Urban expansion is a key driving force of our modern world. Increasing environmental footprint is an example issue that is directly caused by it. The city of St. Petersburg employs on average almost 500 garbage trucks on a daily basis and spends more than 1 million US Dollars every year to collect, process and manage waste. In order for megacities, such as St. Petersburg, to cope with its effects, new ideas are needed. This seems to be an obvious area in which technology can be used to improve current practices and help save resources. In this study, we investigate how the Internet of Things, blockchain and Quantum Key Distribution systems can be integrated to provide a safe and efficient method for improving the waste management process in the context of Smart City projects. Our implemented simulations in Mininet show that there are some clear challenges with regards to the adoption of blockchain technology in an IoT environment. However, the integration of quantum channels and the use of Quantum Key Distribution within the blockchain infrastructure shows good potential for balancing the advantages and disadvantages of blockchain. With the implemented simulations we demonstrate the superior capabilities of the Proof of Infrastructure blockchain solution, which can facilitate secure transactions within the waste management scenario.

Air pollution is a severe issue in many big cities due to population growth and the rapid development of the economy and industry. This leads to the proliferating need to monitor urban air quality to avoid personal exposure and to make savvy decisions on managing the environment. In the last decades, the Internet of Things (IoT) is increasingly being applied to environmental challenges, including air quality monitoring and visualization. In this thesis, we present CAVisAP, a context-aware system for outdoor air pollution visualization with IoT platforms. The system aims to provide context-aware visualization of three air pollutants such as nitrogen dioxide (NO2), ozone (O3) and particulate matter (PM2.5) in Melbourne, Australia and Skellefteå, Sweden. In addition to the primary context as location and time, CAVisAP takes into account users’ pollutant sensitivity levels and colour vision impairments to provide personalized pollution maps and pollution-based route planning. Experiments are conducted to validate the system and results are discussed.

Building Automation System (BAS) is a complex distributed control system that is widely deployed in commercial, residential, industrial buildings for monitoring and controlling mechanical/electrical equipment. Through increasing industrial and technological advances, the control components of BAS are becoming increasingly interconnected. Along with potential benefits, integration also introduces new attack vectors, which tremendous increases safety and security risks in the control system. Historically, BAS lacks security design and relies on physical isolation and "security through obscurity". These methods are unacceptable with the "smart building" technologies. The industry needs to reevaluate the safety and security of the current building automation system, and design a comprehensive solution to provide integrity, reliability, and confidentiality on both system and network levels. This dissertation focuses on the system level in the effort to provide a reliable computing foundation for the devices and controllers. Leveraged on the preferred security features such as, robust modular design, small privilege code, and formal verifiability of microkernel architecture, this work describes a security enhanced operating system with built-in mandatory access control and a proxy-based communication framework for building automation controllers. This solution ensures policy-enforced communication and isolation between critical applications and non-critical applications in a potentially hostile cyber environment.

This paper aims to study the possibilities and challenges the car industry has to face with applying information technology in cars. The goal is to describe and analyse all the existing technology in the cars out on the market today as well as future possible technologies in cars. By interviewing people who has been working or are working with information technology in cars, we aim to clarify the obstacles and opportunities in the process of implementing informatics in cars. With this knowledge we want to learn more about Ubiquitous computing and how humans interact with Ubiquitous computers today and will be interacting in the future. Technology has a rapid development pace and we find it interesting to examine how the car industry can keep up with the rapid development pace of technology.

In conjunction with the possibility of inexpensive wireless communication, many products of tomorrow are developed with the support for wireless communication. The technology enables the possibilty of wireless communication to small plattforms at a realistic price. The cheap connectivity allows for great creativity and gives the developers imagination a wide discretion in the development of new products. This thesis aims to evaluate how the serial communication protocol Modbus RTU - RS232, performs and behaves when transported through meshed networks (Atmel lightweight mesh will be used in this thesis). The work was commissioned by M2M Solutions in J¨onk¨oping. The report will answer the following questions1. How does Modbus RTU behaves when transported through a meshed network. 2. How does Modbus RTU preform when transported through Atmel Lightweight Mesh.The authors have chosen to conduct action research to answer established questions. A test system consisting of both hardware and software was designed and created. With this system, several different tests were conducted and the results were observed and subjected to reflection. The different tests varied the distance, the network’s composition and location of the network infrastructure. Through observation of the test system and evaluation of the recorded data conclusions concering Modbus RTU’s performance and behavior during transport in Atmel lightweigh mesh has been drawn. The test system has been designed with the help of clients and previously made research. Modbus behaves nominally during transportation through Atmel lightweight mesh. Before the network is fully established, an inability to transport data has beend observed. The performance is evaluated by the time it takes to send data, the time is greatly affected by the following factors; Network composition and changes in signal strength (that creates changes in transport routes). For each additional node that traffic is transported through an increase of 5-10ms in the responstime was noted. The network’s ability to change the transport route is also expected to increase performance. The wireless communication provides a longer range than during transportation by standard conventional cable.Considering the results, the authors believe that Modbus RTU has the potential for use in transportation through wireless, meshed networks. One possible scenario is when several Modbus RTU masters are beeing used and data needs to be transported over large distances.

Evolving smart infrastructures requires both content distribution as well as event notification and processing support. Content Centric Networking (CCN), built around named data, is a clean slate network architecture for supporting future applications. Due to its focus on content distribution, CCN does not inherently support Publish-Subscribe event notification, a fundamental building block in computer mediated systems and a critical requirement for smart infrastructure applications. While semantics of content distribution and event notification require different support systems from the underlying network infrastructure, content distribution and event notification can still be united by leveraging similarities in the routing infrastructure. Our Extended-CCN architecture(X-CCN) realizes this to provide lightweight content based pub-sub service at the network layer, which is used to provide advanced publish/subscribe services at higher layers. Light weight content based pub-sub and CCN communication at network layer along with advanced publish/subscribe together are presented as data fabric for the smart infrastructures applications.

Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) is growing prominence as an automated identification technology able to turn everyday objects into an ad-hoc network of mobile nodes; which can track, trigger events and perform actions. Energy scavenging and backscattering techniques are the foundation of low-cost identification solutions for RFIDs. The performance of these two techniques, being wireless, significantly depends on the underlying communication architecture and affect the overall operation of RFID systems. Current RFID systems are based on a centralized master-slave architecture hindering the overall performance, scalability and usability. Several proposals have aimed at improving performance at the physical, medium access, and application layers. Although such proposals achieve significant performance gains in terms of reading range and reading rates, they require significant changes in both software and hardware architectures while bounded by inherited performance bottlenecks, i.e., master-slave architecture. Performance constraints need to be addressed in order to further facilitate RFID adoption; especially for ultra large scale applications such as Internet of Things. A natural approach is re-thinking the distributed communication architecture of RFID systems; wherein control and data tasks are decoupled from a central authority and dispersed amongst spatially distributed low-power wireless devices. The distributed architecture, by adjusting the tag's reflectivity coefficient creates micro interrogation zones which are interrogated in parallel. We investigate this promising direction in order to significantly increase the reading rates and reading range of RFID tags, and also to enhance overall system scalability. We address the problems of energy-efficient tag singulations, optimal power control schemes and load aware reader placement algorithms for RFID systems. We modify the conventional set cover approximation algorithm to determine the minimal number of RFID readers with minimal overlapping and balanced number of tags amongst them. We show, via extensive simulation analysis, that our approach has the potential to increase the performance of RFID technology and hence, to enable RFID systems for ultra large scale applications. / Thesis (Ph.D, Computing) -- Queen's University, 2011-08-30 23:41:02.937

Evolving smart infrastructures requires both content distribution as well as event notification and processing support. Content Centric Networking (CCN), built around named data, is a clean slate network architecture for supporting future applications. Due to its focus on content distribution, CCN does not inherently support Publish-Subscribe event notification, a fundamental building block in computer mediated systems and a critical requirement for smart infrastructure applications. While semantics of content distribution and event notification require different support systems from the underlying network infrastructure, content distribution and event notification can still be united by leveraging similarities in the routing infrastructure. Our Extended-CCN architecture(X-CCN) realizes this to provide lightweight content based pub-sub service at the network layer, which is used to provide advanced publish/subscribe services at higher layers. Light weight content based pub-sub and CCN communication at network layer along with advanced publish/subscribe together are presented as data fabric for the smart infrastructures applications.

The future Internet will be an IPv6 network interconnecting traditional computers and a large number of smart object or networks such as Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). This Internet of Things (IoT) will be the foundation of many services and our daily life will depend on its availability and reliable operations. Therefore, among many other issues, the challenge of implementing secure communication in the IoT must be addressed. The traditional Internet has established and tested ways of securing networks. The IoT is a hybrid network of the Internet and resource-constrained networks, and it is therefore reasonable to explore the options of using security mechanisms standardized for the Internet in the IoT. The IoT requires multi-facet security solutions where the communication is secured with confidentiality, integrity, and authentication services; the network is protected against intrusions and disruptions; and the data inside a sensor node is stored in an encrypted form. Using standardized mechanisms, communication in the IoT can be secured at different layers: at the link layer with IEEE 802.15.4 security, at the network layer with IP security (IPsec), and at the transport layer with Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS). Even when the IoT is secured with encryption and authentication, sensor nodes are exposed to wireless attacks both from inside the WSN and from the Internet. Hence an Intrusion Detection System (IDS) and firewalls are needed. Since the nodes inside WSNs can be captured and cloned, protection of stored data is also important. This thesis has three main contributions. (i) It enables secure communication in the IoT using lightweight compressed yet standard compliant IPsec, DTLS, and IEEE 802.15.4 link layer security; and it discusses the pros and cons of each of these solutions. The proposed security solutions are implemented and evaluated in an IoT setup on real hardware. (ii) This thesis also presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of a novel IDS for the IoT. (iii) Last but not least, it also provides mechanisms to protect data inside constrained nodes. The experimental evaluation of the different solutions shows that the resource-constrained devices in the IoT can be secured with IPsec, DTLS, and 802.15.4 security; can be efficiently protected against intrusions; and the proposed combined secure storage and communication mechanisms can significantly reduce the security-related operations and energy consumption.

This study focuses on the Internet of Things (IoT) gateway; a common middleware solution that bridges the gap between physical sensors and devices to internet applications. There is a shown interest in understanding the characteristics of different types of gateway architectures both from the research field and the industry, particularly the IT-consulting firm Attentec in Linköping, Sweden. A study has also been made on the open source C library libuv, used in the common web runtime engine NodeJS. The library has been used to study how asynchronous I/O operations can be used to improve the IoT gateway performance. A set of three general architectural approaches are identified. Common internal and external properties are identified based on state-of-the-art gateway implementations found in the industry. All of these properties are taken into account when a general gateway implementation is developed that is proposed to mimic any architectural level implementation of the gateway. A set of performance tests are conducted on the implementation to observe how different configurations of the gateway affect throughput and response time of data transmitted from simulated devices. The results show that the properties of the gateway do affect throughput and response time significantly and that libuv overall helps implement one of the best performing gateway configurations.