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Bluetooth low energy is an almost ubiquitous technology currently embedded in billions of power-constrained Internet of Things devices around the world. The Bluetooth mesh profile, released by the Bluetooth Special Interest Group in July 2017, allows Bluetooth low energy devices to form a mesh network, further enabling smart home and building applications where long-range connectivity is required. However, the current release of Bluetooth mesh profile still has power and deployment constraints that limit its applicability. To explore the viability of Bluetooth mesh profile in home/building automation applications, we built the Smart Doorbell: a proof-of-concept Bluetooth mesh profile–based visitor notification system for office spaces. The Smart Doorbell was implemented using a mesh network topology with nodes distributed across office building floors, serving as a real Internet of Things deployment and as a testbed for mesh network protocols. Similar Bluetooth mesh profile evaluations found in literature use mostly development kits and/or synthetic traffic in artificial settings; we contribute by using the Smart Doorbell, a system as close as possible to a minimum viable product, to evaluate power consumption and responsiveness as a proxy for product viability. This article presents the architecture of the Smart Doorbell, the viability evaluation results, and a direct comparison with FruityMesh, a competing Bluetooth low energy mesh network protocol. Overall, the fact that Bluetooth mesh profile devices can directly communicate with a user's mobile phone (using Bluetooth low energy) considerably eases deployment and provisioning. However, the use of flooding to forward messages across the mesh network increases power consumption, precluding the use of battery-powered nodes on the network's backbone and severely limiting the applicability of Bluetooth mesh profile in building automation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nodes in a wireless sensor network are normally constrained by hardware and environmental conditions and face challenges of reduced computing capabilities and system security vulnerabilities. This fact calls for special requirements for network protocol design, security assessment models, and energy-efficient algorithms. Data aggregation is an effective energy conservation technique, which removes redundant information from the data aggregated from neighbor sensor nodes. How to further improve the effectiveness of data aggregation plays an important role in improving data collection accuracy and reducing the overall network energy consumption. Unfortunately, sensor nodes are normally deployed in an open environment and thus are subject to various attacks conducted by adversaries. Consequently, data aggregation brings new challenges to wireless sensor network security. In this article, we propose a novel secure data aggregation solution based on autoregressive integrated moving average model, a time series analysis technique, to prevent private data from being learned by adversaries. We leverage the autoregressive integrated moving average model to predict the data volume in sensor nodes, and update and synchronize the model as needed. The experimental results demonstrate that our model provides accurate predictions and that, compared with competing methods, our solution achieves better security, lower computation and communication costs, and better flexibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents an Internet of Things architecture for Smart Homes that specifically targets service composition and reconfiguration as enablers for the actuation and smart behavior capabilities. To this end, the main challenge that has to be addressed is the support to a seamless integration, composition, and reconfiguration of Internet of Things objects. Two enabling technologies are proposed here: a planning strategy based on a common-sense reasoning approach for service composition and a virtual-network protocol for Inter-Domain Messaging. The planner will identify the services that, properly connected, will cater for arisen, and therefore, unexpected needs. The virtual-network protocol will provide the support for this interconnection to take place in a transparent and orthogonal manner. This is particularly important to enable autonomous systems to instantiate composite services. To demonstrate the capabilities of the resulting framework, two use cases are presented, which under real circumstances demonstrate the potential of the proposed approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Internet of Things (IoT) technologies allow everyday objects to be capable of connecting to the Internet, thereby making smart and convenient daily life. Although users’ daily lives can be convenient due to various smart services utilizing IoT, it can also be a target of attack through the Internet. Thus, security has now been recognized as mandatory technology to activate IoT based smart service. Several standard organizations related to IoT technologies recommend using the CoAP over DTLS protocol stacks for enabling secure communications between resource constrained things. In general DTLS, a cipher suite required to support specific security service should be negotiated between the CoAP client and server in the process of performing the DTLS handshake protocol. However, the handshake requires too much processing and transmission overhead in constrained IoT environment. To improve such an issue, this paper proposes a secure but efficient scheme for resource constrained things. The proposed scheme can selectively apply application data encryption or integrity to the DTLS record layer during an on-going secure session, thereby reducing the burden of DTLS handshake in resource constrained Internet of Things. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Internet of Things (IoT) is expected to become a driver in an emerging era of interconnected world through the advanced connectivity of smart devices, systems, and services. IoT goes beyond a broad range of Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communication technologies and covers a wide variety of networking protocols. There exist solutions like MQTT or SIP collecting data from sensors, CoAP for constrained devices and networks, or XMPP for interconnecting devices and people. Also there is a plethora of standards and frameworks (OSGi, AllJoyn) bringing closer the paradigm of IoT vision. However, the main constraint of most existing platforms is their limited mutual interoperability. To this end, we provide a comprehensive description of protocols suitable to support the IoT vision. Further, we advocate an alternative approach to already known principles and employ the SIP protocol as a container for M2M data. We provide description of data structures and practical implementation principles of the proposed structures (JSON and Protocol Buffers are discussed in detail) transmitted by SIP as a promising enabler for efficient M2M communication in the IoT world. Our reported findings are based on extensive hands-on experience collected after the development of advanced M2M smart home gateway in cooperation with the operator Telekom Austria Group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the popularity of IEEE 802.11 based wireless fidelity (Wi-Fi) portable devices, it becomes increasingly significant to support the mobile users carrying Wi-Fi devices to access the Internet of Things (IoT) so that the communications between the mobile users and the smart objects deployed in the IoT stay uninterrupted when the mobile users are in movement. A scheme using Extended Service Set- (ESS-) based architecture is presented to implement the proxy mobile IPv6 protocol, that is, PMIPv6, for IEEE 802.11 infrastructure Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs). The key signaling packets together with their time sequences for the mobility management in the proposed scheme are proposed. Moreover, the handoff delay in the proposed scheme is derived, through which the performance of the proposed scheme is analyzed. Numerical analysis indicates that the proposed scheme considerably outperforms the existing scheme that uses the Basic Service Set (BSS) based architecture in terms of handoff delay in the case when the delay between Mobile Access Gateway (MAG) and local mobile anchor (LMA) is relatively large. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wireless Sensor Networks are a key element of the Internet of Things since they are one of the most interesting pervasive systems. However, they are battery-powered, so energy efficiency represents one of the primary design challenges to address. This goal can be primarily achieved through an optimization of the communication procedure, which is the most power-consuming component of a WSN node. Nevertheless, the poor resources of the embedded devices usually limit the complexity of protocol solutions, which thus are not sufficient to reach satisfactory results. For this reason, the current trend aims at integrating both hardware and software solutions. In this work, a cross-layer solution, based on the combined use of a duty-cycling MAC protocol and a reconfigurable beam-steering antenna, is presented and validated. It significantly reduces the nodes’ power consumption by exploiting scheduling techniques and directional communications. Specifically, a MAC scheduler manages the activation of the antenna sectors based on information coming from both MAC and network layers. This way, node awakenings occur only when an actual communication has to take place and only the interested antenna sector is activated. The effectiveness of the proposed cross-layer approach has been evaluated through OMNeT++ simulation tool. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Internet of Things (IoT) concept proposes that everyday objects are globally accessible from the Internet and integrate into new services having a remarkable impact on our society. Opposite to Internet world, things usually belong to resource-challenged environments where energy, data throughput, and computing resources are scarce. Building upon existing standards in the field such as IEEE1451 and ZigBee and rooted in context semantics, this paper proposes CTP (Communication Things Protocol) as a protocol specification to allow interoperability among things with different communication standards as well as simplicity and functionality to build IoT systems. Also, this paper proposes the use of the IoT gateway as a fundamental component in IoT architectures to provide seamless connectivity and interoperability among things and connect two different worlds to build the IoT: the Things world and the Internet world. Both CTP and IoT gateway constitute a middleware content-centric architecture presented as the mechanism to achieve a balance between the intrinsic limitations of things in the physical world and what is required from them in the virtual world. Said middleware content-centric architecture is implemented within the frame of two European projects targeting smart environments and proving said CTP's objectives in real scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Service-oriented architectures make establishing comprehensive profiles of smart factories feasible. In this paper, an energy tree model is used to describe a profile that shapes energy system dynamics. The energy tree shows an overall and detailed profile that combines information communication technologies and ontology knowledge bases. A 7-level network protocol defines sustainable communication services for accumulating local information to maintain the global energy tree in real time. The communication protocol manages everchanging temporal and spatial misalignments by aligning groups of energy resources that are temporally or spatially related. Meanwhile, correlated domain information regarding industrial processes is formulized into ontology models. Ontology-based semantic contexts allocate knowledge-supported attributes to energy resources, including systems, resources, and users. The key objective of context awareness is to align attributes and to intensify couplings between different energy resources by decomposing and aggregating internal ontology models. Intertemporal and interspatial correlations of energy resources are made available by the cooperative transmission of ontology-based semantic contexts in the protocol framework. An informational architecture based on the conceptual energy tree finally can be established using incomplete measurement data and reasoning for large-scale industrial networks. A Smart Grid application instance is given to demonstrate the functionalities of energy tree dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The prevalence of Internet of Things (IoT) requires flexible and fine-grained controls over the IoT devices. Existing works rely on specific controllers or programs to remotely control IoT devices, which is inefficient to support intelligent control in IoT environments. In contrast, utilizing a common portal device, for example, smart phone, to control variant IoT devices is a promising solution. However, it is challenging to guarantee the security when transferring the control of IoT devices. In this paper, we design a lightweight protocol to enable secure control transfer among the IoT devices, portal devices, and backend server. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our protocol in defending against mainstream attacks. Experimental results show the efficiency of our protocol in the authentication and key-updating during the control transfer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A cyber-physical system is an integration of computation, networking, and physical processes. This article introduces a novel physical control framework to integrate various devices to form the lower-level abstraction network. Two relevant protocols within this framework are proposed for information exchange between different network environments. Furthermore, a formal verification method for the proposed protocols is discussed. The model-checking tool SPIN is used to model and formally verify such protocols. The properties of the protocols are expressed using linear temporal logic to enable model-checking. Implementation results are presented to provide a deeper understanding of the proposed protocols. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Internet of Things will connect millions of things to the Internet to make our lives more convenient. However, Internet of Things security is an essential factor. OAuth is one of the most successful authentication and authorization protocols on the Internet. This article proposes push OAuth and personal OAuth authorization server by expanding OAuth for a secure access to the information on Internet of Things devices. In personal OAuth, the smartphones that communicate with remote servers to deliver information on Internet of Things devices can be the OAuth authorization server. Hospitals (OAuth client) that intend to access the information on Internet of Things devices cannot know millions of OAuth authorization server when the smartphone becomes the OAuth authorization server. This article proposes the push OAuth that changes the OAuth protocol and issues the OAuth token when the OAuth authorization server registers to the OAuth client first. Personal OAuth authorization server is far more trustworthy than using a third-party OAuth authorization server to authenticate because users directly control access to the information generated by Internet of Things devices. The personal OAuth authorization server and push OAuth suggested here are expected to create a more secure Internet of Things environment as users can directly authenticate the OAuth client that can access the information on their Internet of Things devices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Internet of Things is becoming increasingly important in traffic, medical treatment, and other industry fields. With the development of the Internet of Things technology, lots of new “things” need to be accessed to the Internet of Things. Currently, Internet of Things applications adopt multiple methods to access the heterogeneous devices. How to provide unified access means for those “things” is a fundamental issue. To solve this problem, a new method is proposed in this article to design a reconfigurable smart interface for multiple Internet of Things devices. The IEEE 1451 standard is adopted for this design, and it comprehensively specifies the smart transducer design and relevant interface protocol to implement the intelligent acquisition for common sensors and actuators. Field programmable gate array is adopted for the implementation of this design to reduce consumption of resources and enable the reconfiguration of the whole system. Performance of the proposed system is evaluated, and good performance is achieved in practical application for office environment monitoring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The exponential growth of devices connected to the network has resulted in the development of new IoT applications and on-line services. However, these advances are limited by the rigidity of the current network infrastructure, in which the administrator has to implement high-level network policies adapting and configuring protocols manually and usually through a command line interface (CLI). At this point, Software-Defined Networking (SDN) appears as a viable alternative network architecture that allows for programming the network and opening the possibility of creating new services and more efficient applications to cover the actual requirements. In this paper, we describe this new technology and analyze its opportunities in the development of IoT applications. Similarly, we present the first applications and projects based on this technology. Finally, we discuss the issues and challenges in its implementation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]