In the Internet of Things (IoT) domain, devices need a platform to transact seamlessly without a trusted intermediary. Although Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs) could provide such a platform, blockchains, such as Bitcoin, were not designed with IoT networks in mind, hence are often unsuitable for such applications: they offer poor transaction throughput and confirmation times, put stress on constrained computing and storage resources, and require high transaction fees. In this work, we consider a class of IoT-friendly DLTs based on directed acyclic graphs, rather than a blockchain, and with a reputation system in the place of Proof of Work (PoW). However, without PoW, implementation of these DLTs requires an access control algorithm to manage the rate at which nodes can add new transactions to the ledger. We model the access control problem and present an algorithm that is fair, efficient and secure. Our algorithm represents a new design paradigm for DLTs in which concepts from networking are applied to the DLT setting for the first time. For example, our algorithm uses distributed rate setting which is similar in nature to transmission control used in the Internet. However, our solution features novel adaptations to cope with the adversarial environment of DLTs in which no individual agent can be trusted. Our algorithm guarantees utilisation of resources, consistency, fairness, and resilience against attackers. All of this is achieved efficiently and with regard for the limitations of IoT devices. We perform extensive simulations to validate these claims.
There is a growing interest from both the academia and industry to employ distributed ledger technology in the Internet-of-Things domain for addressing security-related and performance challenges. Distributed ledger technology enables non-trusted entities to communicate and reach consensus in a fully distributed manner through a cryptographically secure and immutable ledger. However, significant challenges arise mainly related to transaction processing speed and user privacy. This work explores the interplay between Internet-of-Things and distributed ledger technology, analysing the fundamenta…
In this paper, we introduce a new networking architecture called Group Centric Networking (GCN), which is designed to support the large number of devices expected with the emergence of the Internet of Things. GCN is designed to enable these devices to operate collaboratively in a highly efficient and resilient fashion, while not sacrificing their ability to communicate with one another. We do a full protocol implementation of GCN in NS3, and demonstrate that GCN utilizes up to an order of magnitude fewer network resources than traditional wireless networking schemes, while providing high conne…
With the growing adoption of Distributed Ledger Technologies and the subsequent scaling of these networks, there is an inherent need for efficient and resilient communication used by the underlying consensus and replication mechanisms. While resilient and efficient communication is one of the main pillars of an efficient blockchain network as a whole, the Distributed Ledger Technology is still relatively new and the task of scaling these networks has come with its own challenges towards ensuring these goals. New content distribution concepts like Information Centric Networking, of which Named …
Forwarding data by name has been assumed to be a necessary aspect of an information-centric redesign of the current Internet architecture that makes content access, dissemination, and storage more efficient. The Named Data Networking (NDN) and Content-Centric Networking (CCNx) architectures are the leading examples of such an approach. However, forwarding data by name incurs storage and communication complexities that are orders of magnitude larger than solutions based on forwarding data using addresses. Furthermore, the specific algorithms used in NDN and CCNx have been shown to have a number…
With the ever growing Internet of Things (IoT) market, ledger systems are facing new challenges to efficiently store and secure enormous customer records collected by the IoT devices. The authenticity, availability, and integrity of these records are critically important for both business providers and customers. In this paper, we describe DLedger, a lightweight and resilient distributed ledger system. Instead of a single chain of blocks, DLedger builds the ledger over a directed acyclic graph (DAG), so that its operations can tolerate network partition and intermittent connectivity. Instead o…
Content replication to many destinations is a common use case in the Internet of Things (IoT). The deployment of IP multicast has proven inefficient, though, due to its lack of layer-2 support by common IoT radio technologies and its synchronous end-to-end transmission, which is highly susceptible to interference. Information-centric networking (ICN) introduced hop-wise multi-party dissemination of cacheable content, which has proven valuable in particular for low-power lossy networking regimes. Even NDN, however, the most prominent ICN protocol, suffers from a lack of deployment. In this pape…
Information-Centric Networking (ICN) is being realized as a promising approach to accomplish the shortcomings of current IP-address based networking. ICN models are based on naming the content to get rid of address-space scarcity, accessing the content via name-based-routing, caching the content at intermediate nodes to provide reliable, efficient data delivery and self-certifying contents to ensure better security. Obvious benefits of ICN in terms of fast and efficient data delivery and improved reliability raises ICN as highly promising networking model for Internet of Things (IoTs) like env…
Information-Centric Networking (ICN) specifically Name Data Networking (NDN) is the name-base (content-base) networking and takes named-contents as "first class citizen", being considered as the ideal candidate to form the Future Internet basis. NDN striking features like named-data self-secured contents, name-base-forwarding, in-network caching and mobility support suits the Internet of Things (IoT) environment, which aims to enable communication among smart devices and to combine all Internet-based smart applications under the one roof. With these aims, IoT put many research challenges regar…
The Internet of Things (IoT) is rapidly evolving based on low-power compliant protocol standards that extend the Internet into the embedded world. Pioneering implementations have proven it is feasible to inter-network very constrained devices, but had to rely on peculiar cross-layered designs and offer a minimalistic set of features. In the long run, however, professional use and massive deployment of IoT devices require full-featured, cleanly composed, and flexible network stacks. This paper introduces the networking architecture that turns RIOT into a powerful IoT system, to enable low-power…
The Internet of Things (IoT) and Distributed ledger technology (DLT) have significantly changed our daily lives. Due to their distributed operational environment and naturally decentralized applications, the convergence of these two technologies indicates a more lavish arrangement for the future. This article develops a comprehensive survey to investigate and illustrate state-of-the-art DLT for various IoT use cases, from smart homes to autonomous vehicles and smart cities. We develop a novel framework for conducting a systematic and comprehensive review of DLT over IoT by extending the knowle…
This paper provides recent advances in the area of Internet of Underground Things (IoUT) with emphasis on enabling communication technologies, networking issues, and localization techniques. IoUT is enabled by underground things (sensors), communication technology, and networking protocols. This new paradigm of IoUT facilitates the integration of sensing and communication in the underground environment for various industries such as oil and gas, agriculture, seismic mapping, and border monitoring. These applications require to gather relevant information from the deployed underground things. H…
Efficient Asynchronous Federated Evaluation with Strategy Similarity Awareness for Intent-Based Networking in Industrial Internet of Things
Guangxi University Key Laboratory of Intelligent Networking and Scenario System (School of Information and Communication, Guilin University of Electronic Technology)（广西智能网络与场景系统重点实验室（信息与通信学院，桂林电子科技大学））；National Engineering Laboratory for Comprehensive Transportation Big Data Application Technology (Guangxi)（综合交通运输大数据应用技术国家工程实验室（广西））；School of Automation, Guangdong University of Technology（自动化学院，广东工业大学）；School of Architecture and Transportation Engineering, GUET（建筑与交通工程学院，桂林电子科技大学）
Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs) are playing a major role in building security and trust in Internet of Things (IoT) systems. However, IoT deployments with a large number of devices, such as in environment monitoring applications, generate and send massive amounts of data. This would generate vast number of transactions that must be processed within the distributed ledger. In this work, we first demonstrate that the Proof of Work (PoW) blockchain fails to scale in a sizable IoT connectivity infrastructure. To solve this problem, we present a lightweight distributed ledger scheme to integ…
The pervasive need to safely share and store information between devices calls for the replacement of centralized trust architectures with the decentralized ones. Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs) are seen as the most promising enabler of decentralized trust, but they still lack technological maturity and their successful adoption depends on the understanding of the fundamental design trade-offs and their reflection in the actual technical design. This work focuses on the challenges and potential solutions for an effective integration of DLTs in the context of Internet-of-Things (IoT). We…
The number of computing devices of the Internet of Things (IoT) is expected to grow by billions. New networking architectures are being considered to handle communications in the IoT. One of these architectures is Opportunistic Networking (OppNets). To evaluate the performance of OppNets, an OMNeT++ based modular simulator is built with models that handle the operations of the different protocol layers of an OppNets based node. The work presented here provides the details of this simulator, called the Opportunistic Protocol Simulator (OPS).
With the explosive growth of smart IoT devices at the edge of the Internet, embedding sensors on mobile devices for massive data collection and collective environment sensing has been envisioned as a cost-effective solution for IoT applications. However, existing IoT platforms and framework rely on dedicated middleware for (semi-) centralized task dispatching, data storage and incentive provision. Consequently, they are usually expensive to deploy, have limited adaptability to diverse requirements, and face a series of data security and privacy issues. In this paper, we employ permissionless b…
Wireless sensor networks have been a driving force of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) advancement in the process control and manufacturing industry. The emergence of IIoT opens great potential for the ubiquitous field device connectivity and manageability with an integrated and standardized architecture from low-level device operations to high-level data-centric application interactions. This technological development requires software definability in the key architectural elements of IIoT, including wireless field devices, IIoT gateways, network infrastructure, and IIoT sensor cloud …
In the creation of a smart future information society, Internet of Things (IoT) and Content Centric Networking (CCN) break two key barriers for both the front-end sensing and back-end networking. However, we still observe the missing piece of the research that dominates the current networking traffic control and system management, e.g., lacking of the knowledge penetrated into both sensing and networking to glue them holistically. In this paper, we envision to leverage emerging machine learning or deep learning techniques to create aspects of knowledge for facilitating the designs. In particul…
Motivated by the increasing variance of suggested Internet of Things (IoT) applications and the lack of suitability of current wireless technologies in scalable, long range deployments, a number of diverging Low Power Wide Area (LPWA) technologies have been developed. These technologies promise to enable a scalable high range network on cheap low power devices, facilitating the development of a ubiquitous IoT. This paper provides a definition of this new LPWA paradigm, presents a systematic approach to defined suitable use cases, and undertakes a detailed comparison of current LPWA standards, …
On the Internet of Things (IoT), devices continuously communicate with each other, with a gateway, or other Internet nodes. Often devices are constrained and use insecure channels for their communication, which exposes them to a selection of attacks that may extract sensitive pieces of information or manipulate dialogues for the purpose of sabotaging. This paper presents a new layer in the RIOT networking architecture to seamlessly integrate secure communication between applications using DTLS. The layer acts as a modular abstraction layer of the different DTLS implementations, enabling swappi…
In this paper, we envision a hybrid opto-acoustic network design for the internet of underwater things (IoUT). Software-defined underwater networking (SDUN) is presented as an enabler of hybridizing benefits of optic and acoustic systems and adapting IoUT nodes to the challenging and dynamically changing underwater environment. We explain inextricably interwoven relations among functionalities of different layers and analyze their impacts on key network attributes. Network function virtualization (NFV) concept is then introduced to realize application specific cross-layer protocol suites throu…
In big cloud structures or large data structures, fog computing could be interpreted, referring critically to the growing issues and problems in accessing the information among the Internet of things (IoT) devices. Fog computing can be used to compute, store, control and connect smart devices to each other. IoT is an architecture of uniquely identified interrelated physical things, these physical things are able to communicate with each other and can transmit and receive information. This research presents a framework of the combination of the Internet of Things (IoT) and Fog computing. The bl…
The past 15 years have seen the rise of the Cloud, along with rapid increase in Internet backbone traffic and more sophisticated cellular core networks. There are three different types of Clouds: (1) data center, (2) backbone IP network and (3) cellular core network, responsible for computation, storage, communication and network management. Now the functions of these three types of Clouds are descending to be among or near the end users, i.e., to the edge of networks, as Fog. This article presents an overview on research opportunities of Fog networking: an architecture that users one or a col…
The use of the term blockchain is documented for disparate projects, from cryptocurrencies to applications for the Internet of Things (IoT), and many more. The concept of blockchain appears therefore blurred, as it is hard to believe that the same technology can empower applications that have extremely different requirements and exhibit dissimilar performance and security. This position paper elaborates on the theory of distributed systems to advance a clear definition of blockchain that allows us to clarify its role in the IoT. This definition inextricably binds together three elements that, …
There continues to be a recent push to taking the cryptocurrency based ledger system known as Blockchain and applying its techniques to non-financial applications. One of the main areas for application remains Internet of Things (IoT) as we see many areas of improvement as we move into an age of smart cities. In this paper, we examine an initial look at applying the key aspects of Blockchain to a health application network where patients health data can be used to create alerts important to authenticated healthcare providers in a secure and private manner. This paper also presents the benefits…
Programmable management framework have paved the way for managing devices in the network. Lately, emerging paradigm of Software Defined Networking (SDN) have revolutionized programmable networks. Designers of networking applications i.e. Internet of things (IoT) have started investigating potentials of SDN paradigm in improving network management. IoT envision interconnecting various embedded devices surrounding our environment with IP to enable internet connectivity. Unlike traditional network architectures, IoT are characterized by constraint in resources and heterogeneous inter connectivity…
World has been introduced with a new way of living by inventing this advanced technology Internet of Things (IOT). By using this technology all the real-world objects can be made to interconnect and communicate with each other which can be done by diagnosing, sensing and networking over the internet to fulfill some objectives. Due to advancements that have taken place in sensors, wireless communication systems and cloud computing has brought steps to invent this innovative technology. This paper deals with the elements, applications and the challenges faced by Internet of Things. This paper ma…
- The Internet of Things (IoT) is the result of many different enabling technologies such as embedded systems, wireless sensor networks, cloud computing, big-data, etc. used to gather, process, infer, and transmit data. Integrating all these technologies requires a comprehensive and holistic research effort to address all the challenges imposed by these technologies, especially for sensing and delivering information from physical world to cloud-hosted services. In this paper, we outline the most important issues related to standardization efforts, mobility of objects, networking and gateway ac…
We propose the object-oriented networking (OON) framework, for meeting the generalized interconnection, mobility and technology integration requirements underlining the Internet. In OON, the various objects that need to be accessed through the Internet (content, smart things, services, people, etc.) are viewed as network layer resources, rather than as application layer resources as in the IP communications model. By abstracting them as computing objects -with attributes and methods- they are identified by expressive, discoverable names, while data are exchanged between them in the context of …
Today's Internet is heavily used for multimedia streaming from cloud backends, while the Internet of Things (IoT) reverses the traditional data flow, with high data volumes produced at the network edge. Information Centric Networking (ICN) advocates against a host-centric communication model which is promising for distributed edge computing environments and the execution of IoT applications in a decentralized fashion. By using naming schemes, data is tightly coupled to names instead of hosts which simplifies discovery and access to data and services. However, the tight coupling challenges netw…
The current revolution in collaborating distributed things is seen as the first phase of IoT to develop various services. Such collaboration is threatened by the fragmentation found in the industry nowadays as it brings challenges stemming from the difficulty to integrate diverse technologies in system. Diverse networking technologies induce interoperability issues, hence, limiting the possibility of reusing the data to develop new services. Different aspects of handling data collection must be available to provide interoperability to the diverse objects interacting; however, such approaches a…
Content-Centric Networking (CCN) is a new paradigm for the future Internet where content is addressed by hierarchically organized names with the goal to replace TCP/IP networks. Unlike IP addresses, names have arbitrary length and are larger than the four bytes of IPv4 addresses. One important data structure in CCN is the Forwarding Information Base (FIB) where prefixes of names are stored together with the forwarding face. Long prefixes create problems for memory constrained Internet of Things (IoT) devices. In this work, we derive requirements for a FIB in the IoT and survey possible solutio…
The Internet is the driving force of the new digital world, which has created a revolution. With the concept of the Internet of Things (IoT), almost everything is being connected to the internet. However, with the traditional IP network system, it is computationally very complex and costly to manage and configure the network, where the data plane and the control plane are tightly coupled. In order to simplify the network management tasks, software-defined networking (SDN) has been proposed as a promising paradigm shift towards an externalized and logically centralized network control plane. SD…
Blockchain (BC) in the Internet of Things (IoT) is a novel technology that acts with decentralized, distributed, public and real-time ledger to store transactions among IoT nodes. A blockchain is a series of blocks, each block is linked to its previous blocks. Every block has the cryptographic hash code, previous block hash, and its data. The transactions in BC are the basic units that are used to transfer data between IoT nodes. The IoT nodes are different kind of physical but smart devices with embedded sensors, actuators, programs and able to communicate with other IoT nodes. The role of BC…
This paper explores the feasibility, advantages, and challenges of an ICN-based approach in the Internet of Things. We report on the first NDN experiments in a life-size IoT deployment, spread over tens of rooms on several floors of a building. Based on the insights gained with these experiments, the paper analyses the shortcomings of CCN applied to IoT. Several interoperable CCN enhancements are then proposed and evaluated. We significantly decreased control traffic (i.e., interest messages) and leverage data path and caching to match IoT requirements in terms of energy and bandwidth constrai…
In today's era of Internet of Things (IoT), where massive amounts of data are produced by IoT and other devices, edge computing has emerged as a prominent paradigm for low-latency data processing. However, applications may have diverse latency requirements: certain latency-sensitive processing operations may need to be performed at the edge, while delay-tolerant operations can be performed on the cloud, without occupying the potentially limited edge computing resources. To achieve that, we envision an environment where computing resources are distributed across edge and cloud offerings. In thi…
Industrial production plants traditionally include sensors for monitoring or documenting processes, and actuators for enabling corrective actions in cases of misconfigurations, failures, or dangerous events. With the advent of the IoT, embedded controllers link these `things' to local networks that often are of low power wireless kind, and are interconnected via gateways to some cloud from the global Internet. Inter-networked sensors and actuators in the industrial IoT form a critical subsystem while frequently operating under harsh conditions. It is currently under debate how to approach inte…
Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) play a major role in the expansion of the Internet of Things (IoT) market as they allow the deployment of low cost and low power networks possibly in large areas. The introduction of the 6LoWPAN standard allowed WSN to move into the IPv6 era, with a seamless integration of sensors into external networks. The recent application of IoT in industrial systems is now introducing new traffic patterns - machine to machine (M2M) above the others - and communication challenges that can modify the classical multipoint-to-point pattern of WSN, having the sink as the root o…
Wireless medium access control (MAC) and routing protocols are fundamental building blocks of the Internet of Things (IoT). As new IoT networking standards are being proposed and different existing solutions patched, evaluating the end-to-end performance of the network becomes challenging. Specific solutions designed to be beneficial, when stacked may have detrimental effects on the overall network performance. In this paper, an analysis of MAC and routing protocols for IoT is provided with focus on the IEEE 802.15.4 MAC and the IETF RPL standards. It is shown that existing routing metrics do …
The heterogeneous and distributed nature of the Internet of Things (IoT) is driving the need for extremely fast and fine-grained service provisioning in 5/5+G architectures and beyond. To meet these needs, it is critical to enable efficient and flexible computation and networking fabrics, that can be rapidly reconfigured to meet the computation and communication tasks at hand. In this article, we propose a novel Fog Computing architecture that translates IoT communications into service transactions, provisioned over a fast and efficient networking fabric. Service matching is provided by a netw…
IOTA Tangle is a distributed ledger technology (DLT), primarily designed for Internet-of-Things (IoT) networks and applications. IOTA Tangle utilizes a direct acyclic graph (DAG) structure for the ledger, with its protocol offering features attractive to the IoT domain, over most blockchain alternatives, such as feeless transactions, higher achievable transactions per second (TPS), and lower energy consumption. The original IOTA implementation relied on a bootstrap centralized coordinator solution for consensus which limited its degree of decentralization and scalability. This concern, alongsi…
To effectively tackle the security threats towards the Internet of things, we propose a SOM-based DDoS defense mechanism using software-defined networking (SDN) in this paper. The main idea of the mechanism is to deploy a SDN-based gateway to protect the device services in the Internet of things. The gateway provides DDoS defense mechanism based on SOM neural network. By means of SOM-based DDoS defense mechanism, the gateway can effectively identify the malicious sensing devices in the IoT, and automatically block those malicious devices after detecting them, so that it can effectively enforce…
Communication networks are used today everywhere and on every scale: starting from small Internet of Things (IoT) networks at home, via campus and enterprise networks, and up to tier-one networks of Internet providers. Accordingly, network devices should support a plethora of tasks with highly heterogeneous characteristics in terms of processing time, bandwidth energy consumption, deadlines and so on. Evaluating these characteristics and the amount of currently available resources for handling them requires analyzing all the arriving inputs, gathering information from numerous remote devices, …
The adoption of Software Defined Networking (SDN) within traditional networks has provided operators the ability to manage diverse resources and easily reconfigure networks as requirements change. Recent research has extended this concept to IEEE 802.15.4 low-power wireless networks, which form a key component of the Internet of Things (IoT). However, the multiple traffic patterns necessary for SDN control makes it difficult to apply this approach to these highly challenging environments. This paper presents Atomic-SDN, a highly reliable and low-latency solution for SDN in low-power wireless. …
In this paper, we propose RECOUP, a reliable group communication routing protocol for IoT networks. RECOUP efficiently uses a low-overhead cluster-based multicast routing technique on top of the RPL protocol. RECOUP increases the probability of message delivery to the intended destination(s), irrespective of the network size and faults (such as broken links or non-responsive nodes), and in the presence of misbehaving nodes.We show that the cluster-based routing mechanism of RECOUP remains robust in presence of various topology (i.e., rank and sybil) and data communication (i.e., blackhole, wor…
Security in the Internet of Things (IoT) requires ways to regularly update firmware in the field. These demands ever increase with new, agile concepts such as security as code and should be considered a regular operation. Hosting massive firmware roll-outs present a crucial challenge for the constrained wireless environment. In this paper, we explore how information-centric networking can ease reliable firmware updates. We start from the recent standards developed by the IETF SUIT working group and contribute a system that allows for a timely discovery of new firmware versions by using cryptog…
Bluetooth (BT) has revolutionized close-range communication enabling smart capabilities in everyday devices through wireless technology. One of the most important sub-domains of Internet-of-Things (IoT) specializes in the usage of BT technologies to develop smart homes and environments, which include hospitals, buildings, shopping facilities, etc. to offer a wide-range of features, like instantaneous and remote access to ventilation, lighting, security, localization, and tracking. However, the deployment of such features in smart infrastructures are typically unaccompanied by appropriate secur…
As one of the most promising applications in future Internet of Things, Internet of Vehicles (IoV) has been acknowledged as a fundamental technology for developing the Intelligent Transportation Systems in smart cities. With the emergence of the sixth generation (6G) communications technologies, massive network infrastructures will be densely deployed and the number of network nodes will increase exponentially, leading to extremely high energy consumption. There has been an upsurge of interest to develop the green IoV towards sustainable vehicular communication and networking in the 6G era. In…
Big data production in industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is evident due to the massive deployment of sensors and Internet of Things (IoT) devices. However, big data processing is challenging due to limited computational, networking and storage resources at IoT device-end. Big data analytics (BDA) is expected to provide operational- and customer-level intelligence in IIoT systems. Although numerous studies on IIoT and BDA exist, only a few studies have explored the convergence of the two paradigms. In this study, we investigate the recent BDA technologies, algorithms and techniques that can …
This paper debates on notions of context-awareness as a relevant asset of networking and computing architectures for an Internet of Things (IoT), in particular in regards to a smoother support of the the networking operation between Cloud and Edge. Specifically, the paper debates on notions of context-awareness and goes over different types of context-awareness indicators that are being applied to Edge selection algorithms, covering the approaches currently used, the role of the algorithms applied, their scope, and contemplated performance metrics. Lastly, the paper provides guidelines for fut…
