Nicklas Beijar

Capillary networks - bridging the cellular and IoT worlds

The Internet of Things (IoT) represents a new revolutionary era of computing technology that enables a wide variety of devices to interoperate through the existing Internet infrastructure. The potential of this era is boundless, bringing in new communication opportunities in which ubiquitous devices blend seamlessly with the environment and embrace every aspect of our lives. Capillary networks will be a fundamental part of the IoT development, enabling local wireless sensor networks to connect to and efficiently use the capabilities of cellular networks through gateways. As a result, a vast range of constrained devices equipped with only short-range radio can utilize the cellular network capabilities to gain global connectivity, supported with the security, management and virtualization services of the cellular network. This paper introduces a new Capillary Network Platform and describes the rich set of functionalities that this platform enables. To show their practical value, the functionalities are applied to a set of typical scenarios. The aim of this paper is to give the reader insight about the Capillary Network Platform and illustrate how this work can be used to enhance the existing IoT networks and tackle their problems.

Enabling Data Processing at the Network Edge through Lightweight Virtualization Technologies

Cloud computing plays a crucial role in making Internet of Things (IoT) becoming a central part of future industries, society and peoples life. However, the increase of the number of devices connected to the different networks, the huge amount of data produced by them, and the advanced requirements of many IoT applications, has resulted in new technical challenges. This has lead to the introduction of an edge-computing approach, which is intended to make the management of such networks more efficient. The paradigm aims to move part of the data processing operations close to the data sources. Such operations are performed by means of network entities - like IoT gateways or local servers - near the IoT device. In this paper, we describe the design of a multifunctional IoT gateway that, making use of lightweight virtualization technologies such as Docker containers, allows managing different services, including data processing services, so as to enable the migration towards the edge based approach. Furthermore, we show how the introduction of container-based technologies can bring several benefits without impacting the gateway performance.

A survey of identifier–locator split addressing architectures

Abstract The TCP/IP architecture of the Internet was originally designed around the contemporary restrictions of large computers that were difficult to move around. However, electronics followed Moore’s law, resulting in cheaper and smaller electronics for consumers, and portable devices, such as laptops and cellular phones, became pervasive. Consequently, the original restriction on static hosts was no longer true even though is still present in the design of the TCP/IP networking stack. The TCP/IP stack remains still constrained by its original design, which was effectively a design compromise to make the addressing model simpler. As TCP connections are created based on the same addresses used by the underlying network layer, the connections break when the address changes or is removed. Thus, the TCP/IP architecture is challenged in the temporal dimension of addressing as it was designed to assume stable addresses. This is not only problematic from the viewpoint of initial connectivity but also critical in sustaining of active data flows. In this paper, we first outline the challenges related to the inflexible nature of the TCP/IP architecture resulting from the fact that the same namespace is shared between the transport and network layers. We then discuss existing solutions for these challenges that arise from the transient nature of addresses in the TCP/IP architecture. Finally, we perform a qualitative analysis of the solutions discussed in the paper.

Gateway selection in capillary networks

The world is adopting machine-type communication, wherein sensors and actuators blend seamlessly with the environment around us, bringing a new ubiquitous computing and communication era - a shift that is, to some extent, illustrated by the explosive growth of the Internet of Things (IoT). Capillary Networks play an important role in the growth of IoT, enabling wireless sensor networks to connect and use the capabilities of cellular networks through Capillary Gateways. In that sense, Capillary Gateways facilitate the seamless integration of wireless sensor networks with cellular networks. Therefore, an optimal selection of the Capillary Gateways by the wireless sensor network is crucial for balancing the load between the gateways and optimizing the end-to-end path through both networks. This paper describes a set of possible gateway selection architectures and presents an algorithm for determining the gateway selection based on policies and a set of constraints. Then, the paper describes our implementation of two selected architectures, discussing the solutions and challenges encountered during implementation. Finally, the paper evaluates the traffic and load generated by gateway selection.

A Framework based on SDN and Containers for Dynamic Service Chains on IoT Gateways

In this paper, we describe a new approach for managing service function chains in scenarios where data from Internet of Things (IoT) devices is partially processed at the network edge. Our framework is enabled by two emerging technologies, Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and container based virtualization, which ensure several benefits in terms of flexibility, easy programmability, and versatility. These features are well suitable with the increasingly stringent requirements of IoT applications, and allow a dynamic and automated network service chaining. An extensive performance evaluation, which has been carried out by means of a testbed, seeks to understand how our proposed framework performs in terms of computational overhead, network bandwidth, and energy consumption. By accounting for the constraints of typical IoT gateways, our evaluation tries to shed light on the actual deployability of the framework on low-power nodes.

Calculating LWM2M resource semantic distance through SENACT ontology

The concept of Internet of Things (IoT) envisions that any type of device should be able to be connected in any type of environment. Due to the heterogeneity of the scenarios where IoT is applied, the capability discovery and dynamic relationship establishment between devices become relevant. One way to define relation between devices is through similarities in functionality. Thus, we define that two devices are close semantically, or have a short semantic distance between them, when the devices have similar functionalities. We have proposed in a previous work a metric called LwRSD (LWM2M Resource Semantic Distance) to calculate similarities between devices utilizing a subjective approach for weighting properties. In this paper, we describe an ontology called SENACT that allows developing a method to calculate the Semantic Distance between devices using weights determined in an objective way. SENACT builds axioms from sensing and actuation concepts. The results shows that is it possible to group devices with similar functionalities in an objective way using SENACT and uncover properties shared between devices that are not immediately apparent.

Adoption of Constrained Application Protocol: A Techno-Economic Perspective

Among billions of Internet enabled devices that are expected to surround us in the near future, many will be resource constrained, i.e., will have limited power supply, processing power and memory. To cope with these limitations, the Constrained Application Protocol CoAP has been recently introduced as a lightweight alternative to HTTP for connecting the resource limited devices to the Web. Although the new protocol offers solid technical advantages, it remains uncertain whether a successful uptake will follow, as it depends also on its economic feasibility for the involved stakeholders. Therefore, this paper studies the techno-economic feasibility of CoAP using a systematic methodological framework. Based on eleven expert interviews complemented with a literature survey, the paper identifies potential deployment challenges for CoAP, both technical and business-related, and suggests approaches to overcome them. The findings should facilitate the uptake of CoAP by supporting the potential adopters of the protocol in their decision-making.