Performance evaluation of publish-subscribe systems in IoT using energy-efficient and context-aware secure messages

Norisvaldo Ferraz Junior,Adilson E Guelfi,Sergio T Kofuji,Anderson A.A Silva

doi:10.1186/s13677-022-00278-6

Abstract

BackgroundThe Internet of Things (IoT) enables the development of innovative applications in various domains such as healthcare, transportation, and Industry 4.0. Publish-subscribe systems enable IoT devices to communicate with the cloud platform. However, IoT applications need context-aware messages to translate the data into contextual information, allowing the applications to act cognitively. Besides, end-to-end security of publish-subscribe messages on both ends (devices and cloud) is essential. However, achieving security on constrained IoT devices with memory, payload, and energy restrictions is a challenge.ContributionMessages in IoT need to achieve both energy efficiency and secure delivery. Thus, the main contribution of this paper refers to a performance evaluation of a message structure that standardizes the publish-subscribe topic and payload used by the cloud platform and the IoT devices. We also propose a standardization for the topic and payload for publish-subscribe systems.ConclusionThe messages promote energy efficiency, enabling ultra-low-power and high-capacity devices and reducing the bytes transmitted in the IoT domain. The performance evaluation demonstrates that publish-subscribe systems (namely, AMQP, DDS, and MQTT) can use our proposed energy-efficient message structure on IoT. Additionally, the message system provides end-to-end confidentiality, integrity, and authenticity between IoT devices and the cloud platform.

Highlights

The number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices connected to the Internet continually increases as well as the data produced by these devices [1,2,3]
The messages promote energy efficiency, enabling ultra-low-power and high-capacity devices and reducing the bytes transmitted in the IoT domain
The performance evaluation demonstrates that publish-subscribe systems can use our proposed energy-efficient message structure on IoT

Summary

Conclusion

This paper proposes and evaluates an energy-efficient, context-aware, and end-to-end secure message structure for publish-subscribe systems. Both ultra-low-power and high-capacity devices benefit from the optimized topic and payload proposed. The context-aware payload ensures the standardization of each device’s sensors, including end-to-end security between the devices and the cloud platform. Limitations and Future works the results obtained prove the low energy consumption and the message size without resorting to fragmentation for ultralow-power devices, the evaluation comprises one measurement from one sensor at a time. For ultra-low-power devices, explore other encryption models that can be adopted when considering security, using key derivation functions and features to deliver the static keys, requiring analysis of the message size and energy consumption. Future works may include evaluating another TSCH Schedule

Introduction

Results and discussion