Low-power Wireless Personal Area Networks Research Articles

RTID: On-demand real-time data processing for IoT network

Internet of Things (IoT) solutions that can sense and actuate based on user commands have been around for a while. Modern IoT systems should be smart enough to sense their environment and actuate based on the data received. Since IoT systems accumulate a huge volume of Real-Time data, it gives rise to various challenges including Big Data. The traditional approach such as conventional 6LoWPAN (IPv6 over Low-Power Wireless Personal Area Networks), and IoT with Cloud system (CCS) does not provide full flexible and efficient data management capability. In this paper, a modern IoT system namely RTID is proposed that can overcome some of the limitations of the existing 6LoWPAN and CCS network architectures. To overcome the processing of huge volume of real-time data, RTID framework is coupled with Apache Spark. The proposed RTID framework ensures that the IoT system is not downgraded by real-time IoT data by processing historical data in micro-batches and extracting meaningful pieces of information for the IoT system to actuate upon. Moreover, the proposed RTID framework uses industrial standard REST-API and OAuth 2.0 to provide secure access to the system. This additional features provides RTID framework to overcome the issue of providing secure transmission of data between the gateway and the cloud. Furthermore, this paper also presents some of the future research scopes that can improve the overall performance of the existing IoT system.

Intrusion Prevention Scheme Against Rank Attacks for Software-Defined Low Power IoT Networks

The 6LoWPAN (IPv6 over low-power wireless personal area networks) standard enables resource-constrained devices to connect to the IPv6 network, blending an IPv6 header compression protocol. For this network technology, a new routing protocol called Routing Protocol for Low Power Lossy network (RPL) has been designed. The latter is a lightweight protocol that determines the route across the nodes based on rank values. This protocol is known to be non-resilient against Rank attacks, which aim at creating non-optimized routes for packet forwarding, hence overwhelming the constrained 6LoWPAN. With 5G, Software-Defined Networks (SDNs) have been developed to facilitate simple programmable control plane, Quality of Service (QoS) provisioning, and route configuration services for 6LoWPAN. However, there is still a lack of optimization mechanisms to protect 6LoWPAN against Rank attacks in SDN-based deployment. To this end, in this paper, a Reinforcement-Learning (RL) agent is leveraged to assist and complement an SDN controller in achieving cost-efficient route optimization, and QoS provisioning packet forwarding to prevent rank attacks. Experimental results confirm that our approach effectively prevents Rank attacks while providing an adequate delay and radio duty cycle. Meanwhile, it maximizes the packet delivery ratio, facilitating practical implementations in software-defined Low Power Internet of Things (IoT) networks.

A secure remote user authentication scheme for 6LoWPAN-based Internet of Things.

One of the significant challenges in the Internet of Things (IoT) is the provisioning of guaranteed security and privacy, considering the fact that IoT devices are resource-limited. Oftentimes, in IoT applications, remote users need to obtain real-time data, with guaranteed security and privacy, from resource-limited network nodes through the public Internet. For this purpose, the users need to establish a secure link with the network nodes. Though the IPv6 over low-power wireless personal area networks (6LoWPAN) adaptation layer standard offers IPv6 compatibility for resource-limited wireless networks, the fundamental 6LoWPAN structure ignores security and privacy characteristics. Thus, there is a pressing need to design a resource-efficient authenticated key exchange (AKE) scheme for ensuring secure communication in 6LoWPAN-based resource-limited networks. This paper proposes a resource-efficient secure remote user authentication scheme for 6LoWPAN-based IoT networks, called SRUA-IoT. SRUA-IoT achieves the authentication of remote users and enables the users and network entities to establish private session keys between themselves for indecipherable communication. To this end, SRUA-IoT uses a secure hash algorithm, exclusive-OR operation, and symmetric encryption primitive. We prove through informal security analysis that SRUA-IoT is secured against a variety of malicious attacks. We also prove the security strength of SRUA-IoT through formal security analysis conducted by employing the random oracle model. Additionally, we prove through Scyther-based validation that SRUA-IoT is resilient against various attacks. Likewise, we demonstrate that SRUA-IoT reduces the computational cost of the nodes and communication overheads of the network.

Optimal proactive monitor placement & scheduling for IoT networks

This work is fulfilled in the context of the optimized monitoring of Internet of Things (IoT) networks. IoT networks are faulty; Things are resource-constrained in terms of energy and computational capabilities; they are also connected via lossy links. For IoT systems performing a critical mission, it is crucial to ensure connectivity, availability, and network reliability, which requires proactive network monitoring. The idea is to oversee the network state and functioning of the nodes and links; to ensure the early detection of faults and decrease node-unreachability times. It is imperative to minimize the resulting monitoring energy consumption to allow the IoT network to perform its functions. Furthermore, to realize the integration of the monitoring mechanism with IoT services, this latter should work in tandem with the IoT standardized protocols, especially the IPv6 for Low-power Wireless Personal Area Networks (6LoWPAN) and the Routing Protocol for Low-power and lossy networks (RPL). In this paper, an optimized, proactive, passive monitoring system is proposed for IoT networks. The proposition ensures the optimal placement of monitoring nodes (monitors). Leveraging the graph built by RPL for routing (the DODAG), minimal sets of monitors are optimally placed to cover a given domain. The monitoring activity is optimally scheduled between several subsets of nodes to prolong longevity while minimizing the energy consumption for monitoring, communication, and state transitions. Our proposition provides the exact solution to the defined monitoring placement and scheduling problem via a Binary Integer Program. The model serves as a benchmark for the performance evaluation of contemporary models. Experimentation is designed using network instances of different topologies. Results demonstrate the proposed model’s effectiveness in realizing full monitoring coverage with minimum energy consumption and communication overhead and a balanced distributed monitoring role.

Securing 6LoWPAN Neighbor Discovery

The IEEE 802.15.4-based 6LoWPAN is a de facto standard platform for a variety of Internet-of-Things applications. To bootstrap the low-power wireless personal area Network (LoWPAN), each device must perform the 6LoWPAN neighbor discovery (6LoWPAN-ND) address registration so that a unique IPv6 address can be allocated to each device. Without a suitable security mechanism, the 6LoWPAN-ND is vulnerable to various security attacks including the compromised node attack. Although a few security mechanisms have been proposed, they are not satisfactory as they depend on the IEEE 802.15.4 hop-by-hop security without specifying how to share the hop-by-hop keys and without considering the compromised node attack. As previous studies for securing 6LoWPAN-ND address registration have security weaknesses, a new security mechanism resilient to compromised node attack, and with a key management system for the IEEE 802.15.4 hop-by-hop security embedded in its design, is proposed and analyzed in this article. We also show that the proposed security mechanism is compatible with the Internet engineering task force (IETF) standard and is more efficient than the mechanism proposed in IETF 6lo WG.

Anonymizing communication flow identifiers in the Internet of Things

We tackle the problem of privacy breaching in IPv6 over Low-Power Wireless Personal Area Networks (6LoWPANs) where an attacker may be able to identify the communicating entities. We propose a solution based on: (i) anonymizing both IP and MAC addresses, as well as port number at the source host, using a random pseudonyming scheme, and (ii) anonymizing the IP address and port number of the destination host, using a Tor-like network. We analyzed the effect of the Tor entry node location on the performance of our solution in three different scenarios: the Tor entry node is located (i) inside the 6LoWPAN, (ii) at the IPv6 Low-power Border Router (6LBR), or (iii) completely outside the 6LoWPAN. Using Cooja simulator, we showed that our solution outperforms state-of-the-art solutions by making it more difficult to identify communication flows by improving the anonymity and unlinkability of the communicating entities without significantly affecting energy consumption, communication delay, and network bandwidth.

A secure routing protocol for low power and lossy networks based 6LoWPAN networks to mitigate DIS flooding attacks

Routing protocols for low-power and lossy networks (RPL) is considered as one of the significant information forwarding routing protocols for IPV6-based low-power wireless personal area networks (6LoWPAN). However, RPL suffers in lack of an appropriate load balancing mechanism and malicious node attack whenever it communicates the DODAG information solicitation (DIS) messages to join in the network. Moreover, in the existing system, the uneven load leads to packet losses, delay, consumes more power, and degrades the lifespan of the network. In order to avoid the drawbacks this research work proposes a novel adaptive load balancing and route discovery mechanism to eradicate the DIS flooding attacks and improve the network lifespan with the aid of enhanced secure RPL routing protocol. This proposed secure RPL routing protocol distributes the load between the several modes efficiently and mitigates the DIS flooding attack in the network. The proposed approach is implemented using Cooja platform simulator with static and dynamic network scenarios. To compare the performance of the proposed system, the standard RPL protocol and RPL without any security are used. The experimental results indicate that the proposed scheme outperforms the other routing protocol by eradicating the DIS flooding attacks and load distribution over the network. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme could decrease the average packet loss ratio, end-to-end delay, energy consumption, control overheads, and enhance packet delivery, throughput, and network lifespan.

The impact of copycat attack on RPL based 6LoWPAN networks in Internet of Things

IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) is the standard network layer protocol for achieving efficient routing in IPv6 over Low-Power Wireless Personal Area Networks (6LoWPAN). Resource-constrained and non-tamper resistant nature of smart sensor nodes makes RPL protocol susceptible to different threats. An attacker may use insider or outsider attack strategy to perform Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks against RPL based networks. Security and Privacy risks associated with RPL protocol may limit its global adoption and worldwide acceptance. A proper investigation of RPL specific attacks and their impacts on an underlying network needs to be done. In this paper, we present and investigate one of the catastrophic attacks named as a copycat attack, a type of replay based DoS attack against the RPL protocol. An in-depth experimental study for analyzing the impacts of the copycat attack on RPL has been done. The experimental results show that the copycat attack can significantly degrade network performance in terms of packet delivery ratio, average end-to-end delay, and average power consumption. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper that extensively studies the impact of RPL specific replay mechanism based DoS attack on 6LoWPAN networks.

Load-Balancing Algorithm for Multiple Gateways in Fog-Based Internet of Things

This article investigates the performance of multicriteria-based load-balancing scheme among gateways in fog-assisted Internet of Things (IoT). We employ a queueing model of the IoT system to calculate the latency of data streams from the IoT devices to the applications. However, a gateway node may easily become congested since all the traffic to IP networks are directed toward the gateway. A congested point can affect system performance and may cause reliability problems in the system. Thus, we employ multiple gateways to alleviate the performance degradation of the network, along with a multicriteria decision-making (MCDM)-based load-balancing policy among the gateways to achieve a global load fairness. The proposed model is evaluated in single-hop IPv6 over low-power wireless personal area networks (6LoWPANs). The evaluation results show the effectiveness of the proposed load-balancing model in providing fast and reliable responses to user queries.

6LE-SDN: An Edge-Based Software-Defined Network for Internet of Things

IPv6 over low-power wireless personal area network (6LoWPAN) has been widely used for large-scale sensing and actuating purposes in the Internet of Things (IoT). Though promising, many challenges, such as high latency, heterogeneity, and packet loss persist. To mitigate these challenges, the software-defined network (SDN) technique can be hybridized with existing IoT structures that can address many of them. In this article, we propose an approach—edge-based 6LoWPAN-SDN (6LE-SDN) architecture, which can improve the system limitations mentioned. It uses an edge-based computational capability to improve the network performance over 6LoWPAN. To reduce heterogeneity, we develop a hybrid-edge switch that helps to enable communication among 6LoWPAN and SDN entities. For efficient communication between different devices, a new protocol—edge-based 6LoWPAN-SDN protocol (6LE-SDNP) is proposed, which is capable of ensuring optimal routing of the packet for efficient communication among the devices. We use the SDN-based edge controller for reducing the latency of the network apart from improving the interoperability feature. The testbed evaluation of the proposed solution indicates satisfactory performance in terms of reducing latency by 60% and network overhead by 91%. The 6LE-SDN network also succeeded in reducing the average round trip time (RTT) by 31% and the packet loss by 70% as compared to that of the traditional 6LoWPAN-based IoT.

Optimized mobility management for RPL/6LoWPAN based IoT network architecture using the firefly algorithm

RPL (Routing Protocol for low-power and Lossy Networks) is a new attractive model that secures the networks from different routing risks. The dynamic environment and limited resources motivated the research towards identifying a stable, reliable, energy efficient, and scalable routing design. IPv6 over low-power Wireless Personal Area Network (6LoWPAN) is a standard RPL IPv6 routing protocol that provides Low power and Lossy Networks (LLNs) interoperability. In this research work, an energy efficient and optimization-based mobility management framework in RPL routing protocol was proposed (mRPL-based firefly optimization algorithm) to achieve a reliable and stable protocol. From the results, it can be inferred that the proposed system (mRPL+firefly optimizer) showed better performance with regard to the Packet_Delivery_Ratio (PDR), number of hops, End_To_End delay and power consumption when compared to existing systems: RPL, mRPL, mRPL+PSO, and mRPL+ACO. The experimental outcome showed that the proposed system improved the PDR on an average of 2.31% in comparison with existing systems.

CoSec-RPL: detection of copycat attacks in RPL based 6LoWPANs using outlier analysis

The IPv6 routing protocol for low-power and lossy networks (RPL) is the standard routing protocol for IPv6 based low-power wireless personal area networks (6LoWPANs). In RPL protocol, DODAG information object (DIO) messages are used to disseminate routing information to other nodes in the network. A malicious node may eavesdrop DIO messages of its neighbor nodes and later replay the captured DIO many times with fixed intervals. In this paper, we present and investigate one of the severe attacks named as a non-spoofed copycat attack, a type of replay based DoS attack against RPL protocol. It is shown that the non-spoofed copycat attack increases the average end-to-end delay (AE2ED) and packet delivery ratio of the network. Thus, to address this problem, an intrusion detection system (IDS) named CoSec-RPL is proposed in this paper. The attack detection logic of CoSec-RPL is primarily based on the idea of outlier detection (OD). CoSec-RPL significantly mitigates the effects of the non-spoofed copycat attack on the network's performance. The effectiveness of the proposed IDS is compared with the standard RPL protocol. The experimental results indicate that CoSec-RPL detects and mitigates non-spoofed copycat attack efficiently in both static and mobile network scenarios without adding any significant overhead to the nodes. To the best of our knowledge, CoSec-RPL is the first RPL specific IDS that utilizes OD for intrusion detection in 6LoWPANs.

Enhancing Energy Saving in Smart Farming through Aggregation and Partition Aware IoT Routing Protocol.

Internet of things (IoT) for precision agriculture or Smart Farming (SF) is an emerging area of application. It consists essentially of deploying wireless sensor networks (WSNs), composed of IP-enabled sensor nodes, in a partitioned farmland area. When the surface, diversity, and complexity of the farm increases, the number of sensing nodes increases, generating heavy exchange of data and messages, and thus leading to network congestion, radio interference, and high energy consumption. In this work, we propose a novel routing algorithm extending the well known IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low power and Lossy Networks (RPL), the standard routing protocol used for IPv6 over Low-Power Wireless Personal Area Networks (6LoWPAN). It is referred to as the Partition Aware-RPL (PA-RPL) and improves the performance of the standard RPL. In contrast to RPL, the proposed technique builds a routing topology enabling efficient in-network data aggregation, hence dramatically reducing data traffic through the network. Performance analysis of a typical/realistic precision agriculture case, considering the potato pest prevention from the well-known late blight disease, shows that PA-RPL improves energy saving up to compared to standard RPL.

Noncooperative Gaming for Energy-Efficient Congestion Control in 6LoWPAN

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) provide a significant contribution to the advancement of the Internet of Things (IoT) as it can transfer massive volume of data to the Internet with the help of low-power and low-cost self-operating sensing devices. This article deals with the congestion problem which is one of the critical issues in IPV6 over low-power and lossy wireless personal area network (6LoWPAN)-based network as it causes significant packet loss that leads to degraded throughput and extra energy consumption. We propose a congestion control mechanism for 6LoWPAN by using the noncooperative game theory. The proposed method named noncooperative gaming for energy-efficient congestion control (NGECC) determines the optimal data transfer rate of all the source nodes (leaf nodes) to avoid congestion at the intermediate nodes. NGECC considers both the channel occupation and the buffer overflow as the main factors of the packet loss in the network. For the simulation of the NGECC method, we use Contiki OS and Cooja simulator, which operates based on the IEEE 802.15.4 standard and implements the 6LoWPAN protocol stack. The performance of NGECC has been evaluated by comparing it with the analytical results, the default routing protocol for low-power and lossy network functioning, and two other existing methods. The simulation results show that the NGECC outperforms the existing methods in terms of sending rate of data packets, packet delivery ratio, throughput, weighted fairness index, energy consumption, and delay.

Green content communications in 6LoWPAN

As a low-rate and low-power network, IPv6 over low-power wireless personal area network (6LoWPAN) wireless sensor network (WSN) suffers from considerable data communication latency and rapid energy depletion which data transmission mainly accounts for. Therefore, it is significant to reduce data communication latency and balance the energy consumption among sensor nodes to avoid the situation that a sensor node transmits a large content. To achieve these two objectives, the authors are motivated to extend the k -anycast communication model to 6LoWPAN WSN so that the different parts of a large content can be provided by multiple optimal k -anycast members in parallel. In this way, content communication latency can be reduced and energy consumption caused by content transmission can be shared by these members. This proposal is evaluated and the data results show that this proposal effectively reduces the content communication latency and achieves the energy consumption balance.

Design of a new wireless data acquisition system for civil structural monitoring

Traditional civil structure wired monitoring systems suffer complicated wiring, high cost, poor flexibility, and available wireless sensors network (WSN)-based wireless monitoring systems are inconvenient to access the internet. In this paper, based on the 6LoWPAN means: IPv6 low-power wireless personal area network WSN, a new wireless data acquisition system is proposed for structural monitoring applications, which consists of data acquisition nodes, a border node and a remote monitoring centre. The hardware design of the wireless data acquisition system is based on the CC2538 wireless transceiver, and inertial sensors and temperature and humidity sensors are integrated. Based on the Contiki-3.0 embedded operating system, the embedded application software of 6LoWPAN data acquisition nodes and border router nodes are designed. The remote monitoring centre of structural monitoring system is developed using the graphical user interface development environment (GUIDE) tool of the MATLAB software. Experimental testing results show that the system is stable and reliable and can realise interconnection between 6LoWPAN network and traditional IPv4 network. Moreover, the network performance is satisfactory. Therefore, the proposed wireless structural monitoring system has a good practical engineering application value.

Design of a new wireless data acquisition system for civil structural monitoring

Traditional civil structure wired monitoring systems suffer complicated wiring, high cost, poor flexibility, and available wireless sensors network (WSN)-based wireless monitoring systems are inconvenient to access the internet. In this paper, based on the 6LoWPAN means: IPv6 low-power wireless personal area network WSN, a new wireless data acquisition system is proposed for structural monitoring applications, which consists of data acquisition nodes, a border node and a remote monitoring centre. The hardware design of the wireless data acquisition system is based on the CC2538 wireless transceiver, and inertial sensors and temperature and humidity sensors are integrated. Based on the Contiki-3.0 embedded operating system, the embedded application software of 6LoWPAN data acquisition nodes and border router nodes are designed. The remote monitoring centre of structural monitoring system is developed using the graphical user interface development environment (GUIDE) tool of the MATLAB software. Experimental testing results show that the system is stable and reliable and can realise interconnection between 6LoWPAN network and traditional IPv4 network. Moreover, the network performance is satisfactory. Therefore, the proposed wireless structural monitoring system has a good practical engineering application value.

A Software-Defined Management System for IP-Enabled WSNs

Software-defined networking (SDN) offers potential pathways to overcome the management complexity of the Internet of Things (IoT). Previous studies have often been limited to software simulations or general proposals only. In this article, we design and evaluate an SDN-based management system for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) using IPv6 over low-power wireless personal area networks (6LoWPAN). The framework is described in detail covering different data-, control-, and application-plane implementations, and includes a novel addressing scheme and packet format. It also uses a centralized routing protocol, located at the SDN controller, based on the shortest path algorithm. We compare our approach with the routing protocol for low-power and lossy networks (RPL), which uses a distributed routing protocol. Hardware tests were carried out in a dynamic environment, with multiple sources of interference for different payload sizes to evaluate the impacts and practicality of SDN in WSNs. The performance comparison shows that the proposed SDN management system for IP-enabled WSNs using a centralized routing protocol outperforms the RPL protocol in terms of round-trip time, jitter, memory consumption, and packet loss rate (PLR), despite the control overhead introduced.

Application research on Interner access of smart home network based on 6LoWPAN

With the rapid development of Internet of things technology and the increasing diversity and number of devices connected to home Network, the technology of 6LoWPAN (IPv6 over low-power Wireless Personal Area Network) has been widely used in smart home Network. According to the actual needs of users, it will be of more practical significance to connect the smart home network to the Internet (IPv4) so that users can obtain the information in the home network instantly and realize remote control through the mobile application platform.Based on 6 lowpan overall design scheme of smart home network access to the Internet, including the system gateway hardware and software design, and combining the transition technology analysis of the 6 lowpan network access of the Internet technology difficulty, according to the current technical background, we have analyzed based on 6 lowpan technology of smart home network to access the Internet in the next generation Internet development foreground and research significance.

Enabling Online Quantitative Security Analysis in 6LoWPAN Networks

IPv6 over low-power wireless personal area networks (6LoWPANs) are comprised of resource-constrained nodes equipped with sensing capabilities that communicate with each other and are linked to the Internet contributing to the Internet of Things (IoT). Because of their constraints, these objects are exposed to attacks from inside the 6LoWPANs. Typically, intrusion detection systems (IDSs), are employed to identify such attacks. However, the alarms generated by IDSs provide no information about the severity of the attacks or to which extent the attacks affect the sensor data routed by the nodes. To address these issues, this paper proposes the node security quantification (NSQ), a probabilistic model which makes it possible to quantitatively assess, in an online manner, the security status of the constrained nodes and the sensor data users consume. The security awareness capability provided by this model can support the security-related decision-making process of both network administrators and users. The obtained simulation results demonstrate that NSQ quantifies node and data security with high accuracy, while keeping performance and energy overhead very low.