The IoT paradigm holds the promise to revolutionize the way we live and work by means of a wealth of new services, based on seamless interactions between a large amount of heterogeneous devices. After decades of conceptual inception of the IoT, in recent years a large variety of communication technologies has gradually emerged, reflecting a large diversity of application domains and of communication requirements. Such heterogeneity and fragmentation of the connectivity landscape is currently hampering the full realization of the IoT vision, by posing several complex integration challenges. In this context, the advent of 5G cellular systems, with the availability of a connectivity technology, which is at once truly ubiquitous, reliable, scalable, and cost-efficient, is considered as a potentially key driver for the yet-to emerge global IoT. In the present paper, we analyze in detail the potential of 5G technologies for the IoT, by considering both the technological and standardization aspects. We review the present-day IoT connectivity landscape, as well as the main 5G enablers for the IoT. Last but not least, we illustrate the massive business shifts that a tight link between IoT and 5G may cause in the operator and vendors ecosystem.

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Internet of Things in the 5G Era: Enablers, Architecture, and Business Models

Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is an emerging low-power wireless technology developed for short-range control and monitoring applications that is expected to be incorporated into billions of devices in the next few years. This paper describes the main features of BLE, explores its potential applications, and investigates the impact of various critical parameters on its performance. BLE represents a trade-off between energy consumption, latency, piconet size, and throughput that mainly depends on parameters such as connInterval and connSlaveLatency. According to theoretical results, the lifetime of a BLE device powered by a coin cell battery ranges between 2.0 days and 14.1 years. The number of simultaneous slaves per master ranges between 2 and 5,917. The minimum latency for a master to obtain a sensor reading is 676 μs, although simulation results show that, under high bit error rate, average latency increases by up to three orders of magnitude. The paper provides experimental results that complement the theoretical and simulation findings, and indicates implementation constraints that may reduce BLE performance.

https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/12/9/11734/pdf

Overview and Evaluation of Bluetooth Low Energy: An Emerging Low-Power Wireless Technology

Internet of Things (IoT): A review of enabling technologies, challenges, and open research issues

The Internet of Things (IoT) is the next wave of innovation that promises to improve and optimize our daily life based on intelligent sensors and smart objects working together. Through Internet Protocol (IP) connectivity, devices can now be connected to the Internet, thus allowing them to be read, controlled, and managed at any time and at any place. Security is an important aspect for IoT deployments. However, proprietary security solutions do not help in formulating a coherent security vision to enable IoT devices to securely communicate with each other in an interoperable manner. This paper gives an overview of the efforts in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to standardize security solutions for the IoT ecosystem. We first provide an in-depth review of the communication security solutions for IoT, specifically the standard security protocols to be used in conjunction with the Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP), an application protocol specifically tailored to the needs of adapting to the constraints of IoT devices. Since Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS) has been chosen as the channel security underneath CoAP, this paper also discusses the latest standardization efforts to adapt and enhance the DTLS for IoT applications. This includes the use of 1) raw public key in DTLS; 2) extending DTLS record Layer to protect group (multicast) communication; and 3) profiling DTLS for reducing the size and complexity of implementations on embedded devices. We also provide an extensive review of compression schemes that are being proposed in IETF to mitigate message fragmentation issues in DTLS.

Securing the Internet of Things: A Standardization Perspective

Ultra low power communication mechanisms are essential for future Internet of Things deployments. Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is one promising candidate for such deployments. We study the energy consumption of BLE by measuring real devices with a power monitor and derive models of the basic energy consumption behavior observed from the measurement results. We investigate also the overhead of Ipv6-based communication over BLE, which is relevant for future IoT scenarios. We contrast our results by performing similar measurements with ZigBee/802.15.4 devices. Our results show that when compared to ZigBee, BLE is indeed very energy efficient in terms of number of bytes transferred per Joule spent. In addition, IPv6 communication energy overhead remains reasonable. We also point out a few specific limitations with current stack implementations and explain that removing those limitations could improve energy utility significantly.

/pdf/how-low-energy-is-bluetooth-low-energy-comparative-2vwzg1kksl.pdf

How low energy is bluetooth low energy? Comparative measurements with ZigBee/802.15.4

Bluetooth Smart is the brand name for the Bluetooth low energy feature
in the Bluetooth specification defined by the Bluetooth Special
Interest Group. The standard Bluetooth radio has been widely
implemented and available in mobile phones, notebook computers, audio
headsets, and many other devices. The low-power version of Bluetooth
is a specification that enables the use of this air interface with
devices such as sensors, smart meters, appliances, etc. The low-power
variant of Bluetooth has been standardized since revision 4.0 of the
Bluetooth specifications, although version 4.1 or newer is required
for IPv6. This document describes how IPv6 is transported over
Bluetooth low energy using IPv6 over Low-power Wireless Personal Area
Network (6LoWPAN) techniques.

IPv6 over BLUETOOTH(R) Low Energy

The next wave driving the expansion of the Internet will come from the Internet of Things. Bluetooth LE is a rapidly emerging ultra-low-power radio technology expected to be incorporated in billions of IoT devices in the next few years. Consequently, it is particularly important to specify Internet connectivity solutions for Bluetooth LE. In this article we present such solutions based on the ongoing standardization work in the IETF and Bluetooth Special Interest Group. We prove the feasibility of a complete IP-based protocol stack on constrained devices and illustrate its performance, highlighting key trade-offs. In addition, we discuss gateway operation covering global IPv6 connectivity and proxy-cache functionality.

Networking solutions for connecting bluetooth low energy enabled machines to the internet of things

BLUETOOTH Low Energy is a low power air interface technology defined
by the BLUETOOTH Special Interest Group (BT-SIG). The standard
BLUETOOTH radio has been widely implemented and available in mobile
phones, notebook computers, audio headsets and many other devices. The
low power version of BLUETOOTH is a new specification that enables the
use of this air interface with devices such as sensors, smart meters,
appliances, etc. The low power variant of BLUETOOTH is currently
specified in the revision 4.0 of the BLUETOOTH specifications
(BLUETOOTH 4.0). This document describes how IPv6 is transported over
BLUETOOTH Low Energy using 6LoWPAN techniques.

Transmission of IPv6 Packets over BLUETOOTH Low Energy

At least one network access point transmits a beacon transmission A user device receiving it determines it does not have credentials necessary to attach with a secure network access point of the at least one network access point, and so forms a preliminary association with the at least one network access point During the preliminary association, the user device receives or creates credentials necessary to associate with the secure network access point, and then forms an association with the secure network access point using the received or created credentials and obtains internet connectivity via the secure network access point In one embodiment there is a non-secure network access point which transmits a beacon using the same SSID as the secure network access point, and the preliminary association is with the non-secure network access point In another embodiment there is only the secure network access point

Dynamic account creation with secured hotspot network

Use of data services in smart phones and broadband services via HSPA
and HSPA+, in particular Internet services, has increased rapidly and
operators that have deployed networks based on 3GPP network
architectures are facing IPv4 address shortages at the Internet
registries and are feeling a pressure to migrate to IPv6. This
document describes the support for IPv6 in 3GPP network architectures.

Basavaraj Patil

Papers

IPv6 over BLUETOOTH(R) Low Energy

Networking solutions for connecting bluetooth low energy enabled machines to the internet of things

Transmission of IPv6 Packets over BLUETOOTH Low Energy

Dynamic account creation with secured hotspot network

IPv6 in 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) Evolved Packet System (EPS)