The Internet of Things: an academic perspective

Bhaskar Krishnamachari

bkrishna@usc.edu

http://anrg.usc.edu

An updated version of slides presented at IEEE SECON 2014, Singapore, July 2, 2014.

Networking Research• The Internet

• Cellular Networks

• ATM

• WLANs

• P2P Overlay Networks

• Mobile Ad Hoc Networks / Static Wireless Mesh Networks

• Delay Tolerant Networks

• Wireless Sensor Networks / Low-Power Wireless Embedded Systems

• Cognitive Radio Networks

• Cyber-Physical Systems

• Data Center Networks

• Software Defined Networking

• Participatory and Mobile Sensing

• Vehicular Networks

• Internet of Things

There have been a dizzyingnumber of topics in networking research as we have sought and explored a number of emergingfrontiers.

Is the Internet of Things somethingnew? Does the research community have something to contribute to it?

My view is somewhat optimistic, thatit represents an attempt to bring about a convergence, a consolidation of previous research divided into silosinto a new Internet, one that maylook quite different from the Internetwe have had all these years.

IoT implications for networking research

• Emerging new applications: Smart Buildings, eHealth, Smart Grid, Smart Cities… providing requirements for new network protocols

• Greater emphasis on heterogeneity, interoperability, large-scale

• Connecting networking research across multiple domains, for all applications to the “IP-over-everything, everything-over-IP” paradigm

Low Power Wireless Embedded Systems -SuccessesOver the past decade, Wireless Sensor Networks Research has produced a number of practically useful algorithms and protocols, that will help incorporate embedded systems into the Internet of things:

• HW Platforms – Motes

• Operating Systems – TinyOS, Contiki

• Asynchronous Sleep / Low Power Links – LPL, BMAC, XMAC, AMAC

• Time Synchronization – RBS, TPSN, FTSP

• RF Localization – Fingerprinting, MLE, SBL, Radio Tomography

• Reliable Routing – CTP, BCP, Glossy

• Congestion Control – IFRC, WRCP, RCRT, Flush

• TDMA/FDMA-based Scheduling – TSMP, WirelessHART, PIP, MCC

• Application Deployments – Precision Agriculture, Ecological Monitoring, Industrial Sensing, Building Automation, Structural Health Monitoring

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Towards the Internet of Things - Successes

There are several examples of the research community and the IETF addressing key challenges in integrating the WSN research with the IP world:

• IP addressing for constrained devices – 6LoWPAN

• IP stacks on embedded devices – BLIP, Contiki IP stack

• IP based routing in wireless embedded networks – RPL, BackIP

• Heterogeneous sensor data management - sMAP

• Web services for constrained devices – CoAP

Towards the Internet of Things – Research ChallengesThere are a number of challenging problems that are still open for networking researchers to tackle with respect to the Internet of Things:

• How to integrate IP with data-centric concepts, enabling in-network processing and aggregation?

• How to leverage the increasingly close linkage between computation and communication? This is driven by the emergence and increasing prevalence of cloud computing and network virtualization.

• How to integrate different networking domains and concepts together ? E.g., how to combine static sensing and actuation with intermittently connected mobile nodes (such as vehicular sensing and V2V+V2I communications), leveraging at the same time the existing cellular infrastructure in urban environments?

• How to incentivize participation and cooperation (at the level of individuals as well as service providers)? I envision a greater role for network economics research to address these questions.

• How to deal with the many privacy and security issues that arise in this setting?

• What evaluation methodology to employ? For large-scale systems research, there will be a shift from full empirical evaluation to partial emulation, greater reliance on measurements and trace-based simulations

Thanks