Application Layer Protocol Research Articles

Supervised classification for dynamic CoAP mode selection in real time wireless IoT networks

The Internet Engineering Task Force recommends the use of a group of well-defined protocols to support Internet of ThingsLow-Power Low-Rate Networks (LLNs). These mechanisms range from physical and media access layer technologies like IEEE 802.15.4 and Bluetooth Low Energy to session and application layer protocols like the Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP). Specifically, CoAP provides, by means of two different modes of operation, great flexibility to deal with the power requirements of wireless LLNs. One mode supports fire-and-forget packet transmission while the other, through retransmissions, guarantees delivery. The trade-off between these mechanisms is the exchange of high packet loss by high latency and increased power consumption. In this paper we introduce an algorithm that dynamically predicts these parameters, by means of supervised learning, based on network conditions that result from Maximum Likelihood Estimation. This prediction, in turns, can be used for on-the-fly CoAP mode selection that accomplishes quality goals.

An Empirical Study on System Level Aspects of Internet of Things (IoT)

Internet of Things (IoT) is an integration of the Sensor, Embedded, Computing, and Communication technologies. The purpose of the IoT is to provide seamless services to anything, anytime at any place. IoT technologies play a crucial role everywhere, which brings the fourth revolution of disruptive technologies after the internet and Information and Communication Technology (ICT). The Research & Development community has predicted that the impact of IoT will be more than the internet and ICT on society, which improves the well-being of society and industries. Addressing the predominant system-level design aspects like energy efficiency, robustness, scalability, interoperability, and security issues result in the use of a potential IoT system. This paper presents the current state of art of the functional pillars of IoT and its emerging applications to motivate academicians and researches to develop real-time, energy-efficient, scalable, reliable, and secure IoT applications. This paper summarizes the architecture of IoT, with the contemporary status of IoT architectures. Highlights of the IoT system-level issues to develop more advanced real-time IoT applications have been discussed. Millions of devices exchange information using different communication standards, and interoperability between them is a significant issue. This paper provides the current status of the communication standards and application layer protocols used in IoT with the detailed analysis. The computing paradigms like Cloud, Cloudlet, Fog, and Edge computing facilitate IoT with various services like data offloading, resource and device management, etc. In this paper, an exhaustive analysis of Edge Computing in IoT with different edge computing architectures and existing status are deliberated. The widespread adoption of IoT in society has resulted in privacy and security issues. This paper emphasizes on analyzing the security challenges, privacy and security threats, conventional mitigation techniques, and further scope for IoT security. The features like fewer memory footprints, scheduling, real-time task execution, fewer interrupt, and thread switching latency of Real-Time Operating Systems (RTOS) enables the development of time critical IoT applications. Also, this review offers the analysis of the RTOS’s suitable for IoT with the current status and networking stack. Finally, open research issues in IoT system development are discussed.

Energy efficient cross layer time synchronisation in cognitive radio networks

Time synchronization is a vital concern for any Cognitive Radio Network (CRN) to perform dynamic spectrum management. Each Cognitive Radio (CR) node has to be environment aware and self adaptive and must have the ability to switch between multiple modulation schemes and frequencies. Achieving same notion of time within these CR nodes is essential to fulfill the requirements for simultaneous quiet periods for spectrum sensing. Current application layer time synchronization protocols require multiple timestamp exchanges to estimate skew between the clocks of CRN nodes. The proposed symbol timing recovery method already estimates the skew of hardware clock at the physical layer and use it for skew correction of application layer clock of each node. The heart of application layer clock is the hardware clock and hence application layer clock skew will be same as of physical layer and can be corrected from symbol timing recovery process. So one timestamp is enough to synchronize two CRN nodes. This conserves the energy utilized by application layer protocol and makes a CRN energy efficient and can achieve time synchronization in short span.

Video stalling detection method

ISP providing network access services has a huge user group; therefore the competition between the ISP providers is extremely fierce. Under the situation that video occupies the most of network flow, providing high satisfaction network services for video users can effectively improve the competitiveness of ISP, in which video Stalling plays an important index. For protecting the privacy of users, most video websites use HTTPS as the application layer protocol for video transmission, so ISP could not get the playback of video users by parsing HTTP packets, and could not directly detect the video users. In this assay, a new method, protocol transport layer Video Stalling Detection Method based on HTTPS is proposed. This method can effectively match the YouTube, Youku, Letv, Tencent video and other major video sources of the stalling event.

Implementation of symbol timing recovery for estimation of clock skew

Time synchronization in any distributed network can be achieved by using application layer protocols for time correction. Time synchronization method proposed in this article uses symbol timing recovery at the physical layer to correct application layer clock. This cross layer methodology diminishes the quantity of message trades needed by application layer for time synchronization thus resulting in energy saving. Precision of skew estimate can be increased by using multiple message exchanges. Examination of the cross layer strategy including the simulation results, the experimentation outcomes and mathematical analysis demonstrates that clock skew at physical layer is same as of application layer, which is actually the skew of hardware clock within the node.

Application layer Protocols for Embedded System Applications: A Comparison

The Internet of Things is one of the fast-growing trends in information technology applications. As with the growth of IoT devices, the volume and pace of the data also increased to a greater extend. The data transfer is possible with the help of a message transmission system. The protocol has a major role in effective communication with the devices and connects them using various applications on the internet of things. The application layer is responsible for the data formatting, presentation, providing assistance, and also it determines the protocols for the message transfer at the application level. The selection of an efficient protocol is the foundation for the intact IoT system. The performance aspects of the IoT protocols are important to its widespread utilization in various fields. However, the protocol feature set aspect is essential for its adoption in the real world. The IoT devices are generally limited to computational resources and processing power, selecting a lightweight, reliable, and secure messaging protocol becomes a daunting challenge. This paper discusses four important application layer protocols that are being used to ensure a reliable bond among devices, which are connected in an IoT system. In this paper, we present a comparison and an evaluation of four application layer messaging protocol for IoT such as MQTT (Message Queuing Telemetry Protocol), AMQP (Advanced Message Queuing Protocol), CoAP (Constrained Application Protocol), and XMPP (Extensible Messaging Presence Protocol). The protocols and their characteristics are explained in this work followed by a comparison to understand the strengths and limitations of these protocols.

A Review of Research Work on Network-Based SCADA Intrusion Detection Systems

Specific intrusion detection systems (IDSs) are needed to secure modern supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems due to their architecture, stringent real-time requirements, network traffic features and specific application layer protocols. This article aims to contribute to assess the state-of-the-art, identify the open issues and provide an insight for future study areas. To achieve these objectives, we start from the factors that impact the design of dedicated intrusion detection systems in SCADA networks and focus on network-based IDS solutions. We propose a structured evaluation methodology that encompasses detection techniques, protected protocols, implementation tools, test environments and IDS performance. Special attention is focused on assessing implementation maturity as well as the applicability of each surveyed solution in the Future Internet environment. Based on that, we provide a brief description and evaluation of 26 selected research papers, published in the period 2015-2019. Results of our analysis indicate considerable progress regarding the development of machine learning-based detection methods, implementation platforms, and to some extent, sophisticated testbeds. We also identify research gaps and conclude the analysis with a list of the most important directions for further research.

Real Time Sensor Data transmission to the IoT Applications using MQTT-SN and MQTT

Internet of Things (IoT) Technology rapidly growing area and active research happening in different Layers of Internet protocol stacks. IOT stack have Physical layer& Data Link layer, Network Layer, Transport layer and Application layer protocols and Applications. Now IOT has many applications like Smart cities, Smart Homes, Environmental monitoring, Agricultural Application and Medical data transmission from remote places to expert Hospital. Numbers of IOT Application Protocols (MQTT, MQTT-SN, COAP, XMPP, and HTPP) are available and implemented in rich resource Environments like good computing power and bandwidth. However all Application protocols are not suitable under lossy wireless sensor network environment. In IOT Environment consists of Sensor Nodes, End Systems and related applications. Latency and bandwidth problems exist between sensor node and End Systems in two tier IOT Environment. To resolve this issue, we proposed Three Tier IOT Architecture; it consists of Sensor Node, IOT Gateway /Fog Computing Node, End Systems and Applications. In this paper we proposed flexible design, development and integration of IOT gateway for different IOT applications using MQTT and MQTT-SN Application Messaging Protocols.

Survey, comparison and research challenges of IoT application protocols for smart farming

Smart farming era has already begun and its societal and environmental implications are expected to be huge. In this context, the Internet of Things (IoT) technologies have become the major path forward towards novel farming practices. The unprecedented capability of data collection and management offered by IoT is based on several factors of the underlying communication network architecture and technology, one of the most important being the application level protocol that is used among IoT nodes, gateways, and application servers. This work offers an up-to-date survey of research efforts on the IoT application layer protocols, focusing on their basic characteristics, their performance as well as their recent use in agricultural applications. Furthermore, it provides a comparison among them, in terms of well-accepted key performance indicators and comments on their suitability in the framework of smart farming as well as the corresponding challenges that have to be faced towards their efficient implementation.

Development of CAN Bus Converter for On Board Diagnostic (OBD-II) System

CAN-bus technology is adapted in various vehicles to reduce the wiring harness and controls the vehicle exploitation physical system. In this paper, Control Area Network (CAN)- bus protocol is enforced employing a Single Board Computer (SBC) and access with each other by set a sender and receiver to get the data transmission. A special CAN-bus application layer protocol is intended for the high reliable and high period management network of the vehicle system. However not all microcontroller that used for Computer module in vehicle network had CAN-bus communication port. Thus the CAN-bus Converter is used as tool for converting data from a computer into an understandable language. The CAN-bus converter can also be used in various ways to obtain the final results of the data sent to it. Although different methods may be used, the most appropriate method cannot be identified. This project is therefore designed to find and evaluate which method is suitable for obtaining accurate data results and for avoiding abnormal data and data transfer speed.

MQTT Protocol: Fundamentals, Tools and Future Directions

Internet of Things (IoT) is a prominent paradigm applied to several areas ranging from medicine to industrial networks. It aims at connecting to the Internet of million of daily used objects. Important challenges in this area consist in to propose mechanisms and protocols that meet security, device interoperability, quality of service and energy-efficiency requirements. Particularly, the Message Queue Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocol has been prospected in order to provide efficient communication at the application layer for the IoT. This survey aims to present the fundamentals, tools and future directions related to MQTT protocol and its variation tailored for sensor networks, called MQTT-SN. We discuss such protocols comparing to other current IoT application layer protocols, such as Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP). Additionally, we present tools so as to support practical experimentation and simulation. Particularly, we carry out pactical experiments to observe the communication delay between MQTT and CoAP. Finally, the open issues and challenges in this area are examined.

Http Rule Base Intrusion Detection and Prevention System

The objective of HTTP Rule Base Intrusion Detection and Prevention System (IDPS) is to provide security for one of the application layer protocols namely HTTP (Hyper-Text Transfer Protocol). Such an HTTP based Intrusion Detection System (IDS) detects header attacks and attacks in payload (includes HTML and scripting). Misuse detection uses signature based approach where predefined patterns are defined. The input text or pattern is compared with the predefined signatures to detect malicious activity. Furthermore new types of attacks are continuously created. The new attacks created by attacker are also detected by these IDS, only if attacks are in the form of signatures. Signatures are defined either in a single-line or by complex script languages and are used in rule base to detect attacks. These signatures and rules have to be updated periodically as the attacks are continuously changing its nature of attacks

Congestion Control in CoAP Observe Group Communication.

The Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) is a simple and lightweight machine-to-machine (M2M) protocol for constrained devices for use in lossy networks which offers a small memory capacity and limited processing. Designed and developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), it functions as an application layer protocol and benefits from reliable delivery and simple congestion control. It is implemented for request/response message exchanges over the User Datagram Protocol (UDP) to support the Internet of Things (IoT). CoAP also provides a basic congestion control mechanism. In dealing with its own congestion, it relies on a fixed interval retransmission timeout (RTO) and binary exponential backoff (BEB). However, the default CoAP congestion control is considered to be unable to effectively perform group communication and observe resources, and it cannot handle rapid, frequent requests. This results in buffer overflow and packet loss. To overcome these problems, we proposed a new congestion control mechanism for CoAP Observe Group Communication, namely Congestion Control Random Early Detection (CoCo-RED), consisting of (1) determining and calculating an RTO timer, (2) a Revised Random Early Detection (RevRED) algorithm which has recently been developed and primarily based on the buffer management of TCP congestion control, and (3) a Fibonacci Pre-Increment Backoff (FPB) algorithm which waits for backoff time prior to retransmission. All the aforementioned algorithms were therefore implemented instead of the default CoAP mechanism. In this study, evaluations were carried out regarding the efficiency of the developed CoCo-RED using a Cooja simulator. The congestion control mechanism can quickly handle the changing behaviors of network communication, and thus it prevents the buffer overflow that leads to congestions. The results of our experiments indicate that CoCo-RED can control congestion more effectively than the default CoAP in every condition.

DCDS: Data centric dispatcher selection protocol for cellular enabled VANET communication

SummaryThe Vehicular Ad‐hoc Network (VANET) is one of the emerging research areas in recent days, in which accomplishing the robustness and security are the demanding tasks. To obtain these objectives, various offloading‐based techniques are developed in the traditional works. Still, it remains with the limitations of high mobility, no assurance for data acceptance, and limited applicability for multiple data exchange units. Thus, this paper aims to develop a Data Centric Dispatcher Selection (DCDS) algorithm based on data offloading for a secure information exchange in VANET. It aims to enable the cellular‐based VANET connection by using the application layer protocol without taking the Pending Interest (PI)‐based information. Also, the Content Centric Network (CCN) concept is utilized to exchange the data between for upcoming internet. In this environment, the position of own vehicle and neighboring vehicle are known to each vehicle by using the Global Positioning System (GPS) and security messages. Moreover, the communication does not depend on the device's name, but it depends on the content name in CCN. Because of the availability of multiple interfaces in CCN, there is no content loss in the network. During simulation, various performance measures are used to evaluate the performance of the proposed technique, which includes throughput, packet loss rate, average end‐to‐end delay, total Satisfied Interest Packet (SIP), Forwarded Interest Packet (FIP), and average Interest Satisfactory Delay (ISD). Also, the superiority of this paper is proved by comparing it with some existing techniques such as Internet Protocol Television Quality of Service (IPTV‐QoS), Michael Oche (MO), and RobUst Forwarder Selection (RUFs).

A proposal for bridging application layer protocols to HTTP on IoT solutions

In the Internet of Things (IoT), data is handled and stored by software known as middleware (located on a server). IoT devices send such data through an application layer protocol that may be different from those supported by the middleware. This paper proposes an application layer gateway, called MiddleBridge, that translates Constrained Application Layer Protocol (CoAP), Message Queuing, Queuing Telemetry Transport Protocol (MQTT), Data Distribution Service (DDS), and Websockets messages into HTTP. MiddleBridge can be deployed on any computer with Java virtual machine because all servers are embedded in its code, enabling IoT gadgets to transmit data to any REST endpoint seamlessly. With the proposed approach, devices can send a smaller message to an intermediary (MiddleBridge), which restructures it and forwards to a middleware, reducing the time that a device spends transmitting. The created graphical user interface allows users to configure messages conversion and forwarding in runtime. The efficiency of such approach is evaluated through the packet size and response times considering the data sent to Orion context broker (a Fiware project). Results show that packet size that is sent by an IoT device through MiddleBridge is 17 times smaller than sending a straight HTTP request to the server and significantly reduces the transmission time.

Enhancing Fast TCP’s Performance Using Single TCP Connection for Parallel Traffic Flows to Prevent Head-of-Line Blocking

Hypertext Transfer Protocol-2 (HTTP/2) partially resolved the problem of Head-of-Line Blocking (HoLB) by multiplexing independent messages at the application layer. This enables simultaneous transmission of multiple requests over the same connection independently. However, this technique becomes ineffective when packet loss occurs in the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) flow in which case all the independent streams are blocked until the retransmission of the lost packet; this problem is known as HoLB at TCP-level. The problem arises because the underlying TCP does not differentiate between independent messages/streams from application layer protocol. This study proposes a multistream framework for Fast TCP to support multiple independent messages/streams of the application. The proposed framework uses separate flows, buffers, and segments for each independent stream, and interleaves these segments over a single TCP connection. It makes TCP compatible with HTTP/2, reduces data delivery latency between transport and application layer, and alleviates head-of-line blocking. We implemented this framework in Fast TCP and carried out a simulation-based comparison between Multistream Fast TCP (MFast TCP) and Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP). Our results show that MFast TCP significantly improved performance over SCTP in the event of HoLB.

Choice of Application Layer Protocols for Next Generation Video Surveillance Using Internet of Video Things

Video surveillance has become ubiquitous due to the increasing security requirements in every sphere of life. The next generation video surveillance system (VSS) possesses great challenges in various applications, such as intelligent urban surveillance systems and smart cities. In these applications, we need to deal with the fast-growing number of surveillance nodes which introduce several constraints, e.g., high latency, high bandwidth, high energy consumption, and CPU and memory usage. To address these issues, the Internet of Video Things (IoVT), which is considered to be a part of the Internet of Things (IoT), can be a solution. The IoVT is composed of visual sensors (i.e., cameras) connected to the Internet. Unlike conventional systems, the VSS under an IoVT framework provides multiple layers (i.e., edge, fog, and cloud) of communication and decision making by capturing and analyzing rich contextual and behavioral information. Since an appropriate application layer protocol (ALP) can help in alleviating the challenges of future VSSs, the selection of ALPs is important for IoVT-based systems. Therefore, this paper presents a generic architecture of an IoVT-based VSS and a comparative analysis of several ALPs, such as MQTT, AMQP, HTTP, XMPP, CoAP, and DDS, with real-time experimentation. This analysis will assist the users to choose the appropriate ALPs in various surveillance applications and determine their suitability at different nodes of the IoVT framework.

Development of Power Consumption Models for ESP8266-Enabled Low-Cost IoT Monitoring Nodes

The development of energy and cost efficient IoT nodes is very important for the successful deployment of IoT solutions across various application domains. This paper presents energy models, which will enable the estimation of battery life, for both time-based and event-based low-cost IoT monitoring nodes. These nodes are based on the low-cost ESP8266 (ESP) modules which integrate both transceiver and microcontroller on a single small-size chip and only cost about $2. The active/sleep energy saving approach was used in the design of the IoT monitoring nodes because the power consumption of ESP modules is relatively high and often impacts negatively on the cost of operating the nodes. A low energy application layer protocol, that is, Message Queue Telemetry Transport (MQTT) was also employed for energy efficient wireless data transport. The finite automata theory was used to model the various states and behavior of the ESP modules used in IoT monitoring applications. The applicability of the models presented was tested in real life application scenarios and results are presented. In a temperature and humidity monitoring node, for example, the model shows a significant reduction in average current consumption from 70.89 mA to 0.58 mA for sleep durations of 0 and 30 minutes, respectively. The battery life of batteries rated in mAh can therefore be easily calculated from the current consumption figures.

Study of Application Layer MQTT Protocol with Assessment & Comparison of Hardware to Enable IOT

The tiny sensors used in roaring technology era is composed of the power supply with, computing facilities & communication of data with a network of the internet. Transfer of data among things can be materialized through lightweight, cheap and low bandwidth application layer protocol for which MQTT is the right choice. This protocol will publish-subscribe the topics via host performing as the server also termed as a broker. In this article, an ESP NodeMCU microprocessor-based hardware module with limited computing abilities is used along with numerous real-time analog and digital sensors. Interfacing of all these temperature, humidity & motion sensors has been described. For transmitting-receiving and routing of data was done through MQTT protocol. The bunch of devices communicating with each other emulates attest bed for the machine to machine communication which gets further enhanced to industry 4.0. The sensors provide condition based monitoring system and get the data to the subscribed clients on a smartphone or web-based service.

Implementation and analysis of QUIC for MQTT

Transport and security protocols are essential to ensure reliable and secure communication between two parties. For IoT applications, these protocols must be lightweight, since IoT devices are usually resource constrained. Unfortunately, the existing transport and security protocols – namely TCP/TLS and UDP/DTLS – fall short in terms of connection overhead, latency, and connection migration when used in IoT applications. In this paper, after studying the root causes of these shortcomings, we show how utilizing QUIC in IoT scenarios results in a higher performance. Based on these observations, and given the popularity of MQTT as an IoT application layer protocol, we integrate MQTT with QUIC. By presenting the main APIs and functions developed, we explain how connection establishment and message exchange functionalities work. We evaluate the performance of MQTTw/QUIC versus MQTTw/TCP using wired, wireless, and long-distance testbeds. Our results show that MQTTw/QUIC reduces connection overhead in terms of the number of packets exchanged with the broker by up to 56%. In addition, by eliminating half-open connections, MQTTw/QUIC reduces processor and memory usage by up to 83% and 50%, respectively. Furthermore, by removing the head-of-line blocking problem, delivery latency is reduced by up to 55%. We also show that the throughput drops experienced by MQTTw/QUIC when a connection migration happens is considerably lower than that of MQTTw/TCP.