Laurynas Riliskis

Beetle: Flexible Communication for Bluetooth Low Energy

The next generation of computing peripherals will be low-power ubiquitous computing devices such as door locks, smart watches, and heart rate monitors. Bluetooth Low Energy is a primary protocol for connecting such peripherals to mobile and gateway devices. Current operating system support for Bluetooth Low Energy forces peripherals into vertical application silos. As a result, simple, intuitive applications such as opening a door with a smart watch or simultaneously logging and viewing heart rate data are impossible. We present Beetle, a new hardware interface that virtualizes peripherals at the application layer, allowing safe access by multiple programs without requiring the operating system to understand hardware functionality, fine-grained access control to peripheral device resources, and transparent access to peripherals connected over the network. We describe a series of novel applications that are impossible with existing abstractions but simple to implement with Beetle.

Ravel: Programming IoT Applications as Distributed Models, Views, and Controllers

The embedded sensor networks are a promising technology to improve our life with home and industrial automation, health monitoring, and sensing and actuation in agriculture. Fitness trackers, thermostats, door locks are just a few examples of Internet of Things that have already become part of our everyday life. Despite advances in sensors, microcontrollers, signal processing, networking and programming languages, developing an Internet of Things application is a laborious task. Many of these complex distributed systems share a 3-tier architecture consisting of embedded nodes, gateways that connect an embedded network to the wider Internet and data services in servers or the cloud. Yet the IoT applications are developed for each tier separately. Consequently, the developer needs to amalgamate these distinct applications together. This paper proposes a novel approach for programming applications across 3-tiers using a distributed extension of the Model-View-Controller architecture. We add new primitive: a space - that contains properties and implementation of a particular tier. Writing applications in this architecture affords numerous advantages: automatic model synchronization, data transport, and energy efficiency.

Symphony: A Framework for Accurate and Holistic WSN Simulation

Research on wireless sensor networks has progressed rapidly over the last decade, and these technologies have been widely adopted for both industrial and domestic uses. Several operating systems have been developed, along with a multitude of network protocols for all layers of the communication stack. Industrial Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) systems must satisfy strict criteria and are typically more complex and larger in scale than domestic systems. Together with the non-deterministic behavior of network hardware in real settings, this greatly complicates the debugging and testing of WSN functionality. To facilitate the testing, validation, and debugging of large-scale WSN systems, we have developed a simulation framework that accurately reproduces the processes that occur inside real equipment, including both hardware- and software-induced delays. The core of the framework consists of a virtualized operating system and an emulated hardware platform that is integrated with the general purpose network simulator ns-3. Our framework enables the user to adjust the real code base as would be done in real deployments and also to test the boundary effects of different hardware components on the performance of distributed applications and protocols. Additionally we have developed a clock emulator with several different skew models and a component that handles sensory data feeds. The new framework should substantially shorten WSN application development cycles.

A configurable cloud-based testing infrastructure for interoperable distributed automation systems

The interoperability between various automation systems is considered as one of the major character of future automation systems. Service-oriented Architecture is a possible interoperability enabler between legacy and future automation systems. In order to prove the interoperability between those systems, a verification framework is essential. This paper proposes a configurable cloud-based validation environment for interoperability tests between various distributed automation systems. The testing framework is implemented in a multi-layer structure which provides automated closed-loop testing from the protocol level to the system level. The testing infrastructure is also capable for simulating automation systems as well as wireless sensor networks in the cloud. Test cases could be automatically generated and executed by the framework.

A new revolution is underway

INIT computers. Cerf discusses considerations for the IoT when it comes to interoper-ability and standardization, as well as security and privacy. He addresses important questions like: What are the trade-offs between interoperability and long-term profitability of a company, the balance between giving a doctor access to medical information in an emergency while protecting patient data against nefarious uses, and who will, or should, take responsibility when things go wrong? Things can go wrong not because of maliciousness, but because of miscommu-nication. With so many new devices we need new ways to interact with them, both for them to understand us and for us to understand them. Jonathan Caras addresses the important topic of interaction with things, and how this can lead to magical experiences. Not only is the way we will interact with the sensors important, but also the capability to personalize the experience. With all the data produced from surrounding devices, we will need to choose and prioritize—very much as we do today with our news feed—what is important to us and what is not. It is the possibility of person-alization and interaction everywhere that will create the magic of the IoT. To have a great user experience we need to enable things E very second of our lives, we rely on five basic senses: sight, touch, hearing, smell, and taste. Using these senses we craft, improve, and progress as a human race. With respect to sensing, Lord Kelvin famously made the following observation in the 19th century: If you can not measure it, you can not improve it. Since then, nearly two centuries of groundbreaking research in mathematics , physics, and chemistry created the scientific revolution that has resulted in the technologies surrounding us today. This revolution made it possible to measure and quantify every aspect of the physical world with a much greater accuracy. Today, we have robots in factories that manufacture faster and more precisely than ever before, devices in buildings that measure and adjust heating and air conditioning, and even cars that can drive mostly on their own. Tomorrow, the Internet of Things (IoT) will take this further by seamlessly expanding our sensing capabilities across the globe with only our imagination as a limit. The IoT refers to the idea of connecting everything to the Internet. This will change the landscape of the Internet as we know it today. No longer …

Ravel a framework for embedded-gateway-cloud applications

Ravel is a software framework for developing sensor network applications that follow the eMbedded-Gateway-Cloud architecture. Developers describe a Ravel application as a data processing pipeline in terms of two abstractions: models and transforms between models. This pipeline generates code for controllers that can compile to and run on any element of the architecture, from embedded devices to cloud servers. Developers also specify views, that represent the data set on a particular device. Therefore, each device type is a space where data flows via transform. The framework automatically handles moving data between spaces using appropriate network protocols. Compile-time tools verify that the code, once modified by the developer, still follows application specification as defined by the data pipeline.

Demo: Tethys -- An Energy Harvesting Networked Water Flow Sensor

We describe Tethys, an energy-harvesting wireless water flow sensor that can monitor water use at a per-fixture level with the intention of associating water use with specific individuals. Tethys was motivated by recent efforts at Stanford University to reduce water use due to the California drought. Understanding how the university population uses water at per-person level can greatly influence policies and conservation approaches. Tethys uses Bluetooth Smart to both identify individuals as well as asynchronously upload data to the cloud for later analysis. We describe two challenges encountered in deploying Tethys: energy harvesting design and the mechanical considerations for high-pressure water at high temperatures.

POSTER: Computations on Encrypted Data in the Internet of Things Applications

We identify and address two primary challenges for computing on encrypted data in Internet of Things applications: synchronizing encrypted data across devices and selecting an appropriate encryption scheme. We propose a caching mechanism that operates across the three devices, enabling interactive order-preserving encryption schemes on resource-constrained devices. Additionally, the system can use a high-level description of an IoT application to select automatically appropriate encryption for the data on corresponding tiers and their mathematical operations. This assists in fine-tuning and choosing the core parameters for underlying data structures.