Internet Of Things Design Research Articles

Monitoring electrical energy in electronic energy audits through internet of things technology

Energy conservation, especially electricity, can be done by conducting an energy audit. Energy audit activities can analyse and find energy-saving opportunities from energy use. This study developed a prototype of a wireless electrical energy monitoring system on a laboratory scale to monitor the use of electrical energy from both electrical equipment using a microcontroller as a sensor node. These nodes have installed several sensors, namely the current sensor, humidity sensor, temperature sensor and light sensor. The protocol used in communication between nodes and servers is the HTTP protocol in the Internet of Things design that can communicate using internet network intermediaries. Data on the server can be monitored in real time using the application on the client side.

On the Role of Age of Information in the Internet of Things

In this article, we provide an accessible introduction to the emerging idea of Age of Information (AoI) that quantifies freshness of information and explore its possible role in the efficient design of freshness-aware Internet of Things (IoT). We start by summarizing the concept of AoI and its variants with emphasis on the differences between AoI and other well-known performance metrics in the literature, such as throughput and delay. Building on this, we explore freshness-aware IoT design for a network in which IoT devices sense potentially different physical processes and are supposed to frequently update the status of these processes at a destination node (e.g., a cellular base station). Inspired by recent interest, we also assume that these IoT devices are powered by wireless energy transfer by the destination node. For this setting, we investigate the optimal sampling policy that jointly optimizes wireless energy transfer and scheduling of update packet transmissions from IoT devices with the goal of minimizing long-term weighted sum-AoI. Using this, we characterize the achievable AoI region. We also compare this AoI-optimal policy with the one that maximizes average throughput (throughput-optimal policy), and demonstrate the impact of system state on their structures. Several promising directions for future research are also presented.

How do technological properties influence user affordance of wearable technologies?

Abstract The Internet of things (IoT) affords people plenty of opportunities and a higher quality of life as well as drives a huge amount of data. By drawing on the concept of affordances, this study examines the user experience of personal informatics focusing on the technological and affective nature of affordance. A multi-mixed approach is used by combining qualitative methods and a quantitative survey. Results of the qualitative methods revealed a series of factors that related to the affordance of personal informatics, whereas results of the user model confirmed a significant role for connectivity, control, and synchronicity affordance regarding their underlying link to other variables, namely, expectation, confirmation, and satisfaction. The experiments showed that users’ affordances are greatly influenced by personal traits with interactivity tendency. The findings imply the embodied cognition process of personal informatics in which technological qualities are shaped by users’ perception, traits, and context. The results establish a foundation for wearable technologies through a heuristic quality assessment tool from a user embodied cognitive process. They confirm the validity and utility of applying affordances to the design of IoT as a useful concept, as well as prove that the optimum mix of affordances is crucial to the success or failure of IoT design.

Wirelessly Powered Data Aggregation for IoT via Over-the-Air Function Computation: Beamforming and Power Control

As a revolution in networking, the Internet of Things (IoT) aims at automating the operations of our societies by connecting and leveraging an enormous number of distributed devices (e.g., sensors and actuators). One design challenge is efficient wireless data aggregation (WDA) over the dense IoT devices. This can enable a series of the IoT applications ranging from latency-sensitive high-mobility sensing to data-intensive distributed machine learning. Over-the-air (function) computation (AirComp) has emerged to be a promising solution that merges computing and communication by exploiting analog-wave addition in the air. Another IoT design challenge is battery recharging for dense sensors which can be tackled by wireless power transfer (WPT). The coexisting of AirComp and WPT in the IoT system calls for their integration to enhance the performance and efficiency of WDA. This motivates the current work on developing the wirelessly powered AirComp (WP-AirComp) framework by jointly optimizing wireless power control, energy and (data) aggregation beamforming to minimize the AirComp error. To derive a practical solution, we recast the non-convex joint optimization problem into the equivalent outer and inner sub-problems for (inner) wireless power control and energy beamforming, and (outer) the efficient aggregation beamforming, respectively. The former is solved in closed form while the latter is efficiently solved using the semidefinite relaxation technique. The results reveal that the optimal energy beams point to the dominant Eigen-directions of the WPT channels, and the optimal power allocation tends to equalize the close-loop (down-link WPT and up-link AirComp) effective channels of different sensors. The simulation demonstrates that the controlling WPT provides additional design dimensions for substantially reducing the AirComp error.

Performance Analysis of Green-Wall Infrastructure Using IoT Devices

Urban populations grow consistently from year to year and their infrastructure has been developed rapidly. Due to population density and the rapid increase of the use of electronic applications, it is common to find the urban heat island effect in these areas where average temperatures have risen significantly. The changes in temperature of urban areas contribute to global warming and are believed to lead to unavoidable natural disasters. Green-wall infrastructure is a popular environmental-friendly method used to reduce the average temperature in urban areas by curbing the urban heat island effect and improving air-quality at the same time. However, a standard monitoring system is lacking as well as statistical data that depicts the efficiency of the green-wall method. This paper proposes to use the emerging Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud technologies to investigate the efficiency of the green wall system in reducing the average temperature of the urban infrastructure. Numerical analysis illustrates the effectiveness of the proposed IoT design in monitoring the performance of the green-wall method.

Analysis of Blockchain Solutions for IoT: A Systematic Literature Review

The Internet of Things (IoT) aims at connecting things to the Internet in a peer-to-peer paradigm for data collecting and data sharing in our daily life. A blockchain is an immutable append-only ledger maintained by a peer-to-peer network, where the whole network needs to reach a consensus on the transactional data stored on the ledger. With the decentralization nature, the design of IoT and blockchain aligns with each other well. Blockchain has been integrated with the IoT to solve the existing IoT problems. Our research focuses on analyzing the solutions proposed in academia and the methodologies used to integrate blockchain with the IoT. Through conducting a systematic literature review (SLR) on peer-reviewed, published articles on blockchain-based solutions for IoT, we gather the knowledge on current technical approaches implemented to integrate blockchain into the IoT. Majority of the research in this space is either at a conceptual level or at a very early stage. However, we only found 35 published papers with the real implementation of blockchain in the IoT platforms. We elicit the challenges of the IoT that were being addressed, and the detailed design of the blockchain-based solutions from two perspectives, namely data management and thing management. The evaluation methods and metrics used by those works are also being recorded and analyzed. In addition to the analysis of the literature, we provide our insights on improving the existing solutions and research methodology based on our expertise and experience on the blockchain.

사물 인터넷 디자인 시대에 따른 한국의 수준과 방향 연구

사물인터넷은 최근 가장 뜨겁게 정보통신업계를 흔들고 있는 트랜드이다. 수많은 사람이 사물인터넷을 말하고 있으며 이러한 제품들이 새롭게 등장하고 있다. 본 연구는 실질적인 전략과 국/내외 디자인 사례들을 통하여 사물인터넷이 우리의 문화생활에 어떻게 적용되고 있으며, 앞으로 산업과 사회를 새롭게 변화시키는 것에 초점을 맞추어 디자인 방향성을 제시하는 것이다. 또한, 기술적인 측면의 사물인터넷 예시들을 분석하여 한국의 수준과 방향성을 개인과 기업이 대비할 수 있도록 연구하는 것이 목적이다. 연구범위와 방법으로는 사물인터넷에 관한 이론적인 고찰을 시작으로 영역 간의 관계를 분석한다. 스마트 제조사들의 사물인터넷 영역 및 방향성에 관하여 분석하고 연구한다. 이에 따른 한국의 준비 수준과 방향성에 관하여 분석하고 연구한다. 블루오션을 창출하는 기업들의 활동을 조사하여 사물인터넷에 관하여 앞으로 준비해야 하는 것을 연구하는 것이다. 사물인터넷은 어떠한 의미를 담고 있으며, 기업들이 사물인터넷을 어떻게 활용하고 있는지 분석하고 연구한다. 그중에서 특히 다양한 디자인 제조기업들을 분석하여 결과적인 한국의 수준과 방향성을 연구해본다.

A review of information centric network-based internet of things: communication architectures, design issues, and research opportunities

In the perspective of Internet advancements for the future Internet, Information Centric Network (ICN) offers a communication model, which is different from the current IP-based paradigm. ICN is a name based communication architecture, where the retrieval of content is done using names rather than their locations. Besides, ICN provides other features such as caching, mobility, scalability, and robustness. Future Internet will have Internet of Things (IoT) devices that will provide very strict requirements. The integration of ICN with IoT opens a new set of design issues and opportunities for researchers. This paper sheds light on the ICN-based IoT design issues and explains some of the research opportunities in which ICN accommodates other Internet technologies, for example, Cloud, Software Defined Network (SDN), Edge, Fog, and 5G. Besides the IoT-ICN integration, IoT also requires suitable wireless communication standards. This paper also provides a description of several wireless communication standards and elaborates their main features. IoT designers will benefit from the provided description to make a decision for the selection of an appropriate standard.

Measuring security in IoT communications

More smart objects and more applications on the Internet of Things (IoT) mean more security challenges. In IoT security is crucial but difficult to obtain. On the one hand the usual trade-off between highly secure and usable systems is more impelling than ever; on the other hand security is considered a feature that has a cost often unaffordable. Therefore, IoT designers not only need tools to assess possible risks and to study countermeasures, but also methodologies to estimate their costs. Here, we present a methodology, based on the process calculus IoT-LySa, to infer quantitative measures on evolution of systems. The derived quantitative evaluation is exploited to establish the cost of the possible security countermeasures, in terms of time and energy.

Agent-Oriented Cooperative Smart Objects: From IoT System Design to Implementation

The future Internet of Things (IoT) is expected to enable a new and wide range of decentralized systems (from small-scale smart homes to large-scale smart cities) in which “things” are able to sense/actuate, compute, and communicate, and thus play a central and crucial role. The growing importance of such novel networked cyber-physical context demands suitable and effective computing paradigms to fulfill the various requirements of IoT systems engineering. In this paper, we propose to explore an agent-based computing paradigm to support IoT systems analysis, design, and implementation. The synergic meeting of agents with IoT makes it possible to develop smart and dynamic IoT systems of diverse scales. Our agent-oriented approach is specifically based on the agent-based cooperating smart object (ACOSO) methodology and on the related ACOSO middleware: they provide effective agent design and programming models along with efficient tools for the actual construction of an IoT system in terms of a multiagent system. A case study concerning the development of a complex IoT system, namely a Smart University Campus, is described to show the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approach.

Nanoelectronic Security Designs for Resource-Constrained Internet of Things Devices: Finding Security Solutions with Nanoelectronic Hardwares

The term internet of things (IoT) is often defined in a variety of different ways but typically refers to electronic devices and systems (e.g., toaster ovens and wearable sensors) with added computational capabilities and Internet connectivity. The IoT introduces new security concerns that must be addressed at an early stage of the IoT design. Since security operations such as encryption and authentication are often resource hungry, solutions are needed that provide reasonable levels of security with minimal area and power consumption. Emerging nanoscale technologies are also being developed and require very low area utilization and low power consumption, important features for the IoT. In this article, we present a few examples of security systems built from nanoscale electronic devices that could provide solutions for low resource security in emerging IoT devices.

A Review of Physical Layer Security Techniques for Internet of Things: Challenges and Solutions.

With the uninterrupted revolution of communications technologies and the great-leap-forward development of emerging applications, the ubiquitous deployment of Internet of Things (IoT) is imperative to accommodate constantly growing user demands and market scales. Communication security is critically important for the operations of IoT. Among the communication security provisioning techniques, physical layer security (PLS), which can provide unbreakable, provable, and quantifiable secrecy from an information-theoretical point of view, has drawn considerable attention from both the academia and the industries. However, the unique features of IoT, such as low-cost, wide-range coverage, massive connection, and diversified services, impose great challenges for the PLS protocol design in IoT. In this article, we present a comprehensive review of the PLS techniques toward IoT applications. The basic principle of PLS is first briefly introduced, followed by the survey of the existing PLS techniques. Afterwards, the characteristics of IoT are identified, based on which the challenges faced by PLS protocol design are summarized. Then, three newly-proposed PLS solutions are highlighted, which match the features of IoT well and are expected to be applied in the near future. Finally, we conclude the paper and point out some further research directions.

Analysis of the Learning Effectiveness of the STEAM-6E Special Course—A Case Study about the Creative Design of IoT Assistant Devices for the Elderly

This study developed a STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Math)-6E (Engage, Explore, Explain, Extend, Enrich, Evaluate; 6E Learning by Design) special course based on the theme of creative design of IoT (Internet of Things) assistant devices for the elderly and investigated the impact of this course on students’ learning effectiveness. It invited eight experts and scholars for focus interviews, jointly developed the STEAM-6E special course, designed teaching activities around the theme of creative design of IoT assistant devices for the elderly, and created a learning effectiveness scale. Furthermore, it selected 46 students majoring in nursing in a vocational and technological college as its subjects and distributed copies of a questionnaire among them to explore learning effectiveness. This study reached the following conclusions. The STEAM-6E special course on the creative design of IoT assistant devices for the elderly included three dimensions, that is, the STEAM course, 6E teaching, and the acquisition of professional knowledge, as well as 17 competence indicators. The nursing students affirmed the learning outcome in the STEAM-6E course, the 6E teaching model, and thematic knowledge after attending the STEAM-6E course. The hands-on activities of the STEAM-6E special course could guide students to learn key points step by step. The STEAM-6E special course can strengthen students’ abilities to integrate STEAM knowledge and improve their learning effectiveness in each discipline. The STEAM-6E special course for the elderly improved the cooperative learning, professional knowledge, and confidence of the students. In light of these conclusions, this study developed a teaching model for the STEAM-6E special course on the creative design of IoT assistant devices for the elderly and proposed several suggestions for curriculum planning and the implementation of a STEAM-6E special course.

Opportunistic and Location-Based Collaboration Architecture among Mobile Assets and Fixed Manufacturing Processes.

Research into integrating the concept of the internet of things (IoT) into smart factories has accelerated, leading to the emergence of various smart factory solutions. Most ideas, however, focus on the automation and integration of processes in factory, rather than organic cooperation among mobile assets (e.g., the workers and manufactured products) and fixed manufacturing equipment (e.g., press molds, computer numerical controls, painting). Additionally, it is difficult to apply smart factory and IoT designs to analog factories, because such a factory would require the integration of mobile assets and smart manufacturing processes. Thus, existing analog factories remain intact and smart factories are newly constructed. To overcome this disparity and to make analog factories compatible with smart technologies and IoT, we propose the opportunistic and location-based collaboration architecture (OLCA) platform, which allows for smart devices to be attached to workers, products, and facilities to enable the collaboration of location and event information in devices. Using this system, we can monitor workers’ positions and production processes in real-time to help prevent dangerous situations and better understand product movement. We evaluate the proposed OLCA platform’s performance while using a simple smart factory scenario, thus confirming its suitability.

MDSClone: Multidimensional Scaling Aided Clone Detection in Internet of Things

Cloning is a very serious threat in the Internet of Things (IoT), owing to the simplicity for an attacker to gather configuration and authentication credentials from a non-tamper-proof node, and replicate it in the network. In this paper, we propose MDSClone, a novel clone detection method based on multidimensional scaling (MDS). MDSClone appears to be very well suited to IoT scenarios, as it: 1) detects clones without the need to know the geographical positions of nodes; 2) unlike prior methods, it can be applied to hybrid networks that comprise both static and mobile nodes, for which no mobility pattern may be assumed a priori . Moreover, a further advantage of MDSClone is that 3) the core part of the detection algorithm can be parallelized, resulting in an acceleration of the whole detection mechanism. Our thorough analytical and experimental evaluations demonstrate that MDSClone can achieve a 100% clone detection probability. Moreover, we propose several modifications to the original MDS calculation, which lead to over a 75% speed up in large scale scenarios. The demonstrated efficiency of MDSClone proves that it is a promising method towards a practical clone detection design in IoT.

A novel multi-level evaluation approach for human-coupled IoT applications

The recent emerging trend to promote the harmonious interactions between human and smart objects in Internet of Things (IoT) applications has led to the rising demand for the comprehensive exploration of associated IoT design spaces, considering system-, network-, and human-level perspectives. The traditional design approach of networked smart objects tends to ignore the effects caused by human interactions so that the existing approach has the limited capability in joint system/network/human multi-level exploration. In this paper, we propose a high-level system modeling and multi-level simulation approach for microsystem models to interoperate with high-level models in the human-level perspective and to provide comprehensive co-exploration. The high-level system modeling enables one to abstract the detailed operations of hardware platforms using power and timing data obtained by the proposed high-level state-based profiling method and using the event-driven modeling concept. For the event-driven system modeling, we utilize the discrete-event system specification (DEVS) to support scalable model-driven prototyping. To represent the coupled relationship of network-level system activity and human-level interactions between node systems and humans, we employ a general-purpose network simulator to model the operation and communication of network modules in smart objects and developed agent-based human behavioral models. For the co-simulation of multi-level models, we designed a distributed simulation platform to enable the interoperation between the DEVS simulator and the network simulator using a runtime infrastructure. The proposed modeling and simulation approach is applied for the multi-level evaluation of a smart museum application to estimate the effect of energy-efficiency policies.

Secure Downlink Transmission in the Internet of Things: How Many Antennas Are Needed?

Physical layer security is a promising way to secure the wireless communications in the Internet of Things (IoT). Motivated by the fact that the limited feedback resources in the IoT network would degrade the secrecy advantage of the multiple-antenna technique, we attempt to investigate the problem of how many transmit antennas should be utilized to perform secure communications. In particular, we consider the heterogeneous IoT downlink network and design a multiuser secure transmission scheme. In this scheme, the zero-forcing beamforming technique is adopted to serve the IoT legitimate users, and the remaining spatial freedoms are utilized to send artificial noise (AN) for confusing the passive eavesdroppers. Given the secrecy outage constraints, we derive the closed-form expression for the network secrecy throughput and formulate a non-convex optimization problem with multiple parameters, e.g., the number of transmit antennas, the wiretap codes, the feedback bits allocation strategy, and the power allocation ratio between the information bearing signal and the AN. To effectively tackle this problem, we develop an optimization framework involving the block coordinate descent algorithm and the 1-D search method. Simulation results validate the effectiveness of our proposed optimization framework and show that the optimal number of transmit antennas increases as the secrecy outage constraints become stricter, or the feedback resources become scarcer.

On security challenges and open issues in Internet of Things

When Internet of Things (IoT) applications become a part of people’s daily life, security issues in IoT have caught significant attention in both academia and industry. Compared to traditional computing systems, IoT systems have more inherent vulnerabilities, and meanwhile, could have higher security requirements. However, the current design of IoT does not effectively address the higher security requirements posed by those vulnerabilities. Many recent attacks on IoT systems have shown that novel security solutions are needed to protect this emerging system. This paper aims to analyze security challenges resulted from the special characteristics of the IoT systems and the new features of the IoT applications. This could help pave the road to better security solution design. In addition, three architectural security designs are proposed and analyzed. Examples of how to implement these designs are discussed. Finally, for each layer in IoT architecture, open issues are also identified.

IoT-based production logistics and supply chain system – Part 1

PurposeThe lack of reference architecture for Internet of Things (IoT) modeling impedes the successful design and implementation of an IoT-based production logistics and supply chain system (PLSCS). The authors present this study in two parts to address this research issue. Part A proposes a unified IoT modeling framework to model the dynamics of distributed IoT processes, IoT devices, and IoT objects. The models of the framework can be leveraged to support the implementation architecture of an IoT-based PLSCS. The second part (Part B) of this study extends the discussion of implementation architecture proposed in Part A. Part B presents an IoT-based cyber-physical system framework and evaluates its performance. The paper aims to discuss this issue.Design/methodology/approachThis paper adopts a design research approach, using ontology, process analysis, and Petri net modeling scheme to support IoT system modeling.FindingsThe proposed IoT system-modeling approach reduces the complexity of system development and increases system portability for IoT-based PLSCS. The IoT design models generated from the modeling can also be transformed to implementation logic.Practical implicationsThe proposed IoT system-modeling framework and the implementation architecture can be used to develop an IoT-based PLSCS in the real industrial setting. The proposed modeling methods can be applied to many discrete manufacturing industries.Originality/valueThe IoT modeling framework developed in this study is the first in this field which decomposes IoT system design into ontology-, process-, and object-modeling layers. A novel implementation architecture also proposed to transform above IoT system design models into implementation logic. The developed prototype system can track product and different parts of the same product along a manufacturing supply chain.

Building an authorization model for external means of protection of APCS based on the Internet of things

In this paper we study application of Internet of Thing concept and devices to secure automated process control systems. We review different approaches in IoT (Internet of Things) architecture and design and propose them for several applications in security of automated process control systems. We consider an Attribute-based encryption in context of access control mechanism implementation and promote a secret key distribution scheme between attribute authorities and end devices.