bin is full of damped waste). Aiming to increase the quality of waste collecting and the efficiency, in order to reduce costs, a monitoring platform of the filling level of the recycling bins was implemented, the Wise Waste from SOMA, and it’s currently being used in several points of the country. However this monitoring platform has several limitations, such as the need for cables for communications and/or power supply, the overall system energy consumption and that it can’t be used in all types of recycling bins. This master’s thesis presents Weco, an embedded platform for monitoring the recycling bins filling level, and aims to improve the current system, Wise Waste, offering a very low cost implementation, wireless communications and a low power architecture that can be used in any kind of existing recycling bins, contributing for an efficient and scheduled waste collection and more environmentally friendly

Towards a green and secure architecture for reconfigurable IoT end-devices

With the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT), objects are becoming smaller, smarter and increasingly connected. IoT devices are being deployed in massive numbers, and the success of this new Internet era is heavily dependent upon the trust and security built over billions of heterogeneous devices. However, securing IoT devices can be a quandary, with hardware requirements, energy consumption and cost limitations pulling in opposite directions. This work-in-progress proposes a novel architecture for reconfigurable IoT end-devices, where several constrains, such as the security, performance and power budget must be seriously considered. The proposed architecture intends to go beyond state-of-the-art by focusing on a trade-off between device security and power consumption, in an attempt to find an optimal design point in the energy-security space.This work has been supported by COMPETE: POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007043 and FCT -Fundacao para a Ciencia e Tecnologia within the Project Scope: UID/CEC/00319/2013

uTango: an open-source TEE for IoT devices

Security is one of the main challenges of the Internet of Things (IoT). IoT devices are mainly powered by low-cost microcontrollers (MCUs) that typically lack basic hardware security mechanisms to separate security-critical applications from less critical components. Recently, Arm has started to release Cortex-M MCUs enhanced with TrustZone technology (i.e., TrustZone-M), a system-wide security solution aiming at providing robust protection for IoT devices. Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) relying on TrustZone hardware have been perceived as safe havens for securing mobile devices. However, for the past few years, considerable effort has gone into unveiling hundreds of vulnerabilities and proposing a collection of relevant defense techniques to address several issues. While new TEE solutions built on TrustZone-M start flourishing, the lessons gathered from the research community appear to be falling short, as these new systems are trapping into the same pitfalls of the past. In this paper, we present UTANGO, the first multi-world TEE for modern IoT devices. UTANGO proposes a novel architecture aiming at tackling the major architectural deficiencies currently affecting TrustZone(-M)-assisted TEEs. In particular, we leverage the very same TrustZone hardware primitives used by dual-world implementations to create multiple and equally secure execution environments within the normal world. We demonstrate the benefits of UTANGO by conducting an extensive evaluation on a real TrustZone-M hardware platform, i.e., Arm Musca-B1. UTANGO will be open-sourced and freely available on GitHub in hopes of engaging academia and industry on securing the foreseeable trillion IoT devices.This work was supported in part by the Fundacao para a Ciencia e Tecnologia (FCT) within the Research and Development Units under Grant UIDB/00319/2020, and in part by FCT within the Ph.D. Scholarship under Grant 2020.04585.BD

Leveraging RISC-V to build an open-source (hardware) OS framework for reconfigurable IoT devices

With the growing interest in RISC-V systems and the endless possi bilities of creating customized hardware architectures, we introduce the first proof of concept (PoC) implementation of ChamelIoT, the first open-source agnostic hardware operating system (OS) frame work for reconfigurable Internet of Things (IoT) low-end devices. At this stage, ChamelIoT, leveraging the Rocket Custom Co-Processor Interface (RoCC), provides hardware acceleration support for thread management and scheduling of three different OSes: RIOT, Zephyr, and FreeRTOS. This paper overviews the overall ChamelIoT archi tecture and describes the implementation details of the current PoC deployment. Our first experiments were carried out on a Xilinx Arty-35T FPGA Evaluation kit and the preliminary results are very promising, showing that the desired agnosticism and flexibility can be achieved with determinism and performance advantages at a reasonable cost of hardware resources

Hardware-accelerated data decoding and reconstruction for automotive LiDAR sensors

The automotive industry is facing an unprecedented technological transformation towards fully autonomous vehicles. Optimists predict that, by 2030, cars will be sufficiently reliable, affordable, and common to displace most current human driving tasks. To cope with these trends, autonomous vehicles require reliable perception systems to hear and see all the surroundings, being light detection and ranging (LiDAR) sensors a key instrument for recreating a 3D visualization of the world. However, for a reliable operation, such systems require LiDAR sensors to provide high-resolution 3D representations of the car’s vicinity, which results in millions of data points to be processed in real-time. With this article we propose the ALFA-Pi, a data packet decoder and reconstruction system fully deployed on an embedded reconfigurable hardware platform. By resorting to field-programmable gate array (FPGA) technology, ALFAPi is able to interface different LiDAR sensors at the same time, while providing custom representation outputs to high-level perception systems. By accelerating the LiDAR interface, the proposed system outperforms current software-only approaches, achieving lower latency in the data acquisition and data decoding tasks while reaching high performance ratios

A hybrid energy-efficient routing protocol for wireless sensor networks

The usage and deployment of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) is rapidly increasing in many different monitoring and control applications. In the majority of these applications, energy is a key factor in sensor networks since the sensor nodes are battery powered and hence have limited resources of energy. In this context, choosing a proper energy-efficient routing technique can increase the network life time. In this paper, a new Hybrid Energy-Efficient (HEE) routing protocol is proposed. HEE uses Direct Transmission (DT) and Minimum Energy Transmission (MTE) which are two of the simplest methods in terms of computational complexity. However the design of routing techniques is highly dependent on the application and the performance may vary based on environmental parameters. The novel proposed method is applicable for different networks regardless of the size and distances between the nodes and also with different parameters such as number of nodes and message length. Simulation results show how HEE performs more efficiently in terms of energy consumption when comparing to DT and MTE.- (undefined

HcM-FreeRTOS: hardware-centric FreeRTOS for ARM Multicore

Migration to multicore is inevitable. To harness the potential of this technology, embedded system designers need to have available operating systems (OSes) with built-in capabilities for multicore hardware. When designed to meet real-time requirements, multicore SMP (Symmetric Multiprocessing) OSes not only face the inherent problem of concurrent access to shared kernel resources, but still suffer from a bifid priority space, dictated by the co-existence of threads and interrupts.This work in progress paper presents the offloading of the FreeRTOS kernel components to a commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) multicore hardware. The ARM Generic Interrupt Controller (GIC) is exploited to implement a multicore hardware centric version of the FreeRTOS that not only solves the priority inversion problem, but also removes the need of internal software synchronization points. Promising preliminary results on performance and determinism are presented, and the research roadmap is discussed.Sandro Pinto is supported by FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (grant SFRH/BD/91530/2012). This work has been supported by FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia within the Project Scope: PEst-UID/CEC/00319/2013

Towards a trustZone-assisted hypervisor for real-time embedded systems

Virtualization technology starts becoming more and more widespread in the embedded space. The penalties incurred by standard software-based virtualization is pushing research towards hardware-assisted solutions. Among the existing commercial off-the-shelf technologies for secure virtualization, ARM TrustZone is attracting particular attention. However, it is often seen with some scepticism due to the dual-OS limitation of existing state-of-the-art solutions. This letter presents the implementation of a TrustZone-based hypervisor for real-time embedded systems, which allows multiple RTOS partitions on the same hardware platform. The results demonstrate that virtualization overhead is less than 2 percent for a 10 milliseconds guest-switching rate, and the system remains deterministic. This work goes beyond related work by implementing a TrustZone-assisted solution that allows the execution of an arbitrary number of guest OSes while providing the foundation to drive next generation of secure virtualization solutions for resource-constrained embedded devices.This work has been supported by COMPETE: POCI-01-0145- FEDER-007043 and FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia – (grant SFRH/BD/91530/2012 and UID/CEC/00319/2013)

Agnostic hardware-accelerated operating system for Low-End IoT

There is increasing pressure to optimize Internet of things (IoT) low-end devices. The ever-growing number of requirements and constraints is pushing towards maximizing performance and real-time, but simultaneously minimizing power consumption, form factor, and memory footprint. This has motivated the adoption of Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) technology to accelerate computing-intensive workloads in hardware. However, and despite the ongoing trend of migrating application-level tasks to hardware, recently, the offload of system software such as operating system (OS) services has received little attention. This paper presents CHAMELIOT, a framework for FPGA-based IoT platforms that provides agnostic hardware acceleration to OS services by leveraging RISC-V technology. CHAMELIOT allows for developers to run unmodified applications in a set of well-established IoT OSes. Currently, the framework has support for RIOT, Zephyr, and FreeRTOS. The evaluation showed that latency and determinism can be enhanced up to 10x while the system’s performance can be increased to nearly 200%. CHAMELIOT will be open-sourced.This work has been supported by FCT -Fundacao para a Ciencia e Tecnologia within the R&D Units Project Scope: UIDB/00319/2020 and SFRH/BD/146678/2019