Globalization Report 2020: How do developing countries and emerging markets perform? Globalization Report 2020.

Every two years, the Globalization Report examines how well individual countries have benefited from the pro-gressing globalization since 1990. The influence of changes of the respective degree of globalization on the real gross domestic product per capita of the country is calculated for 45 industrialized countries and emerging markets. 22 of the countries considered in the “Globalization Report 2020” are also assessed by the Bertelsmann Stiftung’s Transformation Index (BTI). The reports published since 2014 reflect that the emerging markets examined show the smallest increases in real gross domestic product (hereinafter: GDP) as a result of globalization in absolute figures (i.e. calculated in euros). These countries achieve some of the highest globalization-induced gains, however, if the same GDP gains are placed in relation to the GDP per capita in 1990 – the first year of the examination period. For the emerging mar-kets, the advancing globalization is, therefore, a way to increase material prosperity. At the same time, however, the real GDP per capita between emerging markets and developed countries continues to diverge between 1990 and 2018. For reasons of data availability, the developing countries are not included in the Globalization Report. However, a look at other sources shows that the degree of globalization in these countries is very low and generally still be-low that of most emerging markets. Their real GDP per capita is also lower than that of the emerging markets, which means that only small increases in GDP induced by globalization are possible. The gap between develop-ing countries and highly developed economies in terms of real GDP per capita is growing not only in absolute, but also in relative terms

Old Wine in New Skins? Revisiting the Software Architecture for IP Network Stacks on Constrained IoT Devices

In this paper, we argue that existing concepts for the design and implementation of network stacks for constrained devices do not comply with the requirements of current and upcoming Internet of Things (IoT) use cases. The IoT requires not only a lightweight but also a modular network stack, based on standards. We discuss functional and non-functional requirements for the software architecture of the network stack on constrained IoT devices. Then, revisiting concepts from the early Internet as well as current implementations, we propose a future-proof alternative to existing IoT network stack architectures, and provide an initial evaluation of this proposal based on its implementation running on top of state-of-the-art IoT operating system and hardware.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figures and table

The Role of the Internet of Things in Network Resilience

Disasters lead to devastating structural damage not only to buildings and transport infrastructure, but also to other critical infrastructure, such as the power grid and communication backbones. Following such an event, the availability of minimal communication services is however crucial to allow efficient and coordinated disaster response, to enable timely public information, or to provide individuals in need with a default mechanism to post emergency messages. The Internet of Things consists in the massive deployment of heterogeneous devices, most of which battery-powered, and interconnected via wireless network interfaces. Typical IoT communication architectures enables such IoT devices to not only connect to the communication backbone (i.e. the Internet) using an infrastructure-based wireless network paradigm, but also to communicate with one another autonomously, without the help of any infrastructure, using a spontaneous wireless network paradigm. In this paper, we argue that the vast deployment of IoT-enabled devices could bring benefits in terms of data network resilience in face of disaster. Leveraging their spontaneous wireless networking capabilities, IoT devices could enable minimal communication services (e.g. emergency micro-message delivery) while the conventional communication infrastructure is out of service. We identify the main challenges that must be addressed in order to realize this potential in practice. These challenges concern various technical aspects, including physical connectivity requirements, network protocol stack enhancements, data traffic prioritization schemes, as well as social and political aspects

Security for the Industrial IoT: The Case for Information-Centric Networking

Industrial production plants traditionally include sensors for monitoring or documenting processes, and actuators for enabling corrective actions in cases of misconfigurations, failures, or dangerous events. With the advent of the IoT, embedded controllers link these `things' to local networks that often are of low power wireless kind, and are interconnected via gateways to some cloud from the global Internet. Inter-networked sensors and actuators in the industrial IoT form a critical subsystem while frequently operating under harsh conditions. It is currently under debate how to approach inter-networking of critical industrial components in a safe and secure manner. In this paper, we analyze the potentials of ICN for providing a secure and robust networking solution for constrained controllers in industrial safety systems. We showcase hazardous gas sensing in widespread industrial environments, such as refineries, and compare with IP-based approaches such as CoAP and MQTT. Our findings indicate that the content-centric security model, as well as enhanced DoS resistance are important arguments for deploying Information Centric Networking in a safety-critical industrial IoT. Evaluation of the crypto efforts on the RIOT operating system for content security reveal its feasibility for common deployment scenarios.Comment: To be published at IEEE WF-IoT 201

Connecting the World of Embedded Mobiles: The RIOT Approach to Ubiquitous Networking for the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) is rapidly evolving based on low-power compliant protocol standards that extend the Internet into the embedded world. Pioneering implementations have proven it is feasible to inter-network very constrained devices, but had to rely on peculiar cross-layered designs and offer a minimalistic set of features. In the long run, however, professional use and massive deployment of IoT devices require full-featured, cleanly composed, and flexible network stacks. This paper introduces the networking architecture that turns RIOT into a powerful IoT system, to enable low-power wireless scenarios. RIOT networking offers (i) a modular architecture with generic interfaces for plugging in drivers, protocols, or entire stacks, (ii) support for multiple heterogeneous interfaces and stacks that can concurrently operate, and (iii) GNRC, its cleanly layered, recursively composed default network stack. We contribute an in-depth analysis of the communication performance and resource efficiency of RIOT, both on a micro-benchmarking level as well as by comparing IoT communication across different platforms. Our findings show that, though it is based on significantly different design trade-offs, the networking subsystem of RIOT achieves a performance equivalent to that of Contiki and TinyOS, the two operating systems which pioneered IoT software platforms

Interoperable Services on Constrained Devices in the Internet of Things

International audienceThe Internet of Things (IoT) promises billions of constrained devices connected to the Internet in the near-future. The efficient integration of these massively deployments into service-oriented architectures requires light-weight and highly automated mechanisms for device configuration and setup on all layers of the network stack. In this paper we highlight how the set of existing solutions for configuration and service management (i.e.: discovery, description, invocation) are insufficiently analyzed in the context of the IoT on one hand, and on the other hand do not fit all the specific requirements and attributes of constrained devices, in terms of memory usage and power consumption in particular

Demo: IoT Meets Robotics - First Steps, RIOT Car, and Perspectives

International audienceWe present a cloud-enhanced, four-wheeled, mobile mini- robot, assembled from low-cost, off-the-shelf hardware parts, and open-source software building blocks. These building blocks provide a reusable and extensible base for emerging applications mixing robotics with the Internet of Things

Low-Cost Robots in the Internet of Things: Hardware, Software & Communication Aspects

The workshop is hosted by the International Conference on Embedded Wireless Systems and Networks (EWSN)International audienceIn the future, the Internet will not only connect computers and smart objects, but also a wide variety of semi-and fully-autonomous robots. This paper focuses on low-cost robots, and studies the recent convergence between low-cost robot hardware and IoT hardware. The potential for further convergence is then explored in terms of common embedded software platforms and common communication protocols, which could be used on both low-end IoT devices and low-cost robots. Finally, a proof-of-concept is provided based on RIOT and Aversive++ as software platform, show-cased running on a low-cost four-legged IoT robot

NDN-based IoT Robotics

International audienceIn this paper, we demonstrate how NDN can be used as network primitive on low-cost robots with the Robot Operating System (ROS)

Simply RIOT: Teaching and Experimental Research in the Internet of Things

International audienceManufacturers announce on a regular basis the availability of novel tiny devices, most of them featuring network interfaces: the Internet of Things (IoT) is already here - from the hardware perspective. On the software side however, embedded platforms available so far made it uneasy for developers to build apps that run across heterogeneous IoT hardware. Linux does not scale down to small, energy-constrained devices, while alternatives such as Contiki yield a steep learning curve and lengthy development life-cycles because they rule out standard programming and debugging tools. RIOT is a new open source software platform bridging this gap. RIOT allows just about any programmer to develop IoT application with zero learning curve. This is achieved by allowing standard C and C++ application programming with multi-threading, using well-known debugging tools (gdb, Valgrind, profilers etc.), while requiring only a minimum of 1.5 kB of RAM. RIOT also provides built-in energy efficiency and real-time capabilities. These characteristics make this platform attractive in several contexts, including teaching in the field of the Internet of Things, and experimental research in the domain of sensor networks and the IoT