1,720,981 research outputs found
Wearable Computing for the Internet of Things
No full textIn the next few years, the Internet of Things (IoT) will become a reality, merging the social, physical, and cyber worlds to enable new applications and forms of interaction between humans and connected, smart sensing and actuating devices. As billions of smart objects become deployed pervasively in the environment, users should be able to discover and interact with objects in their proximity in a seamless and transparent way. Although smartphones have become an extremely popular computing device, smart wearable devices, such as Google Glass and the Apple watch, are now providing even more effective means to bridge the gap between humans and smart objects. The authors analyze the characteristics of wearable applications for IoT scenarios and describe the interaction patterns that should occur between wearable or mobile devices and smart objects. The authors also present an implementation of a wearable-based Web of Things application used to evaluate the described interaction patterns in a smart environment, deployed within their department's IoT testbed
Lightweight Session Initiation for the Internet of Things
No full textIn the next few years the Internet of Things (IoT) is expected to bring together billions of devices, denoted as "smart objects", thus creating an extremely large-scale network of heterogeneous devices, which will provide an unprecedented opportunity to build new applications and forms of interactions that will shape the world. The heterogeneous and dynamic nature of smart objects that will form the IoT requires the design and adoption of standard communication models and protocols in order to enable interoperability and long-term evolution of deployed systems. Much attention must be therefore paid on the adoption of lightweight and low-overhead communications intended to minimize energy-consumption and processing load. While the Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) is intended to bring the REST paradigm to smart objects, there are many application scenarios that might benefit from the use of sessions (i.e., an exchange of data between an association of participants). In this paper, we introduce a lightweight Session Initiation Protocol targeted to constrained environments, based on CoAP, which re-uses the syntax and semantics of CoAP in order to create, modify, and terminate sessions among smart objects with minimal overhead
Effective authorization for the Web of Things
No full textThe momentum gained by the Internet of Things (IoT) has lead technology to be sufficiently mature to finally reach the market. The expectations and concerns of users around new products are primarily related to the possibility to interact with things in a seamless and effective way and, above all, to do so securely. Within this context, the main pillars required to support a sustainable and practical IoT are: interoperability, discoverability, and authorization. Based on the concepts and experience gained with the traditional Internet, the Web of Things (WoT) paradigm is chartered to address the former two issues. However, fast-developed and simplistic vertical approaches, due to the rush to launch IoT products, have not considered authorization adequately. Access to smart objects typically occurs through product-bound Cloud platforms, which mediate between vendor-specific smartphone apps and objects. Notwithstanding, effective mechanisms to manage authorized access to resources are required to really make simple and safe to use and share things. In this paper, we propose a standard-based authorization framework for WoT applications, which allows to effectively enforce fine-grained access policies to authorized parties. An implementation is presented to highlight the simplicity of the proposed approach and the benefits that it can introduce
mjCoAP: An open-source lightweight java CoAP library for internet of things applications
No full textThe Internet of Things (IoT) is expected to pervasively interconnect more than 50 billion devices, denoted as "smart objects", by 2020 in an Internet-like structure, which will extend the current Internet, enabling new forms of interaction between physical objects and people. The IoT will be made up of heterogeneous devices, featuring extremely diverse capabilities, in terms of computational power, connectivity, availability, and mobility. In such a scenario, characterized by the heterogeneity and large number of involved devices, in order to effectively allow and foster the growth of new applications and services, it is necessary to provide appropriate standards that can guarantee full interoperability among existing hosts and IoT nodes. Standardization organizations, such as the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), and research projects are chartered to bring IP to smart objects and to define suitable application-layer and security protocols for IoT scenarios. In order to cope with the limitations of smart objects, the IETF CoRE Working Group has defined the Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP), a standard application-layer protocol for use with constrained nodes and constrained networks. In this work, we present mjCoAP, an open source lightweight Java-based implementation of CoAP, which aims at simplifying the development of CoAP-based IoT applications. The mjCoAP library is fully RFC-compliant and integrates several IETF CoRE WG specifications, such as blockwise transfers, resource observing, and HTTP/CoAP mapping. We also present some application scenarios and we describe how they can be easily implemented based on mjCoAP
IoT-OAS: An oauth-based authorization service architecture for secure services in IoT scenarios
No full textOpen authorization (OAuth) is an open protocol, which allows secure authorization in a simple and standardized way from third-party applications accessing online services, based on the representational state transfer (REST) web architecture. OAuth has been designed to provide an authorization layer, typically on top of a secure transport layer such as HTTPS. The Internet of Things (IoTs) refers to the interconnection of billions of resource-constrained devices, denoted as smart objects, in an Internet-like structure. Smart objects have limited processing/memory capabilities and operate in challenging environments, such as low-power and lossy networks. IP has been foreseen as the standard communication protocol for smart object interoperability. The Internet engineering task force constrained RESTful environments working group has defined the constrained application protocol (CoAP) as a generic web protocol for RESTful-constrained environments, targeting machine-to-machine applications, which maps to HTTP for integration with the existing web. In this paper, we propose an architecture targeting HTTP/CoAP services to provide an authorization framework, which can be integrated by invoking an external oauth-based authorization service (OAS). The overall architecture is denoted as IoT-OAS. We also present an overview of significant IoT application scenarios. The IoT-OAS architecture is meant to be flexible, highly configurable, and easy to integrate with existing services. Among the advantages achieved by delegating the authorization functionality, IoT scenarios benefit by: 1) lower processing load with respect to solutions, where access control is implemented on the smart object; 2) fine-grained (remote) customization of access policies; and 3) scalability, without the need to operate directly on the device
Improving Quality of Experience in Future Wireless Access Networks through Fog Computing
No full textA novel model of Internet access networks is proposed, based on fog computing. The model hosts applications close to users by relying on virtual machines to dynamically move cloud or Web content to nodes located at the edge of access networks. Then it can perform proactive caching and enforce traffic policies based on the interaction between access infrastructure and external applications. By analyzing experimental data collected from public Wi-Fi hotspots, the authors quantify the benefits of this approach for bandwidth usage optimization, latency reduction, and quality of experience enhancement. Experimental results show that a significant portion (from 28 to 50 percent) of download data could be managed by the fog node. On the basis of these findings, useful insights for future-generation access networks are provided
A distributed approach to energy-efficient data confidentiality in the Internet of Things
No full textIn the Internet of Things (IoT) everything will be connected, from refrigerators to coffee machines, to shoes. Many such “things” will have a very limited amount of energy to operate, often harvested from their own environment. Providing data conf identiality for such energy-constrained devices has proven to be a hard problem. In this article, we discuss existing approaches to data-confidentiality for energyconstrained devices and propose a novel approach to drastically reduce a node’s energy consumption during encryption and decryption. In particular, we propose to distribute encryption and decryption computations among a set of trusted nodes. We validate the proposed approach through both simulations and experiments. Initial results show that the proposed approach leads to energy savings (from a single node’s perspective) of up to 73% and up to 81% of the energy normally spent to encrypt and decrypt, respectively. With such great savings, our approach holds the promise to enable data confidentiality also for those devices, with extremely limited energy, which will become commonplace in the IoT
A novel smart object-driven UI generation approach for mobile devices in the internet of things
No full textThe broad adoption of the Internet of Things (IoT) is linked to the possibility to discover and interact easily with objects in the surroundings of users. Because of their characteristics and large diffusion, mobile devices are perfect to connect the IoT and common people. In order to accomplish the challenging task of enabling seamless interaction between users and smart objects, in this paper, we propose a lightweight, standard and REST compliant mechanism for the generation of user interfaces (UIs) on mobile devices driven by smart objects. This approach is expedient for a number of reasons: i) end-users are no longer required to download and use custom mobile vendor-provided apps to interact with smart objects; ii) smart objects can actually drive the interaction by letting mobile devices generate the correct UI for the intended interplay; iii) UIs can be dynamically changed over time without requiring any software update by the user. A suitable lightweight UI description format is presented, together with an implementation for Android devices. An evaluation of the proposed approach has also been conducted in order to prove its feasibility and ease of use
Virtual Replication of IoT Hubs in the Cloud: A Flexible Approach to Smart Object Management
Full text linkIn future years, the Internet of Things is expected to interconnect billions of highly heterogeneous devices, denoted as “smart objects”, enabling the development of innovative distributed applications. Smart objects are constrained sensor/actuator-equipped devices, in terms of computational power and available memory. In order to cope with the diverse physical connectivity technologies of smart objects, the Internet Protocol is foreseen as the common “language” for full interoperability and as a unifying factor for integration with the Internet. Large-scale platforms for interconnected devices are required to effectively manage resources provided by smart objects. In this work, we present a novel architecture for the management of large numbers of resources in a scalable, seamless, and secure way. The proposed architecture is based on a network element, denoted as IoT Hub, placed at the border of the constrained network, which implements the following functions: service discovery; border router; HTTP/Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) and CoAP/CoAP proxy; cache; and resource directory. In order to protect smart objects (which cannot, because of their constrained nature, serve a large number of concurrent requests) and the IoT Hub (which serves as a gateway to the constrained network), we introduce the concept of virtual IoT Hub replica: a Cloud-based “entity” replicating all the functions of a physical IoT Hub, which external clients will query to access resources. IoT Hub replicas are constantly synchronized with the physical IoT Hub through a low-overhead protocol based on Message Queue Telemetry Transport (MQTT). An experimental evaluation, proving the feasibility and advantages of the proposed architecture, is presented
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