Hauke Petersen

Operating Systems for Low-End Devices in the Internet of Things: A Survey

The Internet of Things (IoT) is projected to soon interconnect tens of billions of new devices, in large part also connected to the Internet. IoT devices include both high-end devices which can use traditional go-to operating systems (OSs) such as Linux, and low-end devices which cannot, due to stringent resource constraints, e.g., very limited memory, computational power, and power supply. However, large-scale IoT software development, deployment, and maintenance requires an appropriate OS to build upon. In this paper, we thus analyze in detail the specific requirements that an OS should satisfy to run on low-end IoT devices, and we survey applicable OSs, focusing on candidates that could become an equivalent of Linux for such devices, i.e., a one-size-fits-most, open source OS for low-end IoT devices.

The Role of the Internet of Things in Network Resilience

Disasters lead to devastating structural damage not only to buildings and transport infrastructure, but also to other critical infrastructure, such as the power grid and communication backbones. Following such an event, the availability of minimal communication services is however crucial to allow efficient and coordinated disaster response, to enable timely public information, or to provide individuals in need with a default mechanism to post emergency messages. The Internet of Things consists in the massive deployment of heterogeneous devices, most of which battery-powered, and interconnected via wireless network interfaces. In this paper, we argue that the vast deployment of IoT-enabled devices could bring benefits in terms of data network resilience in face of disaster. Leveraging their spontaneous wireless networking capabilities, IoT devices could enable minimal communication services (e.g. emergency micro-message delivery) while the conventional communication infrastructure is out of service. We identify the main challenges that must be addressed in order to realize this potential in practice. These challenges concern various technical aspects, including physical connectivity requirements, network protocol stack enhancements, data traffic prioritization schemes, as well as social and political aspects.

Demonstration abstract: simply RIOT: teaching and experimental research in the internet of things

Manufacturers announce on a regular basis the availability of novel tiny devices, most of them featuring network interfaces: the Internet of Things (IoT) is already here - from the hardware perspective. On the software side however, embedded platforms available so far made it uneasy for developers to build apps that run across heterogeneous IoT hardware. Linux does not scale down to small, energy-constrained devices, while alternatives such as Contiki yield a steep learning curve and lengthy development life-cycles because they rule out standard programming and debugging tools. RIOT is a new open source software platform bridging this gap. RIOT allows just about any programmer to develop IoT application with zero learning curve. This is achieved by allowing standard C and C++ application programming with multi-threading, using well-known debugging tools (gdb, Valgrind, profilers etc.), while requiring only a minimum of 1.5 kB of RAM. RIOT also provides built-in energy efficiency and real-time capabilities. These characteristics make this platform attractive in several contexts, including teaching in the field of the Internet of Things, and experimental research in the domain of sensor networks and the IoT.

Old Wine in New Skins?: Revisiting the Software Architecture for IP Network Stacks on Constrained IoT Devices

In this paper, we argue that existing concepts for the design and implementation of network stacks for constrained devices do not comply with the requirements of current and upcoming Internet of Things (IoT) use cases. The IoT requires not only a lightweight but also a modular network stack, based on standards. We discuss functional and non-functional requirements for the software architecture of the network stack on constrained IoT devices. Then, revisiting concepts from the early Internet as well as current implementations, we propose a future-proof alternative to existing IoT network stack architectures, and provide an initial evaluation of this proposal based on its implementation running on top of state-of-the-art IoT operating system and hardware.

Information-centric networking for the industrial IoT

The wireless Internet of Things interconnects numerous constrained devices such as sensors and actuators not only with each other, but also with cloud services. We demonstrate a low power and lossy Information-Centric Network interworking with a cloud in an industrial application. Our approach includes a lightweight publish-subscribe system for NDN and an ICN-to-MQTT gateway which translates between NDN names and MQTT topics. This demo is based on RIOT and CCN-lite.

Seamless Producer Mobility for the Industrial Information-Centric Internet

ACM Reference Format: CenkGündoğan1, Peter Kietzmann1, Thomas C. Schmidt1, Martine Lenders2, Hauke Petersen2, Matthias Wählisch2, Michael Frey3, Felix Shzu-Juraschek3 . 2018. Demo: Seamless Producer Mobility for the Industrial InformationCentric Internet. In MobiSys ’18: The 16th Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services, June 10–15, 2018, Munich, Germany. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1 page. https://doi.org/10.1145/3210240. 3211114

Demo: NDN-based IoT robotics

In this paper, we demonstrate how NDN can be used as network primitive on low-cost robots with the Robot Operating System (ROS).