Search Results (10)

With the electric power grid experiencing a rapid shift to the smart grid paradigm over a deregulated energy market, Internet of Things (IoT)-based solutions are gaining prominence, and innovative peer-to-peer (P2P) energy trading at a micro level is being deployed. Such advancement, however, leaves traditional security models vulnerable and paves the path for blockchain, a distributed ledger technology (DLT), with its decentralized, open, and transparency characteristics as a viable alternative. However, due to deregulation in energy trading markets, most of the prototype resilience regarding cybersecurity attack, performance and scalability of transaction broadcasting, and its direct impact on overall performances and attacks are required to be supported, which becomes a performance bottleneck with existing blockchain solutions such as Hyperledger, Ethereum, and so on. In this paper, we design a novel permissioned Corda framework for P2P energy trading peers that not only mitigates a new class of cyberattacks, i.e., delay trading (or discard), but also disseminates the transactions in a optimized propagation time, resulting in a fair transaction distribution. Sharing transactions in a permissioned R3 Corda blockchain framework is handled by the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) and transport layer security (TLS). The unique contribution of this paper lies in the use of an optimized CPU and JVM heap memory scenario analysis with P2P metric in addition to a far more realistic multihosted testbed for the performance analysis. The average latencies measured are 22 ms and 51 ms for sending and receiving messages. We compare the throughput by varying different types of flow such as energy request, request + pay, transfer, multiple notary, sender, receiver, and single notary. In the proposed framework, request is an energy asset that is based on payment state and contract in the P2P energy trading module, so in request flow, only one node with no notary appears on the vault of the node.Energy request + pay flow interaction deals with two nodes, such as producer and consumer, to deal with request and transfer of asset ownership with the help of a notary. Request + repeated pay flow request, on node A and repeatedly transfers a fraction of energy asset state to another node, B, through a notary. Full article

With the evolution of technology, developed systems have become more complex and faster. Thirty years ago, there were no protocols or databases dedicated to developing and implementing IoT projects. We currently have protocols such as MQTT, AMQP, CoAP, and databases such as InfluxDB. They are built to support a multitude of data from an IoT system and scale very well with the system. This paper presents the design and implementation of an IoT alert system that uses MQTT and InfluxDB to collect and store data. We design a scalable system to display assertive alerts on a Raspberry Pi. Each user can select a subset of alerts in our system using a web interface. We present a bibliographic study of SoTA, the proposed architecture, the challenges posed by such a system, a set of tests for the performance and feasibility of the solution, and a set of conclusions and ideas for further developments. Full article

The open platform communications unified architecture (OPC UA) is a major industry-standard middleware based on the request–reply pattern, and the data distribution service (DDS) is an industry standard in the publish–subscribe form. The OPC UA cannot replace fieldbuses at the control and field levels. To facilitate real-time connectionless operation, the OPC Foundation added the publish–subscribe model—a new specification that supports broker functions, such as message queuing telemetry transport (MQTT), and advanced message queuing protocol (AMQP)—to the OPC UA Part 14 standard. This paper proposes a protocol converter for incorporation into the application layer of the DDS subscriber to facilitate interoperability among publisher–subscriber pairs. The proposed converter comprises a DDS gateway and bridge. The former exists inside the MQTT and AMQP brokers, which convert OPC UA publisher data into DDS messages prior to passing them on to the DDS subscriber. The DDS bridge passes the messages received from the DDS gateway to the OPC UA subscriber in the corresponding DDS application layer. The results reported in existing studies, and those obtained using the proposed converter, allow all devices supporting the OPC UA and OPC UA PubSub standards to realize DDS publish–subscribe interoperability. Full article

IoT-based applications operate in a client–server architecture, which requires a specific communication protocol. This protocol is used to establish the client–server communication model, allowing all clients of the system to perform specific tasks through internet communications. Many data communication protocols for the Internet of Things are used by IoT platforms, including message queuing telemetry transport (MQTT), advanced message queuing protocol (AMQP), MQTT for sensor networks (MQTT-SN), data distribution service (DDS), constrained application protocol (CoAP), and simple object access protocol (SOAP). These protocols only support single-topic messaging. Thus, in this work, an IoT message protocol that supports multi-topic messaging is proposed. This protocol will add a simple “brain” for IoT platforms in order to realize an intelligent IoT architecture. Moreover, it will enhance the traffic throughput by reducing the overheads of messages and the delay of multi-topic messaging. Most current IoT applications depend on real-time systems. Therefore, an RTOS (real-time operating system) as a famous OS (operating system) is used for the embedded systems to provide the constraints of real-time features, as required by these real-time systems. Using RTOS for IoT applications adds important features to the system, including reliability. Many of the undertaken research works into IoT platforms have only focused on specific applications; they did not deal with the real-time constraints under a real-time system umbrella. In this work, the design of the multi-topic IoT protocol and platform is implemented for real-time systems and also for general-purpose applications; this platform depends on the proposed multi-topic communication protocol, which is implemented here to show its functionality and effectiveness over similar protocols. Full article

IoT technologies are becoming pervasive in public and private sectors and represent presently an integral part of our daily life. The advantages offered by these technologies are frequently coupled with serious security issues that are often not properly overseen or even ignored. The IoT threat landscape is extremely wide and complex and involves a wide variety of hardware and software technologies. In this framework, the security of application layer protocols is of paramount importance since these protocols are at the basis of the communications among applications and services running on different IoT devices and on cloud/edge infrastructures. This paper offers a comprehensive survey of application layer protocol security by presenting the main challenges and findings. More specifically, the paper focuses on the most popular protocols devised in IoT environments for messaging/data sharing and for service discovery. The main threats of these protocols as well as the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) for their products and services are analyzed and discussed in detail. Good practices and measures that can be adopted to mitigate threats and attacks are also investigated. Our findings indicate that ensuring security at the application layer is very challenging. IoT devices are exposed to numerous security risks due to lack of appropriate security services in the protocols as well as to vulnerabilities or incorrect configuration of the products and services being deployed. Moreover, the constrained capabilities of these devices affect the types of security services that can be implemented. Full article

This paper discusses the design and prototype implementation of a software solution facilitating the interaction of third-party developers with a legacy monitoring and control system in the airfield environment. By following the Internet of Things (IoT) approach and adopting open standards and paradigms such as REpresentational State Transfer (REST) and Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) for message dispatching, the work aims at paving the way towards a more open world in the airfield industrial sector. The paper also presents performance results achieved by extending legacy components to support IoT standards. Quantitative results not only demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed solution, but also its suitability in terms of prompt message dispatching and increased fault tolerance. Full article

Internet of Things (IoT) technologies have evolved rapidly during the last decade, and many architecture types have been proposed for distributed and interconnected systems. However, most systems are implemented following fragmented approaches for specific application domains, introducing difficulties in providing unified solutions. However, the unification of solutions is an important feature from an IoT perspective. In this paper, we present an IoT platform that supports multiple application layer communication protocols (Representational State Transfer (REST)/HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP), Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT), Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP), Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP), and Websockets) and that is composed of open-source frameworks (RabbitMQ, Ponte, OM2M, and RDF4J). We have explored a back-end system that interoperates with the various frameworks and offers a single approach for user-access control on IoT data streams and micro-services. The proposed platform is evaluated using its containerized version, being easily deployable on the vast majority of modern computing infrastructures. Its design promotes service reusability and follows a marketplace architecture, so that the creation of interoperable IoT ecosystems with active contributors is enabled. All the platform’s features are analyzed, and we discuss the results of experiments, with the multiple communication protocols being tested when used interchangeably for transferring data. Developing unified solutions using such a platform is of interest to users and developers as they can test and evaluate local instances or even complex applications composed of their own IoT resources before releasing a production version to the marketplace. Full article

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs), have a potential offering relatively stable Internet broadband access. The rapid development and growth of WMNs attract ISPs to support users’ coverage anywhere anytime. To achieve this goal network architecture must be addressed carefully. Software Defined Networking (SDN) proposes new network architecture for wired and wireless networks. Software Defined Wireless Networking (SDWN) has a great potential to increase efficiency, ease the complexity of control and management, and accelerate technology innovation rate of wireless networking. An SDN controller is the core component of an SDN network. It needs to have updated reports of the network status change, as in network topology and quality of service (QoS) in order to effectively configure and manage the network it controls. In this paper, we propose Flat Distributed Software Defined Wireless Mesh Network architecture where the controller aggregates entire topology discovery and monitors QoS properties of extended WMN nodes using Link Layer Discovery Protocol (LLDP) protocol, which is not possible in multi-hop ordinary architectures. The proposed architecture has been implemented on top of POX controller and Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) protocol. The experiments were conducted in a Mininet-wifi emulator, the results present the architecture control plane consistency and two application cases: topology discovery and QoS monitoring. The current results push us to study QoS-routing for video streaming over WMN. Full article

Human errors are probably the most critical cause of the large amount of medical accidents. Medical cyber-physical systems (MCPS) have been suggested as a possible approach for detecting and limiting the impact of errors and wrong procedures. However, during the initial development phase of medical instruments, regular MCPS systems are not a viable approach, because of the high costs of repeating complex validation procedures, due to modifications of the prototype instrument. In this work, a communication architecture, inspired by recent Internet of Things (IoT) advances, is proposed for connecting prototype instruments to the cloud, to allow direct and real-time interaction between developers and instrument operators. Without loss of generality, a real-world use case is addressed, dealing with the use of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) for neurodegenerative disease diagnosis. The proposed infrastructure leverages on a message-oriented middleware, complemented by historical database for further data processing. Two of the most diffused protocols for cloud data exchange (MQTT and AMQP) have been investigated. The experimental setup has been focused on the real-time performance, which are the most challenging requirements. Time-related metrics confirm the feasibility of the proposed approach, resulting in an end-to-end delay on the order of few tens of milliseconds for local networks and up to few hundreds of milliseconds for geographical scale networks. Full article

The adoption of embedded systems, mobile devices and other smart devices keeps rising globally, and the scope of their involvement broadens, for instance, in smart city-like scenarios. In light of this, a pressing need emerges to tame such complexity and reuse as much tooling as possible without resorting to vertical ad hoc solutions, while at the same time taking into account valid options with regard to infrastructure management and other more advanced functionalities. Existing solutions mainly focus on core mechanisms and do not allow one to scale by leveraging infrastructure or adapt to a variety of scenarios, especially if actuators are involved in the loop. A new, more flexible, cloud-based approach, able to provide device-focused workflows, is required. In this sense, a widely-used and competitive framework for infrastructure as a service, such as OpenStack, with its breadth in terms of feature coverage and expanded scope, looks to fit the bill, replacing current application-specific approaches with an innovative application-agnostic one. This work thus describes the rationale, efforts and results so far achieved for an integration of IoT paradigms and resource ecosystems with such a kind of cloud-oriented device-centric environment, by focusing on a smart city scenario, namely a park smart lighting example, and featuring data collection, data visualization, event detection and coordinated reaction, as example use cases of such integration. Full article