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Dependable IoT Networking

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A special issue of Sensors (ISSN 1424-8220). This special issue belongs to the section "Sensor Networks".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 April 2021) | Viewed by 17198

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Special Issue Editors

Dr. Fabrice Theoleyre

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Guest Editor

CNRS, 3 Rue Michel Ange, 75016 Paris, France
Interests: wireless networking; IIoT; distributed algorithms; 5G; dependable networks; reproducibility

Prof. Carlo Alberto Boano

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor

Graz University of Technology, Graz, Austria
Interests: Internet of Things; Wireless Sensor Networks; Embedded Systems; Dependability; Benchmarking; Cyber-Physical Systems.

Prof. Dr. Jia-Liang Lu

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor

Shanghai Jiao-tong University, Shanghai, China
Interests: machine learning; security; IoT; data analytics; edge computing

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Networked-embedded systems have been increasingly used to design novel IoT/CPS solutions and to develop a plethora of applications with a high societal relevance, such as smart homes, smart cities, smart healthcare, and smart production. Especially in safety-critical domains, these applications require dependable communication performance and need to meet tight reliability and availability requirements. To this end, after years spent designing low-power wireless networking solutions for best-effort applications, there is an increasing need for reliable and efficient protocols, standards, and algorithms to enable the real-world deployments of applications with strict dependability requirements.

This Special Issue targets scientific contributions tackling these issues. Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

Communication protocols for IoT and cyberphysical systems;
Routing protocols and scheduling algorithms;
Dependability (real-time, reliability, availability, safety);
Fault-tolerant systems;
Low-power wireless and networked embedded systems;
Reliability despite harsh environmental conditions;
Edge computing;
Experiences from real-world deployments;
Benchmarking and testbeds;
Wireless coexistence in dense deployments;
Radio interference identification and mitigation;
Communication standards and technologies for IoT and cyberphysical systems;
Industrial IoT systems and networks;
QoS in the IoT, CPS, and Industry 4.0 contexts;
Wired and wireless convergence;
Technical assessment of emerging IoT standards;
Discovery, coordination, and use of IoT services;
Opportunistic scheduling and software-defined networking;
Network coding, virtualization, and slicing;
Multi-technology hardware and software solutions;
Operations, administration and management (OAM), and monitoring;
Data processing and edge computing;
Real-time big data analytics;
Energy sustainability, efficiency and harvesting.

Prof. Carlo Alberto Boano
Dr. Fabrice Theoleyre
Prof. Dr. Jia-Liang Lu
Guest Editors

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Keywords

Fault-tolerant systems; Low-power wireless network; Industrial IoT systems and networks

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Published Papers (5 papers)

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Research

20 pages, 4373 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Towards Dependable IoT via Interface Selection: Predicting Packet Delivery at the End Node in LoRaWAN Networks

by Marc Guerrero, Cristina Cano, Xavier Vilajosana and Pascal Thubert

Sensors 2021, 21(8), 2707; https://doi.org/10.3390/s21082707 - 12 Apr 2021

Cited by 9 | Viewed by 2445

Abstract

Estimating channel conditions to predict packet delivery can be exploited as a powerful tool to ensure wireless networks dependability. In this article we explore the practical application of this idea from the end-device perspective, using the LoRaWAN protocol stack. We aim to understand if packet delivery can be estimated considering different levels of feedback at the end-device. For that, an extensive data collection campaign is carried out. Through an analysis of the obtained traces, we establish correlations between connectivity metrics at the end node and the fact that a packet is received at the gateway. The study is complemented considering different levels of feedback: (i) No feedback, (ii) enabling acknowledgements frames, and (iii) considering application/control plane data about the channel status at the gateway side. The results show that it is possible to estimate packet delivery in all the evaluated cases. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Dependable IoT Networking)

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21 pages, 742 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Performance of the Transport Layer Security Handshake Over 6TiSCH

by Timothy Claeys, Mališa Vučinić, Thomas Watteyne, Franck Rousseau and Bernard Tourancheau

Sensors 2021, 21(6), 2192; https://doi.org/10.3390/s21062192 - 21 Mar 2021

Cited by 4 | Viewed by 3887

Abstract

This paper presents a thorough comparison of the Transport Layer Security (TLS) v1.2 and Datagram TLS (DTLS) v1.2 handshake in 6TiSCH networks. TLS and DTLS play a crucial role in protecting daily Internet traffic, while 6TiSCH is a major low-power link layer technology for the IoT. In recent years, DTLS has been the de-facto security protocol to protect IoT application traffic, mainly because it runs over lightweight, unreliable transport protocols, i.e., UDP. However, unlike the DTLS record layer, the handshake requires reliable message delivery. It, therefore, incorporates sequence numbers, a retransmission timer, and a fragmentation algorithm. Our goal is to study how well these mechanisms perform, in the constrained setting of 6TiSCH, compared to TCP’s reliability algorithms, relied upon by TLS. We port the mbedTLS library to OpenWSN, a 6TiSCH reference implementation, and deploy the code on the state-of-the-art OpenMote platform. We show that, when the peers use an ideal channel, the DTLS handshake uses up to 800 less and completes

0.6

s faster. Nonetheless, using an unreliable communication link, the DTLS handshake duration suffers a performance penalty of roughly

45 %

, while TLS’ handshake duration degrades by merely

15 %

. Similarly, the number of exchanged bytes doubles for DTLS while for TLS the increase is limited to

15 %

. The results indicate that IoT product developers should account for network characteristics when selecting a security protocol. Neglecting to do so can negatively impact the battery lifetime of the entire constrained network. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Dependable IoT Networking)

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20 pages, 1670 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Defragmenting the 6LoWPAN Fragmentation Landscape: A Performance Evaluation

by Amaury Bruniaux, Remous-Aris Koutsiamanis, Georgios Z. Papadopoulos and Nicolas Montavont

Sensors 2021, 21(5), 1711; https://doi.org/10.3390/s21051711 - 2 Mar 2021

Cited by 5 | Viewed by 3018

Abstract

The emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) has made wireless connectivity ubiquitous and necessary. Extending the IoT to the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) places significant demands in terms of reliability on wireless connectivity. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Std 802.15.4-2015 standard was designed in response to these demands, and the IPv6 over Low power Wireless Personal Area Networks (6LoWPAN) adaptation layer was introduced to address (among other issues) its payload size limitations by performing packet compression and fragmentation. However, the standardised method does not cope well with low link-quality situations and, thus, we present the state-of-the-art Forward Error Correction (FEC) methods and introduce our own contribution, Network Coding FEC (NCFEC), to improve performance in these situations. We present and analyse the existing methods as well as our own theoretically, and we then implement them and perform an experimental evaluation using the 6TiSCH simulator. The simulation results demonstrate that when high reliability is required and only low quality links are available, NCFEC performs best, with a trade-off between additional network and computational overhead. In situations where the link quality can be guaranteed to be higher, simpler solutions also start to be feasible, but with reduced adaptation flexibility. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Dependable IoT Networking)

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14 pages, 2175 KiB

Open AccessArticle

6DYN : 6TiSCH with Heterogeneous Slot Durations

by Mina Rady, Quentin Lampin, Dominique Barthel and Thomas Watteyne

Sensors 2021, 21(5), 1611; https://doi.org/10.3390/s21051611 - 25 Feb 2021

Cited by 8 | Viewed by 2451

Abstract

New radio chips implement different physical layers, allowing firmware to change modulation, datarate and frequency dynamically. This technological development is an opportunity for industrial low-power wireless networks to offer even higher determinism, including latency predictability. This article introduces 6DYN, an extension to the IETF 6TiSCH standards-based protocol stack. In a 6DYN network, nodes switch physical layer dynamically on a link-by-link basis, in order to exploit the diversity offered by this new technology agility. To offer low latency and high network capacity, 6DYN uses heterogeneous slot durations: the length of a slot in the 6TiSCH schedule depends on the physical layer used. This article shows how reserved bits in 6TiSCH headers can be used to standardize 6DYN and details its implementation in OpenWSN, a reference implementation of 6TiSCH. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Dependable IoT Networking)

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23 pages, 44516 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Experimental Evaluation of the Packet Reception Performance of LoRa

by Qingjie Guo, Fengxu Yang and Jianming Wei

Sensors 2021, 21(4), 1071; https://doi.org/10.3390/s21041071 - 4 Feb 2021

Cited by 19 | Viewed by 4154

Abstract

LoRa technology is currently one of the most popular Internet of Things (IoT) technologies. A substantial number of LoRa devices have been applied in a wide variety of real-world scenarios, and developers can adjust the packet reception performance of LoRa through physical layer parameter configuration to meet the requirements. However, since the important details of the relationship between the physical layer parameters and the packet reception performance of LoRa remain unknown, it is a challenge to choose the appropriate parameter configuration to meet the requirements of the scenarios. Moreover, with the increase in application scenarios, the requirements for energy consumption become increasingly high. Therefore, it is also a challenge to know how to configure the parameters to maximize the energy efficiency while maintaining a high data rate. In this work, a complex evaluation experiment on the communication capability under a negative Signal to Noise Ratio is presented, and the specific details of the relationship between physical layer parameters and the packet reception performance of LoRa are clarified. Furthermore, we study the impact of the packet length on the packet reception performance of LoRa, and the experimental results show that when there is a large amount of data to be transmitted, it is better to choose long packets instead of short packets. Finally, considering the influence of physical layer parameters and the packet length on the packet reception performance of LoRa, the optimal parameter combination is explored, so as to propose a transmission scheme with a balanced reliability, delay, and energy consumption. This scheme is the first to consider the physical layer parameters and packet length together to study the communication transmission scheme, which reduces the communication time by 50% compared with the traditional transmission scheme and greatly reduces the energy consumption. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Dependable IoT Networking)

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