Abstract
In future years, the Internet of Things is expected to interconnect billions of highly heterogeneous devices, denoted as “smart objects”, enabling the development of innovative distributed applications. Smart objects are constrained sensor/actuator-equipped devices, in terms of computational power and available memory. In order to cope with the diverse physical connectivity technologies of smart objects, the Internet Protocol is foreseen as the common “language” for full interoperability and as a unifying factor for integration with the Internet. Large-scale platforms for interconnected devices are required to effectively manage resources provided by smart objects. In this work, we present a novel architecture for the management of large numbers of resources in a scalable, seamless, and secure way. The proposed architecture is based on a network element, denoted as IoT Hub, placed at the border of the constrained network, which implements the following functions: service discovery; border router; HTTP/Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) and CoAP/CoAP proxy; cache; and resource directory. In order to protect smart objects (which cannot, because of their constrained nature, serve a large number of concurrent requests) and the IoT Hub (which serves as a gateway to the constrained network), we introduce the concept of virtual IoT Hub replica: a Cloud-based “entity” replicating all the functions of a physical IoT Hub, which external clients will query to access resources. IoT Hub replicas are constantly synchronized with the physical IoT Hub through a low-overhead protocol based on Message Queue Telemetry Transport (MQTT). An experimental evaluation, proving the feasibility and advantages of the proposed architecture, is presented.
Highlights
The Internet of Things (IoT) is expected to consist in a worldwide network comprising, by 2020, more than 50 billions devices
We have considered three different configurations where: (i) the consumer is in the same local network of the target smart object; (ii) the external actor accesses a cached value on the active IoT Hub Replica on the Azure platform; and (iii) the consumer accesses a resource that is not cached on the IoT Hub Replica and, requires a direct communication between the virtual Replica and the real IoT Hub
The proposed architecture relies on a network element, denoted as IoT Hub, which implements several functions, such as management of heterogeneous networks and connectivity protocols, caching, and proxying
Summary
The Internet of Things (IoT) is expected to consist in a worldwide network comprising, by 2020, more than 50 billions devices. This gigantic number of pervasively deployed devices will (i) enable new forms of interaction between things and people and (ii) foster novel applications, denoted as Smart-X Applications. Access to LLNs typically occurs through a border router, a network element with multiple network interfaces: one towards the LLN and the others toward the Internet using different protocols, either wired (e.g., IEEE 802.3) or wireless (e.g., IEEE 802.11, low power Wi-Fi, IEEE 802.15.4, BLE). Due to its less limited capabilities, the border router acts as an IPv6 network coordinator for the LLN, typically being the root of a IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) tree [3]
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