IoT Access Research Articles

Protocol stack virtualization support in IoT

AbstractMassive IoT scenarios involve a huge number of devices where deployment, provisioning, and configuration are carried out without any human intervention. Well‐known mechanisms of resource discovery and management attempt to enable some of this functionality typically associated with zero‐configuration schemes. In this article, we explore the novel use of protocol stack virtualization (PSV) to provide flexibility in the deployment and management of constrained sensors, actuators, and controllers in massive IoT access networks. Specifically, these devices exhibit low power consumption that limits processor computational capabilities and transmission rates that affect, among other things, deployment and maintenance. In this scenario, we present and analyze an end‐to‐end PSV massive IoT solution. We describe the different building blocks, their interaction, and what role they play as part of the overall mechanism. Additionally, we focus on the performance of the solution by looking at how network impairments, like packet loss and latency, affect deployment of the virtualized protocol stacks.

Radio Coverage and Device Capacity Dimensioning Methodologies for IoT LoRaWAN and NB-IoT Deployments in Urban Environments

This paper focuses on the study of IoT network deployments, in both unlicensed and licensed bands, considering LoRaWAN and NB-IoT standards, respectively. The objective is to develop a comprehensive and detailed network planning and coverage dimensioning methodology for assessing key metrics related to the achieved throughput and capacity for specific requirements in order to identify tradeoffs and key issues that are related to the applicability of IoT access technologies for representative use case types. This paper will provide a concise overview of key characteristics of IoT representative IoT access network standards that are considered for being deployed in unlicensed and licensed bands and will present a methodology for modeling the characteristics of both access network technologies in order to assess their coverage and capacity considering different parameters.

Novel Solutions to NOMA-Based Modern Random Access for 6G-Enabled IoT

Modern random access avoids scheduling overheads and greatly improves the transmission efficiency of small packets. The major challenge is the random collision, and slotted ALOHA (SA)-based methods were proposed to cancel collisions via the receiving time slot diversity. Based on power-domain multiple access (PDMA), some nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA) SA methods increased the active user number. This article refines PDMA-based methods at the first step, including: 1) the existing NOMA irregular repetition SA is enhanced and 2) NOMA coded SA is proposed. However, PDMA-based methods require accurate sensing and power control to separate multiple users in the power domain, which is not friendly to low-cost devices. This article proposes a NOMA SA method named spreading SA (SSA), which does not rely on any sensing or power control. Both physical and medium access control layers are considered, and the outage model, instead of the collision model, is proposed to be used for NOMA SA. SSA uses random nonorthogonal code spreading to reduce collisions as a relatively large number of codes can be employed. Compared with the power domain, the code domain gains a much higher degree of freedom. It can be utilized without any coordination with the help of blind detection technologies. Moreover, collision resolution diversity SSA (CRDSSA) is proposed to further improve the user loading. The simulation results validate the analysis and show that the proposed SSA-based methods support a higher user loading and much higher flexibility than existing NOMA SA works in most cases.

Towards protocol stack virtualization in massive IoT deployments

Massive IoT scenarios involve a huge number of devices where deployment, provisioning and configuration are carried out without any human intervention. Well-known mechanisms of resource discovery and management attempt to enable some of this functionality typically associated with zero-configuration schemes. In this paper we explore the novel use of Protocol Stack Virtualization (PSV) to provide flexibility in the deployment and management of constrained sensors, actuators and controllers in massive IoT access networks. Specifically, these devices exhibit low power consumption that limits processor computational capabilities and transmission rates that affect, among other things, deployment and maintenance. In this scenario, we present and analyze an end-to-end PSV massive IoT solution. We describe the different building blocks, their interaction and what role they play as part of the overall mechanism. Additionally, we focus on the performance of the solution by looking at how network impairments, like packet loss and latency, affect deployment of the virtualized protocol stacks.

Model of the IoT access network based on the cell structure

The article analyzes the problems of implementation access networks in high-density communication networks, proposes a method for assessing the achievable data transfer rate, taking into account the mutual influences of network nodes, as well as a method for constructing the logical structure of the network. The possibility of constructing a network model in the form of a cell structure for which the methods of percolation theory are applicable is considered. The use of these methods makes it possible to obtain a structure with specified properties, which makes it possible to ensure the required quality of network functioning

Massive IoT Access With NOMA in 5G Networks and Beyond Using Online Competitiveness and Learning

This paper studies the problem of online user grouping, scheduling and power allocation in beyond 5G cellular-based Internet of things networks. Due to the massive number of devices trying to be granted to the network, non-orthogonal multiple access method is adopted in order to accommodate multiple devices in the same radio resource block. Different from most previous works, the objective is to maximize the number of served devices while allocating their transmission powers such that their real-time requirements as well as their limited operating energy are respected. First, we formulate the general problem as a mixed integer non-linear program (MINLP) that can be transformed easily to MILP for some special cases. Second, we study its computational complexity by characterizing the NP-hardness of different special cases. Then, by dividing the problem into multiple NOMA grouping and scheduling subproblems, efficient online competitive algorithms are proposed. Further, we show how to use these online algorithms and combine their solutions in a reinforcement learning setting to obtain the power allocation and hence the global solution to the problem. Our analysis are supplemented by simulation results to illustrate the performance of the proposed algorithms with comparison to optimal and state-of-the-art methods.

Blockchain-Based IoT Access Control System: Towards Security, Lightweight, and Cross-Domain

Most IoT devices cannot afford to be a blockchain node due to the high computation and storage loads. Thus, the blockchain is usually deployed on one delegate node, e.g., the edge device or cloud, which may encounters three drawbacks: (1) The delegate node becomes the single failure point when the number of delegate notes are limited. (2) The delegate node replicating the blockchain data can lead to privacy information leak. (3) The delegate node is vulnerable to the Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. To tackle these drawbacks, we consider to minimize the redundant of blockchain to make the IoT devices as the specialized blockchain nodes. In this paper, we integrate a permissioned blockchain (HLF), an attribute-based access control (ABAC) and an identity-based signature (IBS) to build a security, lightweight, and cross-domain blockchain-based IoT access control system. Specifically, we divided the IoT system into different function domains, named IoT domains. Then, we establish a local blockchain ledger for each IoT domain to enable more IoT devices as blockchain nodes. The local blockchain ledger records the IoT domain entities’ attributes, policy files’ digests, and access decisions. Meanwhile, we use the channel technology of HLF to realize cross-domain access and use the IBS to filter the legal access requests for each IoT domain to prevent DDoS attacks. We also design a policy decision point (PDP) selection algorithm that select multiple IoT devices (blockchain nodes) to achieve the real-time distributed policy decisions (off-chain). Finally, we implement and evaluate the proposed system to demonstrate its practicality.

Blockchain for IoT Access Control, Security and Privacy: A Review

In modern era, blockchain technology is gaining a major attention among researchers and scientists for different scopes such as access control, data security, privacy and decentralization of the wireless networks. Though blockchain offers several benefits like peer to peer technology, anonymity, increased capacity, better security; the main cause behind being the first choice is its immutable structure. To abolish the role of the reliable third-party within interconnected networks, blockchain can be used as a key technology because of its distributed nature. Hyperledger fabric, IBM Blockchain, Ethereum, Ripple, R3 Corda, multichain are the most prominent blockchain platforms available for implementation. Aforementioned review paper describes and analyzes the existing blockchain based security techniques pertaining to IoT access control, vehicular ad hoc networks, healthcare, and supply chain. The comprehensive survey of use cases of blockchain will serve as a state-of-the-art for the researchers to carry out cutting edge research work in the pursuance of blockchain technology in various fields.

Towards Fine-Grained Access Control in Enterprise-Scale Internet-of-Things

Scalable, fine-grained access control for Internet-of-Things is needed in enterprise environments, where tens of thousands of users need to access smart objects which have a similar or larger order of magnitude. Existing solutions offer all-or-nothing access, or require all access to go through a cloud backend, greatly impeding access granularity, robustness and scale. In this paper, we propose Heracles, an IoT access control system which achieves robust, fine-grained access control and responsive execution at enterprise scale. Heracles adopts a capability-based approach using secure, unforgeable tokens that describe the authorizations of users, to either individuals or collections of objects in single or bulk operations. It has a 3-tier architecture to provide centralized policy and distributed execution desired in enterprise environments. Extensive analysis and performance evaluation on a testbed prove that Heracles achieves fine-grained access control and responsive execution at enterprise scale. Compared with systems using access control list, Heracles eliminates or reduces by 10x-100x the updating overhead under frequent changes of subject memberships and policies. Besides, Heracles achieves responsive execution: it takes 0.57 second to access 18 objects which are scattered 1-9 hops away, and execution on a 1-hop or 2-hop object needs only 0.07 or 0.13 second respectively.

Attribute-Based Access Control Using Smart Contracts for the Internet of Things

Abstract Access control is one of the most important security concerns, which is critical in resource and information protection over IoT devices. This paper proposes a new scheme that combines attribute-based access control (ABAC) model with blockchain technology and uses smart contracts for access control judgment. This scheme can realize dynamic, distributed and reliable access control in the open IoT environment. The IoT access control system based on this scheme consists of five functional modules. The information registration point registers information for each device that joins the system. Policy enforcement point (PEP) is responsible for managing agent-devices in the system and processing original access requests from access subjects. Policy decision point (PDP) makes access control right decision through smart contracts. Policy administration point (PAP) is used to manage smart contract information. Policy information point (PIP) is used to manage key attribute information of devices used for access control judgment. The scheme also includes three types of smart contracts, one management contract (MC) is used to manage other contracts in the system, one policy decision contract (PDC) is responsible for obtaining attribute information from PIP and making final access control right decision, and a large number of policy contracts (PCs) which composed of a public policy contract (PPC) and a large number of exclusive policy contracts (EPCs). These PCs are used to implement specific attribute-based access control policies. To demonstrate the application of the scheme, we simulated a scenario of access control in a home IoT environment and verified the feasibility of access control decisions using our proposed scheme through three experiments.

ControlChain: A new stage on the IoT access control authorization

SummaryThe IoT is changing the way we interact with the world. Very soon, almost all of our daily tasks will be made through self intelligent systems embedded in devices scattered all around us. Their mission is to turn our cities, transportation systems, buildings, homes, and bodies in smart environments. These environments will bring us more comfort, improve our performance, increase our profits, and take away time‐consuming tasks. However, besides its great benefits, the IoT is also a big source of concerns, mainly because a good part of its devices will handle private and confidential information. Recently, cases of successful IoT invasions only worsen this scenario and show us that the today's adopted access control systems need to be replaced by more efficiently and secure ones. To overcome these access control problems, in this work, we present the ControlChain. The ControlChain is an access control authorization architecture that is heavily based on Blockchain technology. We also demonstrate the viability of the ControlChain through the E‐ControlChain, a proof‐of‐concept developed to run over the Ethereum network. Our proposals follows the IoT tendency requirements and are user‐transparent, user‐friendly, fully decentralized, scalable, fault tolerant, and compatible with a wide range of today's access control models already used in the IoT. Finally, we also make a cost and a performance analysis of E‐ControlChain, using a Raspberry Pi as an IoT device.

Social-Feature Enabled Communications Among Devices Toward the Smart IoT Community

Future IoT is expected to achieve ubiquitous access and information exchange on a global scale. Facing the massive IoT access and spectrum shortage problems, centralized control becomes prohibitively complicated. But with the increasing capability of IoT devices in communications and computing, IoT will gradually evolve to be highly autonomous, yield social features in IoT networking, and eventually form the smart IoT community. Motivated by the tendency of socialization over IoT, this article first presents an overview and discussions on social features affecting connections among IoT devices. Then, we propose studies to characterize the highly-varying social features by using the queuing model and asymptotic analysis framework. With emphases on social features including credit and reputation, we show how to fit transmissions between IoT devices to the framework for socially-aware optimization. Finally, this article shares opinions about open problems and future topics on socially-aware design toward the smart IoT community.

SHIOT: A novel SDN-based framework for the heterogeneous Internet of Things

A new measurable and quantifiable world is created by the Internet of Things. However, the variety of IoT components, i.e., devices, access technologies and applications, which are deployed on the same core infrastructure with a common network policy have led to an unexpected issue of heterogeneity. Such issue directly dismisses the interoperability in the IoT, and hence, significantly decreasing the QoS of a given IoT service. In this paper, we develop a SDN-based framework, called SHIOT to address the above challenge. SHIOT relies on the ontology for examining the end-user requests and applies a SDN controller to classify flow scheduling over the task level. We also utilize the Lagrange relaxation theory to optimize the routing mechanism. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SHIOT is able to support stressed networks and offers a significant advantage over the traditional framework that is integrated without SDN.

Challenges and Opportunities in Applying Semantics to Improve Access Control in the Field of Internet of Things

The increased number of IoT devices results in continuously generated massive amounts of raw data. Parts of this data are private and highly sensitive as they reflect owner’s behavior, obligations, habits, and preferences. In this paper, we point out that flexible and comprehensive access control policies are “a must” in the IoT domain. The Semantic Web technologies can address many of the challenges that the IoT access control is facing with today. Therefore, we analyze the current state of the art in this area and identify the challenges and opportunities for improved access control in a semantically enriched IoT environment. Applying semantics to IoT access control opens a lot of opportunities, such as semantic inference and reasoning, easy data sharing, data trading, new approaches to authentication, security policies based on a natural language and enhances the interoperability using a common ontology.

Network Throughput Optimization for Random Access Narrowband Cognitive Radio Internet of Things (NB-CR-IoT)

Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) is a new technology being implemented into the Long-Term Evolution (LTE) standards to support machine-to-machine communications. Applications of IoT are expected to rapidly increase and to expand into many sectors. Increased number of IoT devices trying to access the medium with typically small data packets will overwhelm the network. Cognitive radios coupled with random access strategies can help alleviate excessive collisions in the network by many IoT access attempts. On the other hand, most IoT devices do not have hardware capabilities to perform sophisticated spectrum sensing methods over long durations. Therefore, it is important to reduce the spectrum sensing overhead while maximizing the NB-IoT network level throughput. In this paper, we derive a unique set of optimal sensing parameters which achieve the maximum throughput of a narrowband cognitive radio IoT (NB-CR-IoT) network. We show that accurate sensing from a single device perspective is not always the best solution for maximizing the throughput in an NB-CR-IoT network.

셀룰라 사물인터넷을 위한 비승인 기반 비직교 다중접속 기술

셀룰라 사물인터넷을 위한 비승인 기반 비직교 다중접속 기술

Energy Efficient Resource Allocation in Machine-to-Machine Communications With Multiple Access and Energy Harvesting for IoT

This paper studies energy efficient resource allocation for a machine-to-machine (M2M) enabled cellular network with non-linear energy harvesting, especially focusing on two different multiple access strategies, namely non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) and time division multiple access (TDMA). Our goal is to minimize the total energy consumption of the network via joint power control and time allocation while taking into account circuit power consumption. For both NOMA and TDMA strategies, we show that it is optimal for each machine type communication device (MTCD) to transmit with the minimum throughput, and the energy consumption of each MTCD is a convex function with respect to the allocated transmission time. Based on the derived optimal conditions for the transmission power of MTCDs, we transform the original optimization problem for NOMA to an equivalent problem which can be solved suboptimally via an iterative power control and time allocation algorithm. Through an appropriate variable transformation, we also transform the original optimization problem for TDMA to an equivalent tractable problem, which can be iteratively solved. Numerical results verify the theoretical findings and demonstrate that NOMA consumes less total energy than TDMA at low circuit power regime of MTCDs, while at high circuit power regime of MTCDs TDMA achieves better network energy efficiency than NOMA.

Robust Relay in Narrow-Band Communications for Ubiquitous IoT Access

We propose a robust wireless relay scheme in narrow-band communications for IoT access, which matches the typical features of IoT often carrying relatively low data rate with limited bandwidth. This framework is towards offering robustness in QoS guarantees with emphases on security and/or reliability, and we use the security-assured network as the typical scenario. In particular, we consider a dual-hop relay network including a transmitter, a receiver, an amplify-and-forward (AF) untrusted relay, and a jamming node. The jamming node is treated as a helper. Specifically, the jammer broadcasts artificial noise (AN), which in fact pollutes both the untrusted relay and the destination node’s signals. However, we show that such AN can be effectively mitigated after the destination node obtains the forwarded signal from the relay, while the untrusted relay node cannot do so. The core idea for robustness assurance is to exploit higher signal dimensions at the receiver over the untrusted relay node. Simulations and analyses are also conducted to demonstrate that our proposed scheme can make the performance at the untrusted relay an interference-limited manner while completely removing the interferences at the receiver, therefore corroborating our claim in robustness in terms of security and reliability.