Internet of Things (IoT) is an integration of the Sensor, Embedded, Computing, and Communication technologies. The purpose of the IoT is to provide seamless services to anything, anytime at any place. IoT technologies play a crucial role everywhere, which brings the fourth revolution of disruptive technologies after the internet and Information and Communication Technology (ICT). The Research & Development community has predicted that the impact of IoT will be more than the internet and ICT on society, which improves the well-being of society and industries. Addressing the predominant system-level design aspects like energy efficiency, robustness, scalability, interoperability, and security issues result in the use of a potential IoT system. This paper presents the current state of art of the functional pillars of IoT and its emerging applications to motivate academicians and researches to develop real-time, energy-efficient, scalable, reliable, and secure IoT applications. This paper summarizes the architecture of IoT, with the contemporary status of IoT architectures. Highlights of the IoT system-level issues to develop more advanced real-time IoT applications have been discussed. Millions of devices exchange information using different communication standards, and interoperability between them is a significant issue. This paper provides the current status of the communication standards and application layer protocols used in IoT with the detailed analysis. The computing paradigms like Cloud, Cloudlet, Fog, and Edge computing facilitate IoT with various services like data offloading, resource and device management, etc. In this paper, an exhaustive analysis of Edge Computing in IoT with different edge computing architectures and existing status are deliberated. The widespread adoption of IoT in society has resulted in privacy and security issues. This paper emphasizes on analyzing the security challenges, privacy and security threats, conventional mitigation techniques, and further scope for IoT security. The features like fewer memory footprints, scheduling, real-time task execution, fewer interrupt, and thread switching latency of Real-Time Operating Systems (RTOS) enables the development of time critical IoT applications. Also, this review offers the analysis of the RTOS’s suitable for IoT with the current status and networking stack. Finally, open research issues in IoT system development are discussed.

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An Empirical Study on System Level Aspects of Internet of Things (IoT)

The Internet of Things (IoT) has many applications, including Industry 4.0. There are a number of challenges when deploying IoT devices in the Industry 4.0 setting, partly due to the low-cost IoT devices/nodes with limited capacity to run/support security solutions. Hence, there is a need for a lightweight and efficient security solution to protect the environment. Thus, in this article, we present a robust, lightweight, and provably secure authentication and key agreement protocol specifically for the IoT environment based on a hierarchical approach. The proposed protocol relies on lightweight operations, such as elliptic curve cryptography, physically unclonable functions, hash functions, concatenation, and XOR operations. We then evaluate the security of the designed protocol, including the widely used automated validation of Internet security protocols and applications (AVISPA), and demonstrate that it supports mutual authentication between IoT nodes and server, and is resilient against a number of common security attacks [denial of service (DoS), replay, spoofing, etc.]. The computational and communication overhead analysis shows that the proposed protocol is comparatively less expensive than three other recently published, competing protocols.

Toward Secure and Provable Authentication for Internet of Things: Realizing Industry 4.0

The Internet of Things (IoT) is transforming the whole of society. It represents the next evolution of the Internet and will significantly improve the ability to gather and analyze data, as well as the ability to control devices remotely. In this respect, the usage of connected devices is continuously growing with the expansion of the applications being offered to individuals and industries. To address IoT market needs, many low-power wide-area (LPWA) technologies have been developed, some operating on licensed frequencies (e.g., narrowband-IoT [NB-IoT] and Long-Term Evolution-M [LTE-M]), and others on unlicensed frequencies (e.g., LoRa, Sigfox, etc.). In this article, we address the Release 13 of the NB-IoT 3rd generation partnership project (3GPP) standardized LPWA technology and provide a tutorial on its physical layer (PHY) design. Specifically, we focus on the characteristics and the scheduling of downlink and uplink physical channels at the NB-IoT base station side and the user equipment (UE) side. The goal is to help readers easily understand the NB-IoT system without having to read all the 3GPP specifications or the state-of-the-art papers that generally describe the system. To this end, each presented concept is followed by examples and concrete use-cases to further aid in the reader’s comprehension. Finally, we briefly describe and highlight the new features added to the NB-IoT system in Releases 14 and 15.

https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02952155/document

A Tutorial on NB-IoT Physical Layer Design

Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is present in many participants from the energy, health, manufacturing, transport, and public sectors. Many factors catalyze IIoT, such as robotics, artificial intelligence, and intelligent decentralized manufacturing. However, the convergence between IT, OT, and IoT environments involves the integration of heterogeneous technologies through protocols, standards, and buses. However, this integration brings with it security risks. To avoid the security risks, especially when systems in different environments interact, it is important and urgent to create an early consensus among the stakeholders on the IIoT security. The default Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) offers a mechanism to measure the severity of an asset's vulnerability and therefore a way to characterize the risk. However, CVSS by default has two drawbacks. On the one hand, to carry out a risk analysis, it is necessary to have additional metrics to the one established by CVSSv3.1. On the other hand, this index has been used mostly in IT environments and although there are numerous efforts to develop a model that suits industrial environments, there is no established proposal. Therefore, we first propose a survey of the main 33 protocols, standards, and buses used in an IIoT environment. This survey will focus on the security of each one. The second part of our study consists of the creation of a framework to characterize risk in industrial environments, i.e., to solve both problems of the CVSS index. To this end, we created the Vulnerability Analysis Framework (VAF), which is a methodology that allows the analysis of 1,363 vulnerabilities to establish a measure to describe the risk in IIoT environments.

A Survey of IIoT Protocols: A Measure of Vulnerability Risk Analysis Based on CVSS

The Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) has been introduced in the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) Rel-13 with the aim to provide low-cost, low-power, wide-area cellular connectivity for the Internet of Things. With the exponentially increasing number of connected wireless devices in the order of 100 billion, it has become crucial that researchers develop efficient resource management techniques to meet the 5 th Generation (5G) quality of service (QoS) requirements. Recently, several research challenges including the low modulation data rates, energy-expensive channel coding techniques, and the fast-growing number of connected devices have been identified as some of the main issues encountered in the design and deployment of NB-IoT systems. In addition, several techniques have emerged in the literature to resolve some of these challenges of NB-IoT systems. However, the research activities towards the enhancement of the NB-IoT resource management are yet to continue in the next half-decade before, high data rates, energy-efficient, and scalable NB-IoT specifications can be released for the standardisation and commercialisation. Considering the limited number of existing surveys of such technical enhancement approaches in a broader perspective (i.e. energy efficiency, data rate performance and scalability) and also the non-existence, to the best of our knowledge, of a comparative survey, this paper seeks to elaborate, describe and compare the performances of such resources management approaches. Of the multiple NB-IoT resources, the focus of this paper is on the data rate, energy efficiency, and scalability enhancement schemes that have been proposed for the last three years. The contribution of the paper lies in the analysis, synthesis, comparison and summarised alignments of some of the major existing schemes towards identifying challenges faced by the NB-IoT development. Finally, this work seeks to identify research challenges, open questions, and opportunities that could arise from the existing techniques analysed.

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The Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) Resources Management Performance State of Art, Challenges, and Opportunities

Narrowband internet of things (NB-IoT) is a recent cellular radio access technology based on Long-Term Evolution (LTE) introduced by Third-Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) for Low-Power Wide-Area Networks (LPWAN). The main aim of NB-IoT is to support massive machine-type communication (mMTC) and enable low-power, low-cost, and low-data-rate communication. NB-IoT is based on LTE design with some changes to meet the mMTC requirements. For example, in the physical (PHY) layer only single-antenna and low-order modulations are supported, and in the Medium Access Control (MAC) layers only one physical resource block is allocated for resource scheduling. The aim of this survey is to provide a comprehensive overview of the design changes brought in the NB-IoT standardization along with the detailed research developments from the perspectives of Physical and MAC layers. The survey also includes an overview of Evolved Packet Core (EPC) changes to support the Service Capability Exposure Function (SCEF) to manage both IP and non-IP data packets through Control Plane (CP) and User Plane (UP), the possible deployment scenarios of NB-IoT in future Heterogeneous Wireless Networks (HetNet). Finally, existing and emerging research challenges in this direction are presented to motivate future research activities.

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Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT): From Physical (PHY) and Media Access Control (MAC) Layers Perspectives

The design changes on the physical (PHY) layer, i.e. the limited system bandwidth of one physical resource block (PRB), single antenna support, lower-order modulations, etc. inhibit the mapping of traditional long term evolution (LTE) radio resource management techniques to narrowband internet of things (NB-IoT) systems. Consequently, possible interference due to massive connectivity may severely degrade the expected system performance. In this regard, we propose an interference avoidance scheduling algorithm for NB-IoT systems. The algorithm entails a cooperative strategy in which the base stations share their respective scheduling tables which are then used to compute the interference for future transmitting user equipment (UEs). The computed interference values are then used as input to individual base station schedulers to perform scheduling. Each base station's scheduler then allocates the radio resources to the UEs with the lowest possible interference. Extensive simulations are carried out to analyze the performance of our proposed algorithm and compare it to the conventional Round-Robin scheduling scheme. The results show that our proposed algorithm provides up to 36 % throughput improvement to the NB-IoT UE as compared to Round-Robin. Similarly, for the same device's locations, the UEs are experiencing relatively better maximum coupling loss (MCL) which results in lower repetition numbers per coverage class.

Cooperative Interference Avoidance Scheduler for Radio Resource Management in NB-IoT Systems

In this paper, we propose an inter-cell interference (ICI) minimization scheme for uplink transmission in the narrowband internet of things (NB-IoT) systems. We first establish the theoretical ICI problem formulation and propose its corresponding solution for the orthogonal multiple access (OMA) NB-IoT system. Based on the theoretical formulation, we design a cooperative radio resource scheduler that reduces the impact of ICI and allocates transmit powers to reduce the energy consumption to the scheduled users in a multi-cell scenario. We compare the performance of the proposed scheme with that of some benchmark OMA schedulers. The results show that the proposed technique significantly reduces the impact of ICI and hence is more suitable for the massive connectivity of the NB-IoT system. For example, the users operating under the proposed approach experience up to 50% reduced energy consumption when compared to the best channel quality indicator (CQI) scheme. Furthermore, 30% and 35% improvements in terms of achieved user's data rates are obtained as compared to the MaxMin and round-robin schemes, respectively.

Collins Burton Mwakwata

Papers

Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT): From Physical (PHY) and Media Access Control (MAC) Layers Perspectives

Cooperative Interference Avoidance Scheduler for Radio Resource Management in NB-IoT Systems

Inter-cell Interference Reduction Scheme for Uplink Transmission in NB-IoT Systems