Integration Of Heterogeneous Devices Research Articles

Applying Pattern Language to Enhance IIoT System Design and Integration: From Theory to Practice

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is pivotal in advancing industrial automation, offering significant improvements in connectivity and efficiency. However, the integration of heterogeneous devices within IIoT systems presents substantial challenges, primarily due to the diversity in device hardware, protocols, and functionalities. In this paper, we propose a new pattern language specifically designed to enhance interoperability and operational efficiency across industrial settings. Drawing from a case study of the State Company for Automotive Industry (S.C.A.I.) in Iraq, this study details the development and integration of eleven interrelated patterns. These patterns were carefully combined based on identified relationships, forming a comprehensive pattern language that addresses key aspects of system heterogeneity, including device communication, data security, and system scalability. The pattern language was validated using the Delphi process theory, engaging industry experts to refine and optimize the framework for practical application. The implementation of this pattern language led to significant improvements in system integration, enabling seamless communication between diverse devices and enhancing operational workflows. The case study demonstrates the practical viability of the proposed pattern language in enhancing interoperability within real-world Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) applications. Furthermore, the replicable nature of this framework makes it a valuable resource for other industrial environments seeking to harness the power of IIoT technologies.

Policy-aware Distributed and Dynamic Trust based Access Control Scheme for Internet of Things

The use of smart devices is driving the Internet of Things (IoT) trend today. Day by day IoT helps to support more services like car services, healthcare services, home automation, and security services, weather prediction services, etc, to ease user’s life. Integration of heterogeneous IoT devices and social resources sometimes creates many problems like the privacy of data. To avoid privacy issues, an appropriate access control mechanism is required to check authorized and trusted devices, so that only valid devices can access the data which is only required. In the sequel, this paper presents implementation of distributed and dynamic trust based access control mechanism (DDTAC) for secure machine to machine communication or distributed IoT environment. Novelty of this mechanism is that, it uses trust calculation and device classification for dynamic access control. The proposed scheme is implemented, tested and deployed on Node MCU and same mechanism is also simulated on NS-2 for large number of nodes. This access control model support Scalability, Heterogeneity, Privacy, Trust, Selective disclosure, Principle of least privileges, and lightweight calculation features. Results of this models proves that it gives good performance as compared to existing scheme in terms of scalability, throughput and delay. As number of devices increase it does not degrade performance. This mechanism is also protected against the Man-in-the-Middle attack, Sniffing attack, Session Hijacking attacks and Injection attacks. It required less time to detect and resist those attacks.

A low-area design of two-factor authentication using DIES and SBI for IoT security

Internet of things (IoTs) is an integration of heterogeneous physical devices which are interconnected and communicated over the physical Internet. The design of secure, lightweight and an effective authentication protocol is required, because the information is transmitted among the remote user and numerous sensing devices over the IoT network. Recently, two-factor authentication (TFA) scheme is developed for providing the security among the IoT devices. But, the performances of the IoT network are affected due to the less memory storage and restricted resource of the IoT. In this paper, the integration of data inverting encoding scheme (DIES) and substitution-box-based inverter is proposed for providing the security using the random values of one-time alias identity, challenge, server nonce and device nonce. Here, the linearity of produced random values is decreased for each clock cycle based on the switching characteristics of the selection line in DIES. Moreover, the linear feedback shift register is used in the adaptive physically unclonable function (APUF) for generating the random response value. The APUF–DIES-IoT architecture is analyzed in terms of lookup table, flip flops, slices, frequency and delay. This APUF–DIES-IoT architecture is analyzed for different security and authentication performances. Two existing methods are considered to evaluate the APUF–DIES-IoT architecture such as TFA-PUF-IoT and TFA-APUF-IoT. The APUF–DIES-IoT architecture uses 36 flip flops at Virtex 6; it is less when compared to the TFA-PUF-IoT and TFA-APUF-IoT.

A Component Based Framework to Enable Medical Devices Communication

The interconnection of medical devices is emerging as a new requirement in modern medicine. The final goal of connecting heterogeneous medical devices in a wider network of computational servers is to monitor and improve patient safety, where it also constitutes a major goal in the Integrated Clinical Environment (ICE) framework. The heterogeneity of medical devices provided by different suppliers is a key challenge in ICE-based systems, where interoperability and data communication across devices is still under study and specification. ICE aims to create a standard interface that covers medical devices heterogeneity, hence, achieving interoperability in a safe way. It focuses on defining an interoperable bus between the patient, medical devices, software applications, and the clinician. Given the lack of realization of ICE standard, this paper presents a component-based framework for making ICE usable for medical applications. This work illustrates the component model in detail and validates it with a prototype implementation that focuses on the integration of heterogeneous medical devices as the most relevant requirements faced by ICE.

Modeling of quality of experience for web-based unified communications with perceptual dimensions

The integration of heterogeneous communication services and devices has led to paradigm shift towards unified communications, which promise to improve productivity and lifestyle by creating the digitally connected life and work environment. The increasing use of various devices for accessing web-based rather than native unified communication is expected to initiate the rise of interest among various parties included in the service delivery chain in comprehension of the influence of different perceptual dimensions on user’s quality of experience. This paper presents a multidimensional analysis of quality of experience for web-based unified communication. The contribution of the paper is twofold. First, the multidimensional model, which quantifies the mutual relations between quality of experience and numerous perceivable dimensions of the experience that determine its quality is proposed. Second, the importance of distinct dimensions in terms of overall user perceived quality of experience for web-based unified communication is identified.

Modeling cyber-physical systems – a GliderAgent 3.0 perspective

Eight years ago we have designed and implemented an initial prototype of an agent-based glider pilot support system (the GliderAgent). Our aim was to validate correctness of the initial assumption that an agent-based system, combined with sensor data, can help pilots in various situations that occur during a flight. For instance, the GliderAgent was capable of detecting certain dangers, warn the pilot and, autonomously, send notification(s) to the ground station. Due to the continuous and rapid development of mobile technologies and sensors, our initial prototype has evolved. First, we moved the system, from an emulated environment, to real devices. Second, a semantic-rule-based decision making system was integrated with the GliderAgent, to analyze feeds from sensors (altitude, temperature, blood pressure, etc.) and, based on received information, to trigger appropriate behaviors. The result of our work provided a foundations for development of a general-purpose, cyber-physical system framework, which will be described in this paper. Furthermore, the developed system illustrates an interesting approach to integration of heterogeneous IoT devices (potentially also IoT platforms).

A Survey of IoT Management Protocols and Frameworks

As the complexity of Internet of Things (IoT) systems increases, a large variety of tools and technologies for IoT management are making their way into both research setups and the market. IoT management solutions must consider the resource restrictions of embedded devices, as well as their heterogeneity and network dynamics. With these in mind, the Internet Engineering Task Force developed several standards targeting the integration and interoperation of heterogeneous devices, such as the Representational State Transfer Configuration Protocol (RESTCONF) or the Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) Management Interface. Concurrently, the Open Mobile Alliance developed the Lightweight Machine-to-Machine protocol, for IoT device management. This paper provides a comprehensive, up-to-date overview of IoT management technologies, frameworks and protocols. Also, it proposes a taxonomy for IoT devices management. In addition to presenting the various solutions, the paper provides comparative views, standardization timeline, and market analysis. The presented analysis ranges from traditional network management protocols, such as Simple Network Management Protocol, to the newest IoT management and configuration protocols, such as CoAP Management Interface and Lightweight Machine-to-Machine protocols. Moreover, this survey identifies remaining challenges and solutions offered by recent management protocols, not covered by previous surveys.

Dynamic Big-Data Broadcast in Fat-Tree Data Center Networks With Mobile IoT Devices

In this paper, we study the problem of throughput and delay-optimal dynamic big-data broadcast in fat-tree data center networks (DCNs) in the presence of mobile Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices, where one of the IoT devices acts as a source node. In existing literature, researchers studied that a balanced traffic distribution in DCNs is a NP-hard problem. With the integration of heterogeneous IoT devices in DCNs, the difficulty in achieving a balanced traffic distribution increases significantly. Hence, there is a need to design a throughput and delay-optimal big-data broadcast scheme in DCNs in the presence of IoT devices. In this paper, we propose a dynamic big-data broadcasting scheme, named D2B, using a single-leader-multiple-follower Stackelberg game for solving the aforementioned problem. Here, each switch acts as the leader, and the IoT devices act as the followers. We consider that the source node broadcasts the generated data in real time. We represent bandwidth distribution as a pseudo-Cournot competition, where each follower decides the optimal downloading bandwidth. The existence of the generalized Nash–Stackelberg equilibrium for D2B is evaluated theoretically. We observed that using D2B, the network throughput increases by <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\text{55.32}\%$</tex-math></inline-formula> , while ensuring at least <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\text{33}\%$</tex-math></inline-formula> increase in the average bandwidth allocation per IoT device, and the overall delay in broadcasting is reduced.

Developing pervasive games in interactive spaces: the JUGUEMOS toolkit

The progress in the development of pervasive games is slowing down because of the multiple challenges that these games brings to developers, due to the great variety of interaction paradigms that this kind of games involve and the difficulties of developing applications where so many innovative technologies converge. In this article we present JUGUEMOS, a toolkit aimed at developers to help them in the creation of pervasive games for Interactive Spaces. The toolkit addresses three challenges that arise when developing pervasive games: the integration of heterogeneous devices, the management of multiple displays and the facilitation of the game coding. The toolkit is based on the TUIML modeling language that allows defining games easily, reducing the impact of the coding between iterations. The toolkit also makes use of the OSC Protocol to interconnect the different devices. Detailed descriptions of the toolkit design decisions, architecture and implementation are presented, together with three different case studies carried out in order to explore the toolkit expressivity, its capability to support collaborative multidisciplinary experiences, and its potential to support interactive experiences outside our Interactive Space. We hope this work would contribute to the spread of pervasive games in interactive spaces.

Internet of Things (IoT) Cybersecurity Research: A Review of Current Research Topics

As an emerging technology, the Internet of Things (IoT) revolutionized the global network comprising of people, smart devices, intelligent objects, data, and information. The development of IoT is still in its infancy and many related issues need to be solved. IoT is a unified concept of embedding everything. IoT has a great chance to make the world a higher level of accessibility, integrity, availability, scalability, confidentiality, and interoperability. However, how to protect IoT is a challenging task. System security is the foundation for the development of IoT. This article systematically reviews IoT cybersecurity. The key considerations are the protection and integration of heterogeneous smart devices and information communication technologies (ICT). This review provides useful information and insights to researchers and practitioners who are interested in cybersecurity of IoT, including the current research of IoT cybersecurity, IoT cybersecurity architecture and taxonomy, key enabling countermeasures and strategies, major applications in industries, research trends and challenges.

Micron-Scale Annealing for Ohmic Contact Formation Applied in GaN HEMT Gate-First Technology

High-temperature thermal annealing process for ohmic contact hinders the development of monolithic integration of heterogeneous functional devices as well as gate-first approach for the GaN transistor. Other than reducing processing temperature, we developed a selective annealing method so that temperature-sensitive parts were not thermally affected. Here, we report a micron-scale annealing method by focused laser for ohmic contact in a GaN heterogeneous system/device. The micron-scale annealing method enabled the formation of a relatively thick TiN layer (35 nm) at the metal–semiconductor interface. As a result, a low contact resistance of 0.3 $\Omega \cdot \text {mm}$ was achieved. The miniaturized annealing method was applied to the gate-first approach for GaN high electron mobility transistor (HEMT). A better performance of larger current output, smaller gate leakage ( $1\times 10^{{6}}$ times smaller), and larger dynamic range of HEMT was hence obtained.

Multi-dimensional trust aware routing for clustered IOT framework

With the increased interest in the utilization of smart applications, the IoT has gained a lot of popularity in the real world scenario. Due to the integration of different heterogeneous devices in a single network, various types of security issues will arise in the IoT. To ensure more security in IoT, this paper proposes a new trust aware routing framework based on the inherent communication and data properties of devices connected in the network. A new trust metric is derived in this paper by combining two different trusts based on the communication between nodes and the information passing through them. Further to achieve a prolonged network lifetime with optimal resource conservation, a clustering based communication strategy is accomplished. Extensive simulations are carried out by varying the malicious nature of network and the performance is measured through the metrics, packet loss ratio, packet delivery ratio, delay, network lifetime and average energy consumption.

Machine-to-Machine Content Retrieval in Wireless Networks

Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communication is a distinct capability that enables communications with anything. With the expected connection among several tens of billions of addressable mobile devices and the exchange of a huge amount of content, the Internet and mobile communication are entering a new era that inevitably faces several challenges, especially from a content dissemination perspective. It has been exposed to many limitations such as high control overhead, frequent location updates, and network congestion. To resolve such limitations, this paper proposes an efficient hierarchical routing and content retrieval mechanism, which is called Hierarchical Routing (H-Routing) for the wireless network based on Content-Centric Networking (CCN). The H-Routing is composed of a novel content discovery approach and a common service platform for generic communications and the integration of heterogeneous devices. The proposed mechanism uses CCN and Chord-like lookup in a hierarchical M2M system in the wireless mobile environment. The H-Routing mechanism reduces unnecessary flooding of content request messages, control overhead, and the waste of resources. We also implemented the proposed mechanism in the simulation environment and analyze the performance in terms of throughput, Interest packet overhead, and Interest error ratio.

A Lightweight and Flexible Encryption Scheme to Protect Sensitive Data in Smart Building Scenarios

Smart buildings represent key environments to encourage the growth of more sustainable and efficient cities. With the strong development of the Internet of Things (IoT), the integration of heterogeneous physical devices fosters the emergence of data-driven services to make more effective decisions accordingly. However, the need for sharing large amounts of data could help to infer users’ sensitive information, such as their daily habits, thus harming their privacy. Under these premises, this paper introduces an encryption scheme based on the lightness of the symmetric cryptography, and the expressiveness of attribute-based encryption. Our proposal aims to ensure only authorised services will be able to access specific pieces of data, so that users’ privacy is not compromised, while scalability and efficiency are provided. The resulting scheme has been deployed on a real smart building scenario, and validation results demonstrate its suitability to protect large amounts of sensitive data on IoT-enabled buildings.

A smart mobile, self-configuring, context-aware architecture for personal health monitoring

The last decade has witnessed an exponential increase in older adult population suffering from chronic life-long diseases and needing healthcare. This situation has highlighted a need to revolutionize healthcare and provide innovative, efficient, and affordable solutions to patients at any time and from anywhere in an economic and friendly manner. The recent developments in sensing, mobile, and embedded devices have attracted considerable attention toward mobile health monitoring applications. However, existing architectures aimed at facilitating the realization of these mobile applications have shown to be not suitable to address all these challenging issues: (i) the seamless integration of heterogeneous devices; (ii) the estimation of vital parameters not measurable directly or measurable with a low accuracy; (iii) the extraction of context information pertaining to the patient’s activity to be used for the interpretation of vital parameters; (iv) the correlation of physiological and contextual information to detect suspicious anomalies and supply alerts; (v) the notification of anomalies to doctors and caregivers only when their detection is accurate and appropriate. In light of the above, this paper presents a smart mobile, self-configuring, context-aware architecture devised to enable the rapid prototyping of personal health monitoring applications for different scenarios, by exploiting commercial wearable sensors and mobile devices as well as knowledge-based technologies. This architecture is organized as a composition of four tiers that operate on a layered fashion and it exploits an ontology-based data model to ensure intercommunication among these tiers and the monitoring applications built on the top of them. The proposed architecture has been implemented for mobile devices equipped with the Android platform and evaluated with respect to its modifiability by employing the ALMA (Architecture Level Modifiability Analysis) method, highlighting its capability of being rapidly customized, personalized or eventually modified by software developers in order to prototype, with a reduced effort, novel health monitoring applications on the top of its components. Finally, it has been employed to build, as case study, a mobile application aimed at monitoring and managing cardiac arrhythmias, such as bradycardia and tachycardia, confirming its effectiveness with respect to a real scenario.

Rich Device-Services (RDS): A Service-Oriented Approach to the Internet of Things (IoT)

The Internet of Things (IoT) should enable the seamless integration of devices to combine the data collected from the physical objects and yield new services. From the IoT perspective, every device can offer its functionality as one or more interoperable device-services. As the number of devices grows, and the number of interactions between their device-services is increased, achieving more scalable and dynamic integration of devices becomes a major challenge in IoT. An emerging approach to overcome this challenge is the application of service-oriented architecture. Over the last few years, Rich Services, which is a type of service-oriented architecture, has emerged as an excellent technique for facilitating integration of services in the large-scale systems. In this paper, inspired by the notion of Rich Services, we propose the Rich Device-Services approach to enable a scalable and dynamic integration of heterogeneous devices in IoT. The proposed approach exploits the Data Distribution Service middleware for publish-subscribe, data-centric, real-time, and loosely-coupled communication between device-services. We also present a sample of the proposed approach and analyze the performance of Rich Device-Services.

Stretchable Active Matrix Inorganic Light‐Emitting Diode Display Enabled by Overlay‐Aligned Roll‐Transfer Printing

An active matrix‐type stretchable display is realized by overlay‐aligned transfer of inorganic light‐emitting diode (LED) and single‐crystal Si thin film transistor (TFT) with roll processes. The roll‐based transfer enables integration of heterogeneous thin film devices on a rubber substrate while preserving excellent electrical and optical properties of these devices, comparable to their bulk properties. The electron mobility of the integrated Si‐TFT is over 700 cm2V−1s−1, and this is attributed to the good interface between the Si channel and the thermally grown SiO2insulator. The light emission properties of the LED are of wafer quality. The resulting display stably operates under tensile strains up to 40%, over 200 cycles, demonstrating the potential of stretchable displays based on inorganic materials.

Context-aware Framework to Support Situation-awareness for Disaster Management

When a crisis event occurs, there is a strong need for any involved decision maker to gather in short time frames relevant situational information from different available data sources, to better understand the caused disruptions. Technological devices proliferation and ICT efficiency in timely information sharing did not leave a choice to responders only to adopt them, supporting their operations. This paper proposes a framework that aims to solve challenges brought by this new paradigm of information sharing. Based on service oriented architecture, our framework relies on web service standard for Devices to make pervasive situation-awareness (SA) environment that allows seamless integration of heterogeneous devices. It also provides solutions to filter in real time received information by taking into account the decision maker's context. This context-aware mechanism plays an important role in making the data source intelligent that delivers personalised view of the situation, relevant to decision maker current needs.

Improving the Utilization of AAL Devices through Semantic Web Technologies and Web of Things Concepts

The software-driven assistance of elderly and impaired people in their every day life requires the integration of heterogeneous devices and assistive services. The lack of interoperability hampers the integration and usage of these devices and services. Furthermore, one objective in the field of Ambient Intelligence and Human Machine Interaction is the adaption of assistive services to the user 5. This is deeply rooted in the idea that the usage of ambient technologies still means a barrier for elderly and impaired people and prevents them to trust and use these technologies. But as these technologies aim at supporting and not restricting elderly and impaired people, a methodology is needed to overcome the barrier of using ambient assistive technologies. In this paper, we present an approach to a) enable a simplified integration of heterogeneous devices and services by the Web of Things recommendation and b) a lightweight AAL ontology together with a rule-based engine called Sherlock in order to demonstrate the advantages in representing and linking user intentions to device capabilities using Semantic Web technologies. Moreover, we show how this semantic representation in the context-aware Sherlock engine is used to derive user intentions by recognising device events. The practical applicability of the presented approach is demonstrated in a real-world use case from the AICASys project1.1See: http://www.mtidw.de/ueberblick-bekanntmachungen/ALS/aicasys

Enabling Safe Interoperation by Medical Device Virtual Integration

The safe compositionality and integration of heterogeneous components represents a major challenge in medical cyber-physical systems. The paradigm of medical application platforms allows the virtual integration of heterogeneous devices with various communication infrastructures, but does not fully address the safety properties of the overall system. This paper presents a medical device virtual integration framework for composing medical devices and control applications into an interoperable system without violating the safety properties.