Internet Of Things Entities Research Articles

A survey on internet of things security from data perspectives

As the Internet of Things (IoT) sees an increasing use in the society, the security challenge it faces is becoming more and more severe. Data collected and shared in the IoT plays an important role in the significance of the IoT. Observing from a data perspective may be of great help in understanding IoT security. Though a number of surveys on IoT security have been out there, none of them is from such a perspective. To fill the gap, this paper investigates IoT security from data perspectives. Combining the concept of typical IoT architectures with data life cycles, the paper proposes a three-dimensional approach to exploring IoT security, i.e., with the one-stop, multi-stop and end-application dimensions. The one-stop dimension explores IoT security by observing data on an IoT device, the multi-stop dimension by observing data among a group of IoT entities, and the end-application dimension by observing data used in IoT applications. While data may flow from IoT end-point devices through the Internet to a cloud or vice versa, the most demanding IoT-specific issues are in the space from IoT end-point devices to the border of the Internet, therefore the paper focuses on this space. The one-stop dimension discusses IoT security with respect to data that may flow from and to an end-point device. The multi-stop dimension works from the angle of data among a group of IoT entities, concerning secure communication, authentication and access control. The end-application dimension acts from the viewpoint of data usage in IoT applications, covering privacy, forensics, and social or legal challenges of the entire system. The paper makes an in-depth analysis of the latest development in IoT security by observing from data perspectives, summarizing open issues and suggesting promising directions for further research and applications of IoT security.

Blockchain Based Credibility Verification Method for IoT Entities

With the fast development of mobile Internet, Internet of Things (IoT) has been found in many important applications recently. However, it still faces many challenges in security and privacy. Blockchain (BC) technology, which underpins the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, has played an important role in the development of decentralized and data intensive applications running on millions of devices. In this paper, to establish the relationship between IoT and BC for device credibility verification, we propose a framework with layers, intersect, and self-organization Blockchain Structures (BCS). In this new framework, each BCS is organized by Blockchain technology. We describe the credibility verification method and show how it provide the verification. The efficiency and security analysis are also given in this paper, including its response time, storage efficiency, and verification. The conducted experiments have been shown to demonstrate the validity of the proposed method in satisfying the credible requirement achieved by Blockchain technology and certain advantages in storage space and response time.

Top-Down Delivery of IoT-based Applications for Seniors Behavior Change Capturing Exploiting a Model-Driven Approach

Developing Internet of Things (IoT) requires expertise and considerable skills in different fields in order to cover all the involved heterogeneous technologies, communication formats and protocols. Developers and experts ask for new solutions that speed up the prototyping of IoT applications. One of these solutions is Web of Topics (WoX) middleware, a model-driven Cloud platform that aims to ease IoT applications developing, introducing a strong semantic abstraction of the IoT concepts. In WoX, almost all the IoT entities and concepts are limited to the concept of Topic, i.e. an entity containing the value of a feature of interest that we intend to detect. The local counterpart of WoX is L-WoX (Local-Web of Topics), which manages local instances of features of interest, allowing mobile applications to collaborate among them, offering and receiving data to/from smart objects, and enabling the communication with WoX Cloud platform. The presented study leverages WoX approach for showing an experience in rapid design and prototyping of an ambient assisted living system that detects the movements of elderly persons in their home, acquiring data through sensors in an unobtrusive way. Moreover, The paper shows that the chosen model-driven solution is very suitable in a top-down approach, starting from users requirements: the created system simplifies the user-centered design of IoT applications, adopting a full top-down approach from user required to the technological solution.

Cost-Aware IoT Extension of DISSECT-CF

In the age of the Internet of Things (IoT), more and more sensors, actuators and smart devices get connected to the network. Application providers often combine this connectivity with novel scenarios involving cloud computing. Before implementing changes in these large-scale systems, an in-depth analysis is often required to identify governance models, bottleneck situations, costs and unexpected behaviours. Distributed systems simulators help in such analysis, but they are often problematic to apply in this newly emerging domain. For example, most simulators are either too detailed (e.g., need extensive knowledge on networking), or not extensible enough to support the new scenarios. To overcome these issues, we discuss our IoT cost analysis oriented extension of DIScrete event baSed Energy Consumption simulaTor for Clouds and Federations (DISSECT-CF). Thus, we present an in-depth analysis of IoT and cloud related pricing models of the most widely used commercial providers. Then, we show how the fundamental properties (e.g., data production frequency) of IoT entities could be linked to the identified pricing models. To allow the adoption of unforeseen scenarios and pricing schemes, we present a declarative modelling language to describe these links. Finally, we validate our extensions by analysing the effects of various identified pricing models through five scenarios coming from the field of weather forecasting.

Modeling and Simulating Internet-of-Things Systems: A Hybrid Agent-Oriented Approach

The focus of the Internet has recently shifted from current computers and mobile devices to everyday objects, people, and places; consequently, the Internet of Things (IoT) promises to be not only a compelling vision but the actual driving force of the upcoming fourth Industrial Revolution. Novel cyber-physical, customized, and highly pervasive services are impacting our lives, involving several stakeholders and fostering an unseen globally interconnected ecosystem. However, IoT system development is a multifaceted process that's complex, error-prone, and time-consuming. Although modeling and simulation are crucial aspects that could effectively support IoT system development, an integrated approach synergistically providing both of them is lacking. The authors propose a hybrid approach that uses agents for IoT modeling and OMNeT for simulation, providing mapping guidelines between the agent paradigm and the OMNeT simulator abstractions. The proposed approach has been applied in small-, medium-, and large-scale IoT scenarios, where relevant performance indexes of IoT entities communication have been measured and analyzed.

Mobile Cloud Business Process Management System for the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) represents a comprehensive environment that consists of a large number of smart devices interconnecting heterogeneous physical objects to the Internet. Many domains such as logistics, manufacturing, agriculture, urban computing, home automation, ambient assisted living, and various ubiquitous computing applications have utilized IoT technologies. Meanwhile, Business Process Management Systems (BPMSs) have become a successful and efficient solution for coordinated management and optimized utilization of resources/entities. However, past BPMSs have not considered many issues they will face in managing large-scale connected heterogeneous IoT entities. Without fully understanding the behavior, capability, and state of the IoT entities, the BPMS can fail to manage the IoT integrated information systems. In this article, we analyze existing BPMSs for IoT and identify the limitations and their drawbacks based on a Mobile Cloud Computing perspective. Later, we discuss a number of open challenges in BPMS for IoT.

Mobile-Aware Topology Control Potential Game: Equilibrium and Connectivity

Topology control (TC) is one of the most important techniques for connection establishments between entities in Internet of Things, especially in the scenario where there are no fixed infrastructures such as prompt sensor deployments, emergency communications, and vehicle–vehicle communications. The goal of TC is to assign per-node transmission power such that the resulting topology is energy efficient and also satisfies some global graph property such as connectivity. Among the literatures, however, few efforts focused on the issue of TC with interest-independent nodes. Besides, in a distributed mobile networks, nodes’ mobility can cause the dynamic network topology. As a result, nodes need to execute the TC algorithm periodically. To jointly consider nodes’ selfishness and mobility, we propose a potential game and mobility aware TC (PGMATC) framework based on mobility traces and potential game, where a practical utility function is designed by considering the expected utility for a TC period. Extensive simulations driven by actual data demonstrate that PGMATC can improve the network connectivity with quite a limited increase in energy consumption, compared with the traditional TC algorithms.

Logical interactions for heterogeneous IoT entities via virtual world mirrors in support of Ambient Assisted Living

In Ambient Assisted Living (AAL), as an important applied area of Internet of Things (IoT) technology, logical entity interaction establishes an intelligent virtual world in which heterogeneous ent ...

A Cloud Architecture for Managing IoT-aware Applications According to Knowledge Processing Rules

The Web of Things paradigm has represented a shift in the conjunction of the Internet of Things (IoT) with people, as it allows treating a smart object as a Web resource. While in a first phase the challenge was the physically management of smart objects, the current demand is to help users in profitably introducing IoT in their own daily life.The paper presents a software architecture for IoT systems able to manage the behaviour of involved IoT entities basing on knowledge processing tools. The main goal is informing the user of the occurrence of events of interest semantically determined starting from actual state of the environment. The architecture exploits the potentialities of the Web of Topics (WoX) approach, a conceptual model that simplifies the designing of IoT applications. Leveraging the WoX approach, the architecture introduces an innovative way to mine knowledge from IoT devices aside from any technological background, so that facing the intrinsic heterogeneity affecting IoT entities. The discussed architecture is composed by different modules integrated into an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), strongly decoupled and provided with RESTful-compliant web interfaces to communicate each other and with the external environment, according to a SOA structure. The paper shows how the system is able to receive data coming from sensors and to semantically interpret them by means of a series of business rules that act as knowledge processor.

Constructing Context-centric Data Objects to Enhance Logical Associations for IoT Entities

Entities in Internet of Things (IoT) need intelligent associations to allow a flexible and dynamic system reaction towards varying user situations. Purely data-oriented association methods (e.g., data-mining, machine-learning, etc.) are limited in deduction from existing associations. Also such data-oriented methods are limited in accuracy for working with small-scale datasets (e.g., working with patterns retrieved from historical data), outputting associations based on statistics rather than logic. Moreover, existing semantic technologies (ontological-oriented or rule-oriented) are facing with either flexibility or dynamicity challenges to discover and maintain the associations. This paper proposes an alternative technique of semantically constructing context-centric data objects based on service logics for logical associations, which enables an event net based on association nets adapting for the changing situations (called context-centric). A proof-of-concept implementation is carried out based on a vehicle planning scenario to validate the data construction technique. Comparing to previous work, this technique possesses advantages of flexibility and dynamicity for entity associations based on service logics.

Lightweight collaborative key establishment scheme for the Internet of Things

This work addresses new security issues in the Internet of Things (IoT). The heterogeneous nature of IoT communications and imbalance in resource capabilities between IoT entities make it challenging to provide the required end-to-end secured connections. Clarifying how existing security protocols can be adapted to fulfill these new challenges still has to be improved. A direct use of existing key exchange schemes between two IoT entities may be unfeasible unless both entities be able to run the resource consuming cryptographic primitives required to bootstrap them – thus leaving aside a whole class of resource-constrained devices. In this paper, we revisit existing end-to-end security standards and key establishment schemes and discuss their limitations considering the specific scenarios of the IoT. Later, we propose novel collaborative approaches for key establishment designed to reduce the requirements of these existing security protocols. A constrained device may delegate its heavy cryptographic load to less constrained nodes in neighborhood exploiting the spatial heterogeneity of IoT environment. We demonstrate through a performance analysis that our collaborative key establishment solution allows for a reduction in energy consumption at the constrained device by up to 80% in comparison with existing key establishment schemes.

An Internet of Things Platform for Real-World and Digital Objects

The vision of the Internet of Things (IoT) relies on the provisioning of real-world services, which are provided by smart objects that are directly related to the physical world. A structured, machine-processible approach to provision such real-world services is needed to make heterogeneous physical objects accessible on a large scale and to integrate them with the digital world. The incorporation of observation and measurement data obtained from the physical objects with the Web data, using information processing and knowledge engineering methods, enables the construction of intelligent and interconnected things. The current research mostly focuses on the communication and networking aspects between the devices that are used for sensing amd measurement of the real world objects. There is, however, relatively less effort concentrated on creating dynamic infrastructures to support integration of the data into the Web and provide unified access to such data on service and application levels. This paper presents a semantic modelling and linked data approach to create an information framework for IoT. The paper describes a platform to publish instances of the IoT related resources and entities and to link them to existing resources on the Web. The developed platform supports publication of extensible and interoperable descriptions in the form of linked data.