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

With the rapid development of technology and application for Internet of Things (IoT), Low-Power Wireless Personal Area Network (LoWPAN) devices are more popularly applied. Evaluation of power efficiency is important to LoWPAN applications. Conventional method to evaluate the power efficiency of different LoWPAN devices is as follows: first measure the current of the devices under working/idle/sleep state and then make an average and estimation of the lifetime of batteries, which deeply relied on the accuracy of testing equipment and is not that accurate and with high cost. In this work, a low-cost, real-time power measurement platform called PTone is proposed, which can be used to detect the real-time power of LoWPAN devices (above 99.63%) and be able to determine the state of each module of DUT system. Based on the PTone, a novel abnormal status diagnosis mechanism is proposed. The mechanism can not only judge abnormal status but also find accurate abnormal status locating and classify abnormal status accurately. According to the method, each state of Device Under Test (DUT) during wireless transmission is estimated, different abnormal status can be classified, and thus specific location of abnormal module can be found, which will significantly shorten the development process for LoWPAN devices and thus reduce costs.

Background & Objective: The Internet of things (IoT) refers to the connection of smart electronics devices to the Internet which enables these devices to collect and exchange data. Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are effectively connected in an ad-hoc manner which consists of collaborative sensing devices that have limited resources capabilities. The sensor nodes can work together to organize real-time monitoring, sensing, and collecting information about the various environments within the event area. Method: Connecting WSNs to the internet will allow new generations of WSN applications to appear. One of the main standards of Internet of Things (IoT) over WSN is IPv6 over Low-power Wireless Personal Area Network (6LoWPAN) which has been designed to enable low-power wireless personal area network devices to integrate with IPv6 networks. This paper presents a 6LoWPAN test bed which has been conducted using MICAZ and TELOSB platforms. It implements TCP/IPv6 layers using Berkeley IP (BLIP) in TELOSB and MICAZ platforms. Conclusion: The finding in this paper opens up new Internet applications over WSNs. Keywords: Internet of Things, 6LoWPAN, WSNs, BLIP, electronic devices, sensor nodes.

Edge computing has played a vital role in improving the performance of the Internet of Things (IoT) network. It provides computation locally at the edge of the network, placed near the field of data generation. It has significantly reduced some of IoT’s significant challenges, such as scalability, availability, reliability, and resiliency. In this domain, researchers are further incorporating advanced technology such as Software-Defined Network (SDN) to improve the Edge-based IoT network’s overall performance. Moreover, Edge-based IoT network’s working depends on the type of protocol used for data delivery. Various data transmission protocols can be used to transmit a packet from source to destination. This paper aims to determine the performance of the two widely used protocols, namely IPv6 over low-power wireless personal area networks (6LoWPAN) and OpenFlow for SDN enabled Edge-based IoT network. The experimentation was carried out in a Mininet-WiFi emulator. The results indicate that SDN based OpenFlow protocol can improve the system performance in terms of average round trip time (RTT) of a packet, packet loss ratio, and jitter compared to the conventional 6LoWPAN protocol.KeywordsInternet of ThingsSoftware-defined network6LoWPANOpenFlowEdge computation

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a flagship project that aims to connect objects to the Internet to extend their use. For that, it was needed to find a solution to combine between the IEEE 802.15.4 protocol for Low Power Wireless Personal Area Networks (LoWPANs) and IPv6 network protocol that its large address space will allow million devices to integrate the internet. The development of 6LoWPAN technology was an appropriate solution to deal with this challenge and enable the IoT concept becoming a reality. But this was only the beginning of several challenges and problems like the case of how to secure this new type of networks, especially since it includes two major protocols so the combination of their problems too, over and above new problems specific to that network. In this paper, we analyze the security challenges in 6LoWPAN, we studied the various countermeasures to address these needs, their advantages and disadvantages, and we offer some recommendations to achieve a reliable security scheme for a powerful 6LoWPAN networks.

Since the Internet of Things (IoT) will be entwined with everything we use in our daily life, the consequence of security flaws escalates. Smart objects will govern most of the home appliances and car engines yielding potential disaster scenarios. In this context, successful attacks could lead to chaos and scary scenarios (www.darkreading.com). Unprotected personal information may expose sensitive and embarrassing data to the public and attacks may threaten not only our computers and smart devices, but our intimacy and perhaps our lives too. Because persons and objects will be bonded with each other, user consent becomes critical. Therefore, thing, object, and user Identity will be the focus of future IoT security solutions, yielding a Trust, Security, and Privacy (TSP) paradigm, which may constitute the Achilles' heel of IoT. While security issues are quite straightforward, mainly from background knowledge, privacy issues are far more complex. Privacy constitutes a rather challenging task, even for the m...

The dissemination of digital devices across the seas and oceans of the world is becoming a reality, laying the foundations for sophisticated operations such as autonomous shipping or exposed fish-farming. This reflects the importance of maritime regions as well as the growing demand for more data and knowledge in these remote areas. Currently, the presence of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in offshore settings is limited by the lack of infrastructures, with communications being typically decoupled from the standard Internet or relying on expensive satellite solutions. This paper proposes integrating a commonly available maritime radio-technology, namely very high frequency (VHF) communications, with protocols used in the Internet of Things (IoT). By using the Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) over a low-power wireless personal area networks and the constrained application protocol (CoAP), interoperability is ensured between already existing maritime systems and the Internet. An experimental setup is evaluated under different settings and using different configurations. In addition, an analytical assessment of the solutions’ reliability is presented. The obtained results prove the feasibility of using IoT protocols over a VHF link and demonstrate that such an approach outperforms IPv4-based solutions. The conducted assessment reveals that, in constrained settings, configurations at the application layer (e.g., CoAP’s block size in Block-wise transfers) strongly impact the overall performance and reliability of the system. This motivates the development of new maritime solutions based on IPv6 for ensuring a sustainable and ubiquitous development of ICTs even in the most remote locations.

Newer concepts like Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN), Internet of Things (IoT), 6LoWPAN (IPv6 over Low-Power Wireless Personal Area Networks) etc are emerging. So, protocols, techniques and concepts that have been developed for the traditional computational devices do not essentially apply to the newer low power, less capable devices which are an integral part of the Internet of Things paradigm. So newer protocols need to be developed and [1] has drafted in specifications for the routing protocol for Low Power and Lossy Networks. Routers in LLN mostly operate with constraints like memory, processing power, and battery power (energy). Interconnects are characterized by low data-rate, high loss-rates, and instability. We aim to propose an authentication and encryption protocol for these Low Power and Lossy Networks (LLN).

Secured lightweight authentication for 6LoWPANs in machine-to-machine communications

Internet of Things (IoT) is reshaping our daily lives by bridging the gaps between physical and digital world. To enable ubiquitous sensing, seamless connection and real-time processing for IoT applications, fog computing is considered as a key component in a heterogeneous IoT architecture, which deploys storage and computing resources to network edges. However, the fog-based IoT architecture can lead to various security and privacy risks, such as compromised fog nodes that may impede developments of IoT by attacking the data collection and gathering period. In this paper, we propose a novel privacy-preserving and reliable scheme for the fog-based IoT to address the data privacy and reliability challenges of the selective data aggregation service. Specifically, homomorphic proxy re-encryption and proxy re-authenticator techniques are respectively utilized to deal with the data privacy and reliability issues of the service, which supports data aggregation over selective data types for any type-driven applications. We define a new threat model to formalize the non-collusive and collusive attacks of compromised fog nodes, and it is demonstrated that the proposed scheme can prevent both non-collusive and collusive attacks in our model. In addition, performance evaluations show the efficiency of the scheme in terms of computational costs and communication overheads.

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.

Over the last decade, increasing availability of Internet of Things (IoT) devices and broadband communications technologies has enabled a number of smart applications in many cities. Among various smart city applications, a smart street lighting application is considered as one of the most cost-effective choices for a smart city today, if relying on existing street lights that are already deployed and networked across a city. Piggy-bagging on a readily available networked street lighting infrastructure, several city-wide services can be offered rapidly and cost effectively. Examples of additional devices that can be deployed along with networked street lights are such as environmental sensors, traffic sensors, IP cameras, digital signage, and more. To enable connections among different sensing and control devices, communication technologies and networks are of crucial components. There are a wide variety of communication technologies that can be used, namely, Sigfox, long range (LoRa), Weightless, Symphony Link, random phase multiple access (RPMA), narrowband IoT (NB-IoT), long-term evolution category 0/1/M (LTE category 0/1/M), power line communications (PLC), ZigBee, IPv6 low-power wireless personal area network (6LoWPAN), wireless local area network (WLAN), wireless mesh, worldwide interoperability for microwave access (WiMAX), and Cellular (2G/3G/ 4G/5G). The chapter aims at providing a comprehensive discussion of various communication technologies that can serve smart street lighting and other add-on applications in a smart city. These technologies are evaluated on the basis of communication network requirements of different applications pertaining to their data rate, latency, reliability, and security.

The Internet of things is a popular concept in the current digital revolution. Nowadays, devices worldwide can be connected to the Internet, enhancing their communication, capabilities, and intelligence. Low-Power Wireless Personal Area Network (6LoWPAN) was specifically designed to build wireless networks for IoT resource-constrained devices. However, 6LoWPAN is susceptible to several security attacks. The fragmentation mechanism, in particular, is vulnerable to various attacks due to the lack of fragment authentication and verification procedures in the adaptation layer. This article provides a survey of fragmentation attacks and available countermeasures. Furthermore, the buffer reservation attack, one of the most harmful fragmentation attacks that may cause DoS, is studied and simulated in detail. A countermeasure for this attack is also implemented based on a reputation-scoring scheme. Experiments showed the harmful effects of the buffer reservation attack and the effectiveness of the implemented reputation-scoring countermeasure.

This chapter introduces the first fully implemented two-way authentication security scheme for Internet-of-Things (IoT) based on existing Internet standards, specifically the Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS) protocol. By relying on an established standard, existing implementations, engineering techniques, and security infrastructure can be reused, which enables an easy security uptake. The proposed security scheme uses two public key cryptography algorithms, RSA (Rivest, Shamir und Adleman) and Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC), tailored for the resource heterogeneous nature of IoT devices. The two-way authentication solution presented is designed to work over standard communication stacks that offer UDP/IPv6 networking for Low power Wireless Personal Area Networks (LoWPANs). A prototype implementation of DTLS is presented here in the context of a system architecture, and the scheme’s feasibility (low overheads and high interoperability) is demonstrated through extensive evaluations on the DTLS-supporting platform OPAL as clusterhead with children of different IoT hardware platforms.

A common radio technology used in wireless sensor networks is the IEEE 802.15.4 standard. Wireless sensor networks have so far used custom, light-weight, and application specific network protocols on top of IEEE 802.15.4, often optimized for resource constrained low power hardware. In order to achieve interoperability at the network layer, the Internet Engineering Task Force published a standard for the transmission of IPv6 packets over IEEE 802.15.4 low-power wireless personal area networks, which provides an additional layer adapting the IPv6 network layer to the low power and resource constrained IEEE 802.15.4 link layer. This paper provides an evaluation of several independent implementations of the IPv6 over IEEE 802.15.4 standard. We describe the characteristics of the implementations and the protocol features supported. Our interoperability tests, carried out using two different hardware platforms, show that at least three implementations are to a large extend compatible with each other. At the end of the paper, we summarize recent work in the IETF to improve the IPv6 over IEEE 802.15.4 technology.

Wireless networks of future generation are envisioned to be a combination of diverse networks environment and access technologies that can give us convenient wireless environment. The IEEE 802.15.4 standard is a low cost, low-rate, low-power wireless personal area network technology. IP for smart objects (IPSO) seeks to extend the use of IP networking into resource-constrained devices over a low-power network. IPv6 over low-power wireless personal area network (6LoWPAN) is specified by the IETF Working Group, and advanced by the IPSO alliance. 6LoWPAN Ad Hoc on-demand distance vector routing (LOAD) is based on ad hoc on-demand distance vector (AODV), and simplifies the routing protocol for 6LoWPAN mesh network. Although the LOAD simplifies the AODV for 6LoWPAN mesh network, but the broadcasting route request (RREQ) message of route discovery is still caused whole network overhead. In this paper, we would like to use the concept of Ad Hoc on-demand multipath distance vector routing (AOMDV) for LOAD to find multipath during the route discovery. If the path fail, we still have alternate path can be used for reducing the overhead of route discovery for the network.