Internet Of Things Reference Architecture Research Articles

A Domain-Specific Language for Modeling IoT System Architectures That Support Monitoring

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a technological paradigm involved in a diversity of domains with favorable impacts on people’s daily lives and the development of industry and cities. Nowadays, one of the most critical challenges is developing software for IoT systems since the traditional Software Engineering methodologies and tools are unproductive in the face of the complex requirements resulting from the highly distributed, heterogeneous, and dynamic scenarios in which these systems operate. Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) emerges as an appropriate approach to abstract the complexity of IoT systems. However, there are no domain-specific languages (DSLs) aligned to standardized reference architectures for IoT. Furthermore, existing DSLs have an incomplete language to represent the IoT entities that may be needed at the edge, fog, and cloud layers to monitor IoT environments. Therefore, this paper proposes a domain-specific language named Monitor-IoT, which supports developers in designing multi-layer monitoring architectures for IoT systems with high abstraction, expressiveness, and flexibility. Monitor-IoT consists of a high-level visual modeling language and a metamodel aligned with the ISO/IEC 30141:2018 reference architecture. In addition, it provides a language capable of modeling architectures with a wide variety of digital entities and dataflows (synchronous and asynchronous) between them across the edge, fog, and cloud layers to support the monitoring of a diversity of IoT scenarios. The empirical evaluation of Monitor-IoT through the application of an experiment, which contemplates the use of the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), demonstrates the intention of the participants to use this tool in the future since they consider it easy to use and useful.

IoT systems in the process of multidisciplinary training of personnel for the digital economy and their design

In the context of digitalization of the most knowledge-intensive sectors of the domestic economy, the development of an industrial training system in the field of electronic instrumentation is of great importance. The key areas of its development with the use of information and communication technologies include the development and improvement of the technological basis for training and retraining of personnel in engineering educational programs. One of the elements of this basis is the service of multi-user remote access via the internet to a high-tech experimental equipment laboratory as a service based on internet of things (IoT) systems. Within the framework of this service, an urgent problem is to increase the functional saturation of automated stands/installations, which is currently characterized by a paucity of scientific research. The purpose of the research is to expand the areas of experimental research carried out in the mode of multiuser remote access based on specialized IoT systems. As a result, a method of multidisciplinary application of specialized IoT systems was developed. This consists of the technical implementation of possibilities for additional research: research into technologies underlying both multi-user distributed measuring and control systems and IoT systems in general; research into technologies used in their end-to-end computer-aided design; research into joint interaction of several geographically distributed automated stands/installations, implemented on the basis of a four level IoT reference architecture. A methodology for the design of multi-user distributed measuring and control systems as specialized IoT systems has also been developed, focused on solving multidisciplinary research problems in an interactive dialogue mode based on single sample of experimental equipment. The methodology mobilizes organizational, technical and methodological support for the process of creating such systems with specified target characteristics. In general, the method and methodology developed open up opportunities for systematically implementing the basic principles of the “Education 4.0” concept in the preparation and retraining of engineering personnel in the field of electronic instrumentation.

IoVT: Internet of Vulnerable Things? Threat Architecture, Attack Surfaces, and Vulnerabilities in Internet of Things and Its Applications towards Smart Grids

In recent years, people have witnessed numerous Internet of Things (IoT)-based attacks with the exponential increase in the number of IoT devices. Alongside this, the means to secure IoT-based applications are maturing slower than our budding dependence on them. Moreover, the vulnerabilities in an IoT system are exploited in chains to penetrate deep into the network and yield more adverse aftereffects. To mitigate these issues, this paper gives unique insights for handling the growing vulnerabilities in common IoT devices and proposes a threat architecture for IoT, addressing threats in the context of a three-layer IoT reference architecture. Furthermore, the vulnerabilities exploited at the several IoT attack surfaces and the challenges they exert are explored. Thereafter, the challenges in quantifying the IoT vulnerabilities with the existing framework are also analyzed. The study also covers a case study on the Intelligent Transportation System, covering road transport and traffic control specifically in terms of threats and vulnerabilities. Another case study on secure energy management in the Smart Grid is also presented. This case study covers the applications of Internet of Vulnerable Things (IoVT) in Smart energy Grid solutions, as there will be tremendous use of IoT in future Smart Grids to save energy and improve overall distribution. The analysis shows that the integration of the proposed architecture in existing applications alarms the developers about the embedded threats in the system.

Laying the Foundations for an IoT Reference Architecture for Agricultural Application Domain

The Internet of Things (IoT) relates to many billions of various applications and devices scattered around the world talk to each other and can exchange data and perform cooperative tasks without the intervention of humans. Towards efficiently realizing this, many things are needed to be achieved in advance, such as common language, basis of work and cooperation, roles distribution, resources availability, and security. Here comes the role of humans to build a reference architecture represents the common communication framework among the Internet things. There is no doubt that in order for the IoT to meet expectations, it needs to follow standardization; therefore, this paper addresses the IoT standardization by formulating the basis of an IoT reference architecture for the agriculture domain. The proposed Agricultural IoT Reference Architecture (AITRA) is based on a defined architecture generation process incorporates analysis of the IoT and the application domain ecosystems. AITRA is composed of three tiers: Device, Cloud, and Business, described in the paper including architectures, conventions, frame format, applications and services, and illustrative examples for utilizing the architecture at its highest abstraction level. The proposed design resulted in a foundation for a reference architecture combines the three main required features: best practices, common vocabulary, and reusable designs; characterized over the other architectures by its efficient low abstraction level meanwhile giving design freedom, lower time-to-market, standardization in its interfaces and communication protocol. It connects to its outside world with authorization rules and at any scale: individual, company, government(s), and global levels.

A Comprehensive Study of Security and Privacy Guidelines, Threats, and Countermeasures: An IoT Perspective

As Internet of Things (IoT) involvement increases in our daily lives, several security and privacy concerns like linkability, unauthorized conversations, and side-channel attacks are raised. If they are left untouched, such issues may threaten the existence of IoT. They derive from two main reasons. One is that IoT objects are equipped with limited capabilities in terms of computation power, memory, and bandwidth which hamper the direct implementation of traditional Internet security techniques. The other reason is the absence of widely-accepted IoT security and privacy guidelines and their appropriate implementation techniques. Such guidelines and techniques would greatly assist IoT stakeholders like developers and manufacturers, paving the road for building secure IoT systems from the start and, thus, reinforcing IoT security and privacy by design. In order to contribute to such objective, we first briefly discuss the primary IoT security goals and recognize IoT stakeholders. Second, we propose a comprehensive list of IoT security and privacy guidelines for the edge nodes and communication levels of IoT reference architecture. Furthermore, we point out the IoT stakeholders such as customers and manufacturers who will benefit most from these guidelines. Moreover, we identify a set of implementation techniques by which such guidelines can be accomplished, and possible attacks against previously-mentioned levels can be alleviated. Third, we discuss the challenges of IoT security and privacy guidelines, and we briefly discuss digital rights management in IoT. Finally, through this survey, we suggest several open issues that require further investigation in the future. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this work is the first survey that covers the above-mentioned objectives.

The SmartHabits: An Intelligent Privacy-Aware Home Care Assistance System.

Many researchers and product developers are striving toward achieving ICT-enabled independence of older adults by setting up Enhanced Living Environments (ELEs). Technological solutions, which are often based on the Internet of Things (IoT), show great potential in providing support for Active Aging. To enhance the quality of life for older adults and overcome challenges in enabling individuals to achieve their full potential in terms of physical, social, and mental well-being, numerous proof-of-concept systems have been built. These systems, often labeled as Ambient Assisted Living (AAL), vary greatly in targeting different user needs. This paper presents our contribution using SmartHabits, which is an intelligent privacy-aware home care assistance system. The novel system comprising smart home-based and cloud-based parts uses machine-learning technology to provide peace of mind to informal caregivers caring for persons living alone. It does so by learning the user’s typical daily activity patterns and automatically issuing warnings if an unusual situation is detected. The system was designed and implemented from scratch, building upon existing practices from IoT reference architecture and microservices. The system was deployed in several homes of real users for six months, and we will be sharing our findings in this paper.

Hierarchical Modeling of Complex Internet of Things Systems Using Conceptual Modeling Approaches

Popularity of the Internet of things (IoT) is currently on the rise. Academia as well as industry is equally fascinated by this disruptive technology. The IoT research and implementation have succeeded securing their place in numerous domains including, but not limited to, business, transportation and logistics, health care, smart cities, and agriculture. Conceptual modeling is pivotal to the design and implementation of a system. Various modeling approaches have been used for a variety of the IoT applications and case studies. In this paper, we examine various innovative applications of the existing conceptual modeling approaches for the IoT. We analyze the use of these approaches against different concerns in isolation as well as in mutual combination for the IoT. We also define a set of terminologies that we frequently encounter in this manuscript and those likely to be used while adopting proposed modeling approaches for the IoT scenarios. This study also attempts to reconcile different modeling approaches toward a unified modeling system. For this purpose, we map various conceptual modeling approaches against different layers of functional model of the IoT reference architecture. There is also a scenario in the end of the paper which elaborates the use of different modeling approaches in hierarchy for a complex IoT system.

Architectural standards for internet of things: standardising IoT architecture

Internet of things (IoT) employs un-abatable number of intelligent sensing and actuating devices with advanced software stacks to integrate physical and digital world. To address issues of heterogeneity, communication, connectivity, data collection mechanisms, security and scalability, each IoT application is based on some architecture describing data flow through the system. Given to continuous evolution of IoT enabling technologies, it is challenging to standardise one concrete architecture. This paper provides the synopsis of the IoT architectures, discusses the architectural reference framework of IoT-A, Industrial IoT reference architecture, WSO2 and CISCO architectural models that minimise the architectural levels of abstraction and describe an architectural model based on present IoT enabling technologies. It discusses a model to evaluate the architectural criteria addressed by the discussed architectures to arrive at an architectural reference model that has the potential to serve as a standard for collective IoT application development.

Semantic interoperability in IoT-based automation infrastructures

Abstract The paper analyses and compares the different approaches to achieve semantic interoperability of the most influential IoT reference architectures, namely the Industrial Internet Reference Architecture, Reference Architecture Model Industrie 4.0, ISO/IEC Internet of Things Reference Architecture, the Internet of Things – Architecture (IoT-A) and oneM2M functional architecture.

Interoperation among IoT Standards

This article presents generic IoT (Internet of Things) reference architecture proposed by standard organization. It compares different IoT reference architectures proposed by different standards institutes, specially emphasizing lightweight requirements of IoT reference architecture. These architectures define multiple interfaces. Functionalities of proposed interfaces are compared here to enable an understanding regarding the scope of interoperation among different IoT standards. Finally, future scopes for standardization in IoT are presented.