Internet Of Things End Research Articles

A Survey on IoT Programming Platforms: A Business-Domain Experts Perspective

The vast growth and digitalization potential offered by the Internet of Things (IoT) is hindered by substantial barriers in accessibility, interoperability, and complexity, mainly affecting small organizations and non-technical entities. This survey paper provides a detailed overview of the landscape of IoT programming platforms, focusing specifically on the development support they offer for varying end-user profiles, ranging from developers with IoT expertise to business experts willing to take advantage of IoT solutions to automate their organization processes. The survey examines a range of IoT platforms, classified according to their programming approach between general-purpose programming solutions, model-driven programming, mashups and end-user programming. Necessary IoT and programming backgrounds are described to empower non-technical readers with a comprehensive field summary. In addition, the paper compares the features of the most representative platforms and provides decision insights and guidelines to support end-users in selecting appropriate IoT platforms for their use cases. This work contributes to narrowing the knowledge gap between IoT specialists and end users, breaking accessibility barriers and further promoting the integration of IoT technologies in various domains.

Machine learning deployment for energy monitoring of Internet of Things nodes in smart agriculture

SummaryLow‐Power Wide‐Area Network technologies, such as LoRa, are gaining popularity in the agricultural sector for field deployment. The crucial factors in these devices are their range and power efficiency. The energy consumption of a LoRa wireless sensor network is predominantly affected by transmission parameters like carrier frequency, bandwidth, transmit power, spreading factor, and coding rate. Incorrect chosen transmission parameters can lead to a reduction in the battery life of end nodes, requiring frequent battery replacements—a situation undesirable for field deployment. This study introduces a machine learning deployment in the form of a web application designed to monitor the energy consumption of end nodes in LoRa wireless sensor networks. The research initially employs 12 regression models, including Linear, Random Forest, K‐Nearest Neighbours, Decision Tree, Support Vector, Lasso, Ridge, AdaBoost, Gradient Boost, XGBoost, CatBoost, and LightGBM models. The findings of the study reveal that the LightGBM model surpasses other models in accurately predicting the energy consumption of Internet of Things (IoT) nodes, leading to its selection for the web application. This machine learning web application can be implemented in a programmable Long Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN) gateway to effectively monitor the energy consumption of IoT end nodes in the agricultural sector.

Enhanced power supply circuitry with long duration and high‐efficiency charging for indoor photovoltaic energy harvesting internet of things end device

AbstractLight is a popular choice as an indoor energy source for Internet of Things (IoT) end devices. However, indoor light sources are intermittent, which can disrupt the operation of IoT end devices, potentially leading to safety concerns or inaccurate data. Therefore, there is a growing need to develop a long‐duration power supply for IoT end devices. The energy from ambient light is harnessed to charge a supercapacitor through an energy manager chip. This supercapacitor serves as the power source for IoT nodes when the ambient light is unavailable. Nevertheless, as the voltage of the supercapacitor drops below the operating threshold, the IoT end node will eventually shut down. This paper proposes a circuit that utilizes a Joule Thief circuit, booster converter, and capacitor stack‐up circuit to extract the remaining energy from the supercapacitor and boost the voltage, thereby extending the operational lifespan of IoT end nodes. Additionally, capacitor stack‐up circuits significantly enhance charging efficiency. PSpice design and simulations confirm circuit feasibility. High‐efficiency charging and long‐duration IoT nodes suggest replacing traditional batteries with supercapacitors, reducing environmental impact.

Resource allocation strategy based on service function Chaining in Multi-Access edge computing network

The Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) network enhances the processing capability of Internet of Things (IoT) terminals by deploying 3C resources (computing resources, cache resources, and communication resources) at the IoT edge side, effectively improving the quality of service (QoS) of IoT applications. The majority of current MEC network research focuses on task offloading and energy management, with few studies looking at resource allocation from a service provisioning perspective. In this paper, we focus on the resource allocation problem when processing multiple tasks requested by IoT terminal devices in the MEC network. Firstly, we transform various tasks requested by IoT end devices into an SFC-based resource allocation problem. Then, we model the problem as a graph theory-based virtualized network function (VNF) node deployment cost optimization problem. Furthermore, we propose two resource allocation and deployment strategies by jointly considering the computing cost and security cost in VNF node deployment. Finally, extensive simulation experiments show that the proposed method can significantly improve the success rate of SFC task processing by more than 30% and network resource utilization by more than 20% when compared to other deployment methods for processing multiple SFC tasks with dynamic requests.

An autonomous Internet of Things spectral sensing system for in-situ optical monitoring of grape ripening: design, characterization, and operation

The present work proposes a novel autonomous Internet of Things (IoT) spectral sensing system for in-situ optical monitoring of grape ripening through reflectance signals. To this end, tailor-made hardware for this IoT end node was developed, characterized, and operated in both lab and field conditions. It included three complementary modules: the optical module, the host module, and the controller module. The optical module included four photodetectors and four LEDs with maximum emission wavelength centered at 530, 630, 690, and 730 nm that was placed in direct contact with the grape berry. The host module included the LED driver and the analog front-end for signal acquisition. Finally, the controller module provided full control of the system and ensured data storage, power management, and connectivity. The system was capable of measuring reflectance in the range of 4 – 100 % with a linear response (r2 > 998) and with a high reproducibility among different optical units. This design made it possible to collect reflectance signals from red (cv. Touriga Nacional) and white (cv. Loureiro) grape varieties in both lab and field environments. The relationship between this optical fingerprint (comprised of the different reflectance intensities recorded) and the evolution of grape berry quality parameters throughout the ripening period (for approximately two months), was analyzed and discussed. Lab data was used to establish a multivariate model based on Partial Least Squares for the prediction of the Total Soluble Solids (TSS) content in both varieties. The model error (Root Mean Square Error in Cross Validation) was 2.31 and 0.73 °Brix for Touriga Nacional and Loureiro, respectively. This model was applied to data acquired in the field in an illustrative example of the potential of the system to predict TSS in real time. The field observations collected during the monitoring period also provided relevant information about the potential issues that may occur during the unattended operation of the optical sensors. Additionally, the modular architecture of the optical module proposed makes it possible to use different LEDs and photodetectors, as well as the assembly of optical filters. This creates the possibility of using the same principles for measuring reflectance in different spectral ranges (e.g. IR) or even fluorescence. The results herein described paved the work for future developments of this technology that will include the development of prediction models for the most relevant grape ripening parameters based on reflectance data, as well as its operation as part of a Wireless Sensor Network.

Security Framework for IoT Implementing Random Forest Classifier

The Internet of Things will become commonplace by making global connections possible at any moment. The necessity of well-thought-out, carefully implemented, and strictly enforced security standards over the entire lifecycle of IoT devices cannot be overstated.The Internet of Things (IoT) is a relatively new phenomenon that connects disparate computing infrastructures and infrastructure components. Given that the vast majority of the data collected will be shared with an unknowable audience, security is of paramount importance when connecting multiple independent IoT units across the Internet. This article provides a comprehensive review of the state of security in the Internet of Things.The essay emphasizes the necessity to provide security in the device itself alongside conventional security solutions to offer a method employing machine learning exible for preventing, detecting, diagnosing, isolating, and counteracting successful breaches.The bulk of IoT end hosts are low-end devices, This means that many common security practices cannot be used to protect IoTdevices., leaving IoT services and the wider Internet vulnerable to attacks and exploits.To solve this problem, this article presents a unified IoT framework that employs machine learning to implementthe proposed GNRS&NC architecture. This framework's primary goal is to ensure the safety of IoT devices.The framework makes use of random forest classifier. The suggested architecture allows for the seamless incorporation of regional IoT infrastructures into global frameworks without compromising on usability, interoperability, or security.

Exploration of transferable deep learning-aided radio frequency fingerprint identification systems

Radio frequency fingerprint identification (RFFI) shows great potential as a means for authenticating wireless devices. As RFFI can be addressed as a classification problem, deep learning techniques are widely utilized in modern RFFI systems for their outstanding performance. RFFI is suitable for securing the legacy existing Internet of Things (IoT) networks since it does not require any modifications to the existing end-node hardware and communication protocols. However, most deep learning-based RFFI systems require the collection of a great number of labelled signals for training, which is time-consuming and not ideal, especially for the IoT end nodes that are already deployed and configured with long transmission intervals. Moreover, the long time required to train a neural network from scratch also limits rapid deployment on legacy IoT networks. To address the above issues, two transferable RFFI protocols are proposed in this paper leveraging the concept of transfer learning. More specifically, they rely on fine-tuning and distance metric learning, respectively, and only require only a small amount of signals from the legacy IoT network. As the dataset used for transfer is small, we propose to apply augmentation in the transfer process to generate more training signals to improve performance. A LoRa-RFFI testbed consisting of 40 commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) LoRa IoT devices and a software-defined radio (SDR) receiver is built to experimentally evaluate the proposed approaches. The experimental results demonstrate that both the fine-tuning and distance metric learning-based RFFI approaches can be rapidly transferred to another IoT network with less than ten signals from each LoRa device. The classification accuracy is over 90%, and the augmentation technique can improve the accuracy by up to 20%.

Evaluation of Blockchain Networks’ Scalability Limitations in Low-Powered Internet of Things (IoT) Sensor Networks

With the development of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, industries such as healthcare have started using low-powered sensor-based devices. Because IoT devices are typically low-powered, they are susceptible to cyber intrusions. As an emerging information security solution, blockchain technology has considerable potential for protecting low-powered IoT end devices. Blockchain technology provides promising security features such as cryptography, hash functions, time stamps, and a distributed ledger function. Therefore, blockchain technology can be a robust security technology for securing IoT low-powered devices. However, the integration of blockchain and IoT technologies raises a number of research questions. Scalability is one of the most significant. Blockchain’ scalability of low-powered sensor networks needs to be evaluated to identify the practical application of both technologies in low-powered sensor networks. In this paper, we analyse the scalability limitations of three commonly used blockchain algorithms running on low-powered single-board computers communicating in a wireless sensor network. We assess the scalability limitations of three blockchain networks as we increase the number of nodes. Our analysis shows considerable scalability variations between three blockchain networks. The results indicate that some blockchain networks can have over 800 ms network latency and some blockchain networks may use a bandwidth over 1600 Kbps. This work will contribute to developing efficient blockchain-based IoT sensor networks.

Data Compression in LoRa Networks: A Compromise between Performance and Energy Consumption

The Internet of Things (IoT) end devices have major limitations related to hardware and energy autonomy. Generally, the highest energy consumption is related to communication, which accounts for up to 60% of consumption depending on the application. Among the strategies to optimize the energy consumed by communication, data compression methods are one of the most promising. However, most data compression algorithms are designed for personal computers and need to be adapted to the IoT context. This study aims to adapt classical algorithms, such as LZ77, LZ78, LZW, Huffman, and Arithmetic coding, and to analyse their performance and energy metrics in IoT end devices. The evaluation is performed in a device with an ESP32 processor and LoRa modulation. The study makes use of real datasets derived from two IoT applications. The results show compression rates close to 70%, a three-fold increase in the number of messages sent, and a reduction in energy consumption of 22%. An analytical model was also developed to estimate the gain in the battery life of the device using the adapted algorithms.

An energy‐efficient power allocation algorithm under reliability constraint for industrial Internet of Thing systems

SummaryWith the development of 5G technology, the Internet of Things (IoT) system is becoming more and more widely used in various fields. However, the reliability issue still hinders the wide applications. For instance, the transmission reliability of the IoT system will be significantly affected by the status of end devices, wireless channel quality, and the environment. Moreover, according to the Automatic Repeat‐reQuest (ARQ) retransmission mechanism in the 802.15.4 protocol, if the IoT end devices pursue a conservative power model causing low signal transmission power, it is likely that the signal power will lose too much during the transmission process. This will result in the increase of the network packet loss rate and the power consumption during the data retransmission. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a reasonable transmission power allocation algorithm to ensure the transmission reliability, considering the ARQ retransmission mechanism. The algorithm intends to find the optimal transmission power of each IoT end device, so as to minimize the total energy consumption. The simulation results demonstrate that the power allocation algorithm improves the reliability of the IoT system, compared with other algorithms.

Evaluation of Correlation between Temperature of IoT Microcontroller Devices and Blockchain Energy Consumption in Wireless Sensor Networks.

Blockchain technology is an information security solution that operates on a distributed ledger system. Blockchain technology has considerable potential for securing Internet of Things (IoT) low-powered devices. However, the integration of IoT and blockchain technologies raises a number of research issues. One of the most important is the energy consumption of different blockchain algorithms. Because IoT devices are typically low-powered battery-powered devices, the energy consumption of any blockchain node must be kept low. IoT end nodes are typically low-powered devices expected to survive for extended periods without battery replacement. Energy consumption of blockchain algorithms is an important consideration in any application that combines both technologies, as some blockchain algorithms are infeasible because they consume large amounts of energy, causing the IoT device to reach high temperatures and potentially damaging the hardware; they are also a possible fire hazard. In this paper, we examine the temperatures reached in devices used to process blockchain algorithms, and the energy consumption of three commonly used blockchain algorithms running on low-powered microcontrollers communicating in a wireless sensor network. We found temperatures of IoT devices and energy consumption were highly correlated with the temperatures reached. The results indicate that device temperatures reached 80 °C. This work will contribute to developing energy-efficient blockchain-based IoT sensor networks.

Enhanced charge circuitry for indoor photovoltaic energy harvesting with fast activation and high efficiency

AbstractUsing batteries in low‐power Internet of Things (IoT) devices poses a risk of environmental pollution. Energy harvesting (EH) systems are needed to capture ambient energy and charge supercapacitors to address this issue. Indoor photovoltaic (PV) panels are a promising power source, but their weak ambient energy makes it challenging to activate IoT end nodes quickly. Here, an EH system enhanced charge circuitry with fast activation is proposed that reduces IoT end nodes activation time to less than 2 s, compared to the traditional 19.8 h, if an indoor PV panel supplying 28 µA to charge a 1 F capacity supercapacitor from 0 to 2 V. This system also offers high‐efficiency charging, enabling supercapacitors to replace batteries, particularly when charging from 0 to 1.2 V, with a charge time improvement ratio of 64%. These breakthroughs address long‐standing challenges in IoT power systems and reduce environmental pollution.

BLAST-IoT: BLockchain Assisted Scalable Trust in Internet of Things

Internet of Things (IoT) paved the way to realize ubiquitous access towards manifold services and applications by enabling connectivity between different physical devices. The devices, having heterogeneous computation power, protocol stack, or storage power, can send or receive various services by communicating through the internet. These services inevitably demand a secure and reliable network system to interchange the data or information for their impressive utilization. One proven solution to attain this objective is embedding Trust Management System (TMS) that aims to reduce risk or uncertainty associated with interacting adversary devices by capturing their dynamic behavior in the system. With TMS, devices compute and maintain trust value on the interacting devices by observing their behavior with different interaction instances. This trust information is exchanged between the devices to assess the global reputation of devices and facilitate devices’ decisions when there is a lack of direct interactions. For systems having enormous low-power devices, one crucial aspect of TMS is secure and timely dissemination, management, and storage of trust information to accurately assess devices’ dynamic behavior. Addressing this issue, we present a blockchain-assisted scalable trust model, BLAST-IoT, for IoT systems of heterogeneous devices in this paper. BLAST-IoT intends to ensure secure dissemination and storage of trust information leveraging on the functionalities provided by blockchain technology. It adopts a semi-distributed approach where direct trust information, computed by IoT end devices, is processed and stored by some high-power edge devices running public blockchain networks to handle impediments caused by power-deficient IoT devices. The effectiveness of BLAST-IoT has been evaluated through implementation and simulation-based results for trust convergence and assessment accuracy in the dynamic IoT environment. Further, the throughput performance of BLAST-IoT has been examined with an increase in network load.

A Comparative Analysis of the Computation Cost and Energy Consumption of Relevant Curves of ECC Presented in Literature

With the Internet of Things (IoT) becoming expo-nentially more prevalent, the need for lightweight cryptography functions increases simultaneously. Namely, IoT end devices are mostly limited by their resource-constrained capabilities and therefore cannot rely on heavyweight cryptographic algorithms such as Rivest-Shamir-Adleman (RSA) or Diffie-Hellman (DH) for security. Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) offers a more lightweight alternative by being based on a mathematical prob-lem named the Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithm Problem (ECDLP) which is not known to be solvable in sub-exponential time. Within the field of ECC, many different curve types exist following various standards for this protocol. In this paper, the energy consumption and time consumption for key generation, encryption, and decryption are measured within the ElGamal protocol using ECC for the various curves. To measure this, a Raspberry Pi 4B and a Personal Computer are used to conclude the disproval of the hypothesis that the Twisted Edwards curve performs most efficient to achieve its security strength. Namely, Brainpool curves function most efficient within this benchmark, after which Short Weierstrass curves follow. Moreover, it is concluded the performance pattern for both data processors and data providers is equal to each other for all message sizes.

Assessing a Methodology for Evaluating the Latency of IPv6 with SCHC Compression in LoRaWAN Deployments.

The Internet of Things (IoT) approach relies on the use of the Internet Protocol (IP) as a pervasive network protocol. IP acts as a "glue" for interconnecting end devices (on the field side) and end users, leveraging on very diverse lower-level and upper-level protocols. The need for scalability would suggest the adoption of IPv6, but the large overhead and payloads do not match with the constraints dictated by common wireless solutions. For this reason, compression strategies have been proposed to avoid redundant information in the IPv6 header and to provide fragmentation and reassembly of long messages. For example, the Static Context Header Compression (SCHC) protocol has been recently referenced by the LoRa Alliance as a standard IPv6 compression scheme for LoRaWAN-based applications. In this way, IoT end points can seamlessly share an end-to-end IP link. However, implementation details are out of the specifications' scope. For this reason, formal test procedures for comparing solutions from different providers are important. In this paper, a test method for assessing architectural delays of real-world deployments of SCHC-over-LoRaWAN implementations is presented. The original proposal includes a mapping phase, for identifying information flows, and a subsequent evaluation phase, in which flows are timestamped and time-related metrics are computed. The proposed strategy has been tested in different use cases involving LoRaWAN backends deployed all around the world. The feasibility of the proposed approach has been tested by measuring the end-to-end latency of IPv6 data in sample use cases, obtaining a delay of less than 1 s. However, the main result is the demonstration that the suggested methodology permits a comparison of the behavior of IPv6 with SCHC-over-LoRaWAN, allowing the optimization of choices and parameters during deployment and commissioning of both infrastructure components and software.

An Overview of Medium Access Control and Radio Duty Cycling Protocols for Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) applications such as smart grids, smart agriculture, smart cities, and e-healthcare are popular nowadays. Generally, IoT end devices are extremely sensitive to the utilization of energy. The medium access control (MAC) layer is responsible for coordination and access of the IoT devices. It is essential to design an efficient MAC protocol for achieving high throughput in IoT. Duty cycling is a fundamental process in wireless networks and also an energy-saving necessity if nodes are required to operate for more than a few days. Numerous MAC protocols along with different objectives have been proposed for the IoT. However, to the best of our knowledge, only limited work has been performed dedicated to covering MAC and radio duty cycling (RDC). Therefore, in this study, we propose a systematic cataloging system and use if to organize the most important MAC and RDC proposals. In this catalog, each protocol has been categorized into main ideas, advantages, applications, limitations, innovative features, and potential future improvements. Our critical analysis is different from previous research studies, as we have fully covered all recent studies in this domain. We discuss challenges and future research directions.

Data reduction in fog computing and internet of things: A systematic literature survey

Cloud computing, the most crucial computing and storage tool in IoT (Internet of Things), still meets various challenges. The remoteness of IoT end devices from cloud platforms may lead to significant issues for real-time applications such as disaster handling, healthcare application, etc. In order to address these issues, fog computing is a new platform with specialized features that perform essential IoT data management and real-time application management tasks. Data management in IoT via fog computing is critical for decreasing latency in real-time IoT applications and is needed to produce more professional knowledge and smart decisions. Reduction in the size of data sent to the cloud layer is a fundamental topic in data management on the fog computing platform. In this paper, to select and survey studies about data size reduction in fog computing, we applied the Systematic Literature Review (SLR) process to comprehend and classify the different topics and related approaches in this field. In addition, the studies presented in the edge computing field, which were close to our goal, were also investigated. The primary purpose of this study is to classify and analyze the fog data reduction (FDR) studies published between 2016 and 2022. The topics and related approaches of selected papers are presented in an approach-based taxonomy. The topics of provided taxonomy include data filtering, data compression, data aggregation, data prediction, data pattern recognition, and general facets and related approaches. Finally, open issues for FDR and relevant main challenges are presented in upcoming research.

Resource placement strategy optimization for IoT oriented monitoring application

Cloud computing and the low power wide area network (LPWAN) network represent the key infrastructures for developing intelligent solutions based on the internet of things (IoT). However, the diversity of use cases and deployment scenarios of IoT in the different domains makes optimizing IoT-based cloud solutions a major challenge. The cloud solution’s cost increases with the increase in central processing unit (CPU) resources and energy consumption. The optimal use of edge material resources in industrial solutions will reduce the consumption of resources and thus optimize cloud infrastructure costs in terms of resources and energy consumption. The article presents the network and application architecture of an IoT monitoring solution based on cloud services. Then, we study the integration of IoT services based on application placement strategies on the fog cloud compared to the traditional centralized cloud strategy. Simulations evaluate the scenarios with the iFogSim simulator and the analyzed results compare the traditional strategy with the cloud-fog. The results show that cost and energy consumption in the cloud can be significantly reduced by processing the application at the end devices level with respect to the possible limit of CPU processing power for each IoT end device. Latency and network usage respect quality of service constraints in cloud-fog placement for this type of monitoring-oriented IoT application.

A DQN-Based Consensus Mechanism for Blockchain in IoT Networks

The integration of the blockchain and Internet of Things (IoT) systems can effectively guarantee data security in IoT applications. To facilitate the use of blockchain on resource-constrained IoT end devices, we propose RAFT+ with a new leader selection scheme in this article, which is based on the distributed consensus algorithm RAFT. The design of RAFT+ aims at mitigating the imparities between different types of IoT end devices and enabling these devices to allow different types of IoT end devices to participate in block consensus, thus maintaining strong consistency of the blockchain network. The leader selection scheme is generated by a deep <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${Q}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> -Network (DQN), which can make the optimal selection of the leader under various conditions by leveraging the limited system resources as well as balancing the load of the consensus mechanism on multiple IoT end devices. Simulation results show that RAFT+ can enhance the system performance while maintaining the security of the system under high load conditions.

An efficient multikeyword fuzzy ciphertext retrieval scheme based on distributed transmission for Internet of Things

As traditional computing and cloud computing integrate, the Internet of Things (IoT) has evolved into a layered and cloud-network-edge-end architecture. However, most searchable encryption models still use triples, in which hierarchical structures are neglected, and insecure intermediate nodes are exposed to external environment. Meanwhile, mainstream schemes adopting accurate retrieval are incompatible with IoT end users' features of differentiation. To address these issues, we innovatively design an efficient and credible search model with an accurate multikeyword fuzzy ciphertext retrieval scheme in the context of IoT. First, based on network coding and key sharing, data are grouped, encoded, and transmitted in parallel to the receiver node through middle-layer nodes, with high efficiency and reliability. Second, to realize fuzzy retrieval of IoT, edit distance is selected as the standard of difference between keywords, and then document index vector and query vector are created based on locality sensitive hashing (LSH) and Bloom Filter. Furthermore, to improve the traditional scheme, query keywords are split into multiple single-word forms, inner products between each trapdoor of single word and encryption index vector are calculated, respectively, for the sum of each inner product and thus top $\mathrm{top}$ - k $k$ sorting search. Ultimately, feasibility, safety, and efficiency of our improved scheme are verified by security analysis, while simulation results support that our scheme has better accuracy and efficiency.