Powering the Internet of Things with RIOT: Why? How? What is RIOT?

The crucial importance of software platforms was highlighted by recent events both at the political level (e.g. renewed calls for digital data and operating system "sovereignty", following E. Snowden's revelations) and at the business level (e.g. Android generated a new industry worth tens of billions of euros yearly). In the Internet of Things, which is expected to generate business at very large scale, but also to threaten even more individual privacy, such aspects will be exacerbated. The need for an operating system like RIOT stems from this context, and this short article outlines RIOT's main non-technical aspects, as well as its key technical characteristics.Comment: 4 page

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

The Future of IoT Software Must be Updated

International audienceDecades of software engineering shows that updating deployed software is not a nice-to-have, but a must-have. Deployed software (e.g. an IP protocol stack) is never bug free, and these bugs must be patched to increase its robustness and security, and as communication standards and application logic evolve, deployed software typically needs to evolve in parallel. As the IoT emerges, the same will apply to deployed IoT software

Design and implementation of a platform for hyperconnected cyber physical systems

International audienceThe Internet of Things (IoT) is an area of growing importance as more and more computing capability becomes embedded into real world objects and environments. But at the same time IoT is just one component of a widespread shift towards a new age of federation, combining with other trends such as cloud computing, blockchain and automation to create a new hyperconnected infrastructure. This infrastructure will emerge from the convergence of traditional, cloud and IoT-based models of computing, creating a more decentralised, secure and democratic computing platform for the future. But while bringing significant benefits, federation also brings significant problems-in particular the complexity of building, integrating and managing systems built using highly distributed and heterogeneous platforms. In this paper we discuss our work on modelling, deployment and management for this new converged computing environment, leveraging previous work on domain languages, cloud computing and the Web of Things to accelerate and democratize the development of real world hyperconnected systems

Reprogramming Low-end IoT Devices from the Cloud

International audienceThe Internet of Things (IoT) consists in a variety of smart connected objects, among which a category of low-end devices based on micro-controllers. The orchestration of low-end IoT devices is not straightforward because of the lack of generic and holistic solutions articulating cloud-based tools on one hand, and low-end IoT device software on the other hand. In this paper, we describe such a solution, combining a cloud-based IDE, graphical programming, and automatic JavaScript generation. Scripts are pushed over the Internet and over-the-air for the last hop, updating runtime containers hosted on heterogeneous low-end IoT devices running RIOT. We demonstrate a prototype working on common off-the-shelf low-end IoT hardware with as little as 32kB of memory

RIOT and the Evolution of IoT Operating Systems and Applications

International audienceThe Internet of Things (IoT) is expected to be the next ‘big thing’. To date, however, there is no de facto standard software platform to program memory and energy-constrained IoT devices. We expect an evolution of IoT software platforms that can be roughly compared to the recent evolution of software platforms powering smartphones. In this article, we describe such an evolution

Secure Firmware Updates for Constrained IoT Devices Using Open Standards: A Reality Check

International audienceWhile IoT deployments multiply in a wide variety of verticals, most IoT devices lack a built-in secure firmware update mechanism. Without such a mechanism, however, critical security vulnerabilities cannot be fixed, and IoT devices can become a permanent liability , as demonstrated by recent large-scale attacks. In this paper, we survey open standards and open source libraries that provide useful building blocks for secure firmware updates for constrained IoT devices -- by which we mean low-power, microcontroller-based devices such as networked sensors/actuators with a small amount of memory, among other constraints. We design and implement a prototype that leverages these building blocks and assess the security properties of this prototype. We present experimental results , including first experiments with SUIT, a new IETF standard for secure IoT firmware updates. We evaluate the performance of our implementation on a variety of commercial off-the-shelf constrained IoT devices. We conclude that it is possible to create a secure, standards-compliant firmware update solution that uses state-of-the-art security for IoT devices with less than 32kB of RAM and 128kB of flash memory

Scripting Over-The-Air: Towards Containers on Low-end Devices in the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) connects a variety of small devices, via gateways, to the cloud. Use-cases often require IoT devices to run logic that is not pre-determined before deployment, and that must be updated during the life-time of the device. In this paper, we explore the potential of over-the-air scripting and updatable runtime containers hosting application logic on heterogeneous low-end IoT devices. Based on RIOT and Javascript, we provide a proof-of-concept implementation of this approach for a building automation IoT scenario. A preliminary evaluation shows our prototype runs on common off-the-shelf low-end IoT hardware with as little as 32kB of memory

Scripting Over-The-Air: Towards Containers on Low-end Devices in the Internet of Things

International audienceThe Internet of Things (IoT) connects a variety of small devices, via gateways, to the cloud. Use-cases often require IoT devices to run logic that is not predetermined before deployment, and that must be updated during the lifetime of the device. In this paper, we explore the potential of over-the-air scripting and updatable runtime containers hosting application logic on heterogeneous low-end IoT devices. Based on RIOT and Javascript, we provide a proof-of-concept implementation of this approach for a building automation IoT scenario. A preliminary evaluation shows our prototype runs on common off-the-shelf low-end IoT hardware with as little as 32kB of memory