Recent advances in industrial wireless sensor networks toward efficient management in IOT
- 1. SPECIAL SECTION ON INDUSTRIAL SENSOR NETWORKS WITH
ADVANCED DATA MANAGEMENT: DESIGN AND SECURITY
Received March 30, 2015, accepted April 27, 2015, date of publication May 19, 2015, date of current version June 1, 2015.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/ACCESS.2015.2435000
Recent Advances in Industrial Wireless Sensor
Networks Toward Efficient Management in IoT
ZHENGGUO SHENG1, (Member, IEEE), CHINMAYA MAHAPATRA2, (Student Member, IEEE),
CHUNSHENG ZHU2, (Student Member, IEEE), AND VICTOR C. M. LEUNG2, (Fellow, IEEE)
1School of Engineering and Informatics, University of Sussex, Brighton BN1 9RH, U.K.
2Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z4, Canada
Corresponding author: C. Zhu (chunsheng.tom.zhu@gmail.com)
This work was supported in part by a Four-Year Doctoral Fellowship Through The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC,
Canada, in part by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, and in part by the ICICS/TELUS People and Planet
Friendly Home Initiative Through The University of British Columbia, TELUS and, other industry partners. This work was also supported
by the Start-Up Fund from the University of Sussex, U.K.
ABSTRACT With the accelerated development of Internet-of-Things (IoT), wireless sensor networks
(WSNs) are gaining importance in the continued advancement of information and communication technolo-
gies, and have been connected and integrated with the Internet in vast industrial applications. However,
given the fact that most wireless sensor devices are resource constrained and operate on batteries, the
communication overhead and power consumption are therefore important issues for WSNs design. In order
to efficiently manage these wireless sensor devices in a unified manner, the industrial authorities should be
able to provide a network infrastructure supporting various WSN applications and services that facilitate the
management of sensor-equipped real-world entities. This paper presents an overview of industrial ecosystem,
technical architecture, industrial device management standards, and our latest research activity in developing
a WSN management system. The key approach to enable efficient and reliable management of WSN within
such an infrastructure is a cross-layer design of lightweight and cloud-based RESTful Web service.
INDEX TERMS Internet-of-Things, device management, IEEE 802.15.4, RESTful, error correction
coding (ECC), cloud.
I. INTRODUCTION
With the development of IoT technologies, a wide range of
intelligent and tiny wireless sensing devices will be deployed
in a variety of application environments. Generally, these
sensing devices are constrained by limitations in energy
resources (battery power), processing and storage capability,
radio communication range and reliability, etc., and yet their
deployment must satisfy the real-time nature of applications
under little or no direct human interactions. In order to well
maintain these sensor devices, for example, monitoring the
performance or sending commands to a sensor node, it is
essential to design reliable and efficient communication
protocol to remotely manage sensor devices without
consuming significant resources.
According to the definition in [1], the term of management
generally consists of configuration, monitoring and admin-
istration of managed entities, including network elements,
system resources, applications and services. Hence it can be
hierarchically divided into three major domains: 1) Network
management where the elements making the network
connected are managed, such as routers and servers, etc.
2) System management where system elements (usually
networked) are managed, such as operating system and
information system, and 3) Application management where
applications built on system are managed, such as web
applications and J2EE applications. In most cases, there are
no clear boundaries between these domains and even in
some scenarios they can be exchangeable. Different from the
above management domains, we consider the sensor
device management that is an integration of network,
system and application managements. In essence, it
includes provisioning and management, configuration of
network parameters, firmware upgrades and performance
monitoring, etc.
Traditional device management solutions used to target
devices such as computer, mobile phone, set-top box and
gateway, etc. In order to address the interoperability of
connected devices, a number of industry standards have been
developed and recognized by international communities, for
example OMA Device Management (OMA DM) [2] for
management of small mobile devices and TR-069 [3] of
Broadband Forum for automatic configuration of internet
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access devices such as gateways and set-top box, etc.
However, these solutions are not optimized for WSN-based
IoT applications, because of missing features that should be
considered for sensor device management, such as limited
resources of devices, distributed network environment and
real time nature of applications, etc.
In order to cope with new challenges for designing
IoT1 device management, there are some key characteristics
that should be taken into account, such as limited resources
of wireless sensor devices, distributed network environment
and massive data collected from a variety of applications, etc.
Particularly, there is a considerable need to understand the
new requirements imposed by IoT, and its inter-dependence
with networking protocols and functions. To be specific,
it is of fundamental importance to understand: (1) what is
the current status of industrial IoT development, (2) what
are the technical architecture and key elements of IoT to
perform device management and (3) how to utilize efficient
communication protocols and the emerging cloud computing
infrastructure to assist IoT device management in future
massive WSN deployment, which are the major motivations
of this paper.
The following summarizes our key contributions:
• We give an overview of IoT ecosystem covering
the recent industry development in the context of
main areas of application, challenges and key players.
By identifying the key characteristics of IoT develop-
ment, we summarize the major areas of applications into
smart city, smart home and smart transportation.
• We focus on the main verticals of IoT ecosystem by
describing the IoT architecture into three main layers,
namely sensor device, data connectivity, cloud
management platform. For each of these layers, we
provide a survey of technical solutions and identify the
importance of device management from a system level.
• We identify the importance of IoT management and its
positions in the IoT architecture, outline new research
trend towards efficient management, and propose a
framework of cloud based management system for
WSN. Specifically, we take a cross layer approach
to extend the Representation State Transfer (REST)
paradigm, in which a reliable and efficient management
protocol can be embedded in resource constrained
sensor devices, and connect WSN to the IoT cloud
management platform using CoAP methods.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows.
We provide an overview of IoT ecosystem in Section II,
and introduce the IoT architecture and its key technologies
in Section III. The management protocol standards, new
research direction and our proposed cross layer design
are reviewed and discussed in Section IV. The IoT cloud
management platform features, out-of-shelf solutions,
1In this paper, we focus on WSN based IoT (or M2M) applications and
techniques. In order to simplify the presentation and align with industry
terminology, we use IoT to represent a system level description of WSN,
and should be treated in equal means throughout the paper.
and our contributions are introduced in V. A prototype
IoT management system is built and evaluated in Section VI,
and future work and conclusion are then given in Section VII
and VIII.
II. OVERVIEW OF IoT ECOSYSTEM
In this section, we provide an overview of global industrial
IoT ecosystem, including the main characteristics, key
application scenarios to technical visions, and players.
A. MAJOR CHARACTERISTICS
The development of industrial IoT has following major
characteristics.
1) ECOSYSTEM FORMED BY INDUSTRIAL ALLIANCES
Industrial associations are early founded and often funded
by the government authority and academy for the purpose
of enhancing the development and cooperation, and
providing services to government and more importantly
its industrial ally. Currently, major driving forces behind
the IoT industry alliances include manufacturers, vendors,
service providers, telecom operators and government, etc.
With the development of WSN technologies in the past few
years, a number of major standardization alliances are gradu-
ally formed based on their interests in technology selections
and commercial markets. Technically speaking, current WSN
solutions can be categorized as non-IP based and IP based
solutions. Most of off-the-shelf solutions belong to the
former, especially for some well-known standard alliances,
such as ZigBee [4] and WAVE2M [5] for office and manufac-
turing automation, and WirelessHart [6] and PROFIBUS [7]
for real-time industrial control systems, etc. However, most of
these non-IP solutions are isolated within their own verticals,
which hinders the IoT development due to the incompatible
nature across heterogeneous communication systems.
For the IP based solutions, IETF2 takes the lead to
standardize communication protocols for resource
constrained devices and develop a number of Internet
protocols, including IPv6 over Low power wireless personal
area networks (6LoWPAN) [8], Routing Protocol for Low
Power and Lossy Network (RPL) [9] and Constrained
Application Protocol (CoAP) [10], etc, to tackle the
technical challenges, such as extensive protocol over-
heads against memory and computational limitations
of sensor devices [11]. Meanwhile, IP Smart Object
Alliance (IPSO) [12] actively promotes IPv6 embedded
devices for Machine-to-Machine (M2M) applications.
PROFINET, a promising real-time Ethernet standard,
also adapts Ethernet to the next generation of industrial
automation [13]. Today, many non-IP based technical
alliances are evolving toward a protocol translation gateway
model to better cope the interoperability with the dominated
IP networks, e.g., ZigBee IP.
2The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is a large open international
community of network designers, operators, vendors and researchers con-
cerned with the developments and promotions of Internet standards of the
Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP).
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Although a number of intelligent and tiny devices have
been deployed in a variety of application verticals, they all
require similar functions (e.g., device management,
discovery, registration) and share common infrastructure
and network elements. This provides a motivation to recent
global IoT/M2M related standardisations from applications’
perspective.
In particular, the European Telecommunication Standards
Institute (ETSI) Technical Committee (TC M2M) [14] is
to standardize the application layer which is independent
of the underlying communication networks. The goal of
ETSI TC M2M includes the specifications of service
requirements, functional architecture, interfaces and use
cases. The oneM2M Global Initiative [15] has been formed
in order to develop one globally agreed specifications for
common service layer, which can be the basis of horizontal
IoT platforms. The IoT-Architecture project [16], which is an
European research project addressing the Reference model
of IoT, is to develop IoT architectures in an interoperable
manner. The project has derived entities and resources, which
are subject for management functions, and provides various
functions to orchestrate and manage collaboration of
IoT devices.
2) GOVERNMENT PLAYS AN IMPORTANT ROLE
IN IoT DEPLOYMENT
Although the industry is accelerating the pace of IoT develop-
ment, we should admit that there are still significant obstacles
for its growth, such as fragmented solutions, and interoper-
ability across vertical applications, etc. Moreover, existing
IoT solutions are not fully accepted by customers due to
security and privacy concerns which are caused by the fact
that the IoT development is on its early stage in which
standardizations of IoT architecture, model and application
are still under way. Today, governments or regulation
authorities are aware of the challenges in the IoT ecosystem
that cannot be addressed by the industry alone, and have
started to play an important role in IoT market development
by investing IoT applications and introducing incentive
programs to improve public security and welfare. For
example, since 2009, the US regulation authority has issued
an action plan for standards governing the development
of a smart grid, which stimulates regional potential for
research and innovation [17]. In Europe, intensive standard-
ization and regulatory efforts are made to deploy a universal
eCall service as a mandatory vehicle fitment by 2016 [18].
In China, the government has also designated a great impor-
tance to the development of IoT and strategically fostered it
in China’s 12th five-year plan [19].
3) LIMITED MARKET DRIVE, FEW SIGNIFICANT
APPLICATIONS
Although the industry is optimistic about the future
IoT development, e.g., Cisco forecasts of 50 Billion
Internet-Connected Things by 2020, and also governments
are vigorously advancing many demonstration projects, e.g.,
European ‘‘20-20-20’’ [20] target to achieve 20% reduction in
emissions, 20% renewable energies, and 20% improvement in
energy efficiency, the current progress remain under proof-
of-concept and there is a lack of spontaneous needs from
industries and customers. According to one latest consulting
report [21], nearly three-fourths of enterprises express
interest in adopting IoT solutions to reduce expenditures
and increase efficiency. However, only 13% of IoT use
cases between 2009 and 2013 targeted revenue growth or
innovation.
This is suggested that we are still early in the adoption
of the IoT and a mature market is not yet formed. Current
implementations mainly focus on solution optimization with-
out highly developed intelligent system. Pilot projects tend to
be presented as proof of concept in limited areas without a
large scale commercialization. Given the lack of successful
references, IoT is not ready to bring substantial business for
large scale operations in a short term.
B. MAIN AREAS OF APPLICATION
According to IDC report [22], the global market for
IoT (or M2M) shows a huge long term potential with over
100 billions things could be turned into machines by 2020.
For example, in Europe, the market value will reach to
11 billion Euro by 2015 for IoT related projects, including
sensor devices, integration, application development and
service management, etc. Another example in China shows
that IoT applications are rapidly developed and widely
deployed in a number of areas, ranging from personal devices
to industrial automations. According to the information
from the 2nd IoT EXPO China, the market size in 2011 is
30 billion Euro. This number is expected to be increased by
30% per year and reaching to 90 billion Euro in 2015. Hence it
is impossible to envisage all potential IoT applications having
in mind. In Fig. 1, we present some of the major applications
on the market, and categorize them into smart city, smart
home and smart transportation.
1) SMART CITY
Technically speaking, smart city is very much like a
conceptualized blueprint, rather than actual services that have
been implemented and put in use in people’s everyday life.
However, the development of the concept is booming while
the urban population has expanded rapidly in recent years.
By 2025, with more than 60% of the world population
expected to live in urban cities. By 2023, there will be
30 mega cities globally, with 55% in developing countries,
such as China, India, Russia and Latin America [23].
Because the rapid growth of population naturally demands
the innovation or development of a better way to provide
public services to its citizens, cities and their services
represent an almost ideal platform for IoT research, taking
into account city requirements and transferring them to
solutions enabled by IoT technology. In the following, we
provide some examples of the recent development in some
regions and countries.
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FIGURE 1. Industrial IoT ecosystem, including major applications and players.3
1) Europe definitely has the strong willing to develop
smart cities, since cities tend to be denser, have
better public transit, a stronger focus on sustainability
and low-carbon solutions, and perhaps most important,
a culture and citizenry more engaged in the journey
towards more sustainable and smarter cities. There
are many successful examples and projects are
going on. European commission plays a leading role
in the smart cities development, such as FP7 Smart
Santander project [24] which aims at deploying an
IoT infrastructure with thousands of sensor devices
across several cities, and the recent call from
Horizon 2020 on Low Power Computing, Internet
of Things and platforms for smart objects. Also,
major European telecom operators, energy companies,
car manufactures and financial institutes have been
involving in different level of collaborations to delivery
smart cities services.
2) According to 2011 China’s urban development report,
there are almost 660 million people living in cities,
which counts for 49.68% of Chinese population. This
ratio will be increased to 51% by the end of 2015.
3The nominative use of a logo is recognized only for purposes of descrip-
tion and identification of the product or service of the company it represents.
Moreover, more than 220 Chinese cities will have
a population of over one million people (there are
currently only 35 in Europe). Many cities have
announced their smart city plans to provide
public services, e.g., grid management system,
building management, water monitoring, security
video surveillance, smart traffic (information,
parking management and e-toll) and telematics,
including two of the biggest cities like Beijing and
Shanghai, and a number of medium-size cities, like
Wuxi, Ningbo, Chengdu, Wuhan, Kunming, Fujian,
Shenzhen and Guangzhou.
3) The smart city concept is less commonly used in North
America than in Europe and Asia, but North American
cities are looking to technology to improve the quality
of public services and boost local economies. U.S and
Canadian cities are also matching their counterparts
around the world in setting ambitious sustainability
targets. Major innovation activities include building
smart grid and water infrastructures, adopting new
business model to improve the efficiency of city trans-
portation, promoting electric vehicle and charging
facilities, and sharing public sector data for open
innovations.
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TABLE 1. Key IoT areas, application requirement and challenges.
2) SMART HOME
The concept of smart home has existed for over 10 years.
Although the related technologies are well mature,
there are still barriers to populate a large scale adoption,
such as expensive unit price, exaggerated advertising, fancy
ideas but not practical, and lack of industry standards.
The existing applications can be categorized into
following areas:
1) Home Security and Monitoring: The applications
include window/door control, gas/smoke detector,
infrared sensor, remote control/emergency button and
air conditioner control. It also provides alternative
method to take care of children and elderly.
2) Community Security: These applications include
property management, community monitoring, electric
patrol, security intercom and entrance guard.
3) Multi-Service Home Gateway: The applications
include broadband service, home multimedia system,
IPTV and remote health monitoring.
4) Home Devices Connectivity and Control: including
intelligent home appliances, such as smart bulb,
high-end wash machine and refrigerator, which are
already available on the market.
5) Energy and Water Use: The application includes
monitoring energy and water supply consumption to
obtain advice on saving cost and resources.
3) SMART TRANSPORTATION
The development of smart transportation is generally led
by governments or transportation authorities. Successful
examples include real time traffic and public transportation
information sharing, intelligent traffic control systems,
incentive program to regulate transportation, largely
promotion of electric vehicle and charging facilities, and
dedicated short-range communication (DSRC) enabled
vehicular communication system, etc. Typical application
scenarios are presented as follows [25].
1) Navigation and Safety: Utilizing the vehicles (e.g., cars,
buses, trains) along with the roads and the rails
equipped with sensors, actuators and processing power,
important traffic information could be offered to the
drivers or passengers of the vehicles to achieve better
navigation and safety. Main functions include collision
avoidance systems and monitoring of transportation of
hazardous materials.
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FIGURE 2. End-to-end IoT architecture.
2) Road Planning and Route Optimization: Benefiting
from the more accurate traffic information about road
patterns, governmental authorities could better plan and
design the roads. Particularly, intelligent roads can be
performed, with warning messages based on climate
conditions and unexpected events (e.g., accidents or
traffic jams). In addition, enterprises (e.g., freight
companies) could perform route optimization for
energy savings.
3) Guided Delivery: Regarding the vehicles transporting
goods, integrating the information about the vehicle
movement and the information about the type and
status of the goods, guidance about the delivery time,
the delivery delays and faults could be obtained.
With the status of the warehouses, automatic refilling
of the magazines could be achieved further.
To provide a better vision of IoT applications, we highlight
in Table 1 some key IoT development areas, including
application requirements and challenges.
III. IoT ARCHITECTURE
It is clear from Fig. 1 that although a wide range of intelligent
and tiny sensing devices have been massively deployed in
a variety of application verticals, they all share a common
architecture and network elements. Generally, the
IoT characteristics with their challenges can be summarized
as follows:
1) No Direct Human Interaction: It is necessary to ensure
a reliable communication via remote device and
communication managements.
2) Fragmented IoT Services With Distinct Service
Requirements and Customers Needs: It is necessary
to unify the service capabilities on a single horizontal
platform and open platform application programming
interfaces (APIs) to satisfy customization.
3) Massive Connections Into a IoT Network: It is
necessary to address problems of insufficient address
resources and access congestion, etc.
4) Heterogeneous Networks Access: It is necessary to
address the naming and addressing of heterogeneous
access to guarantee QoS requirements.
5) Sensing Device Management and Control: As funda-
mental issues to enable IoT services, it is necessary to
provide reliable and efficient mechanisms to remotely
monitor and control sensor devices.
6) Massive Information Processing: It is necessary to
address massive information storing, sharing and
mining.
Looking into IoT architectures proposed and discussed in
various organizations, we come up with a IoT architecture as
shown in Fig. 2.
A. SENSOR DEVICE
It lays a foundation of the IoT architecture. IoT uses various
wireless sensor devices to capture events or monitor status of
different things, such as temperature or inventory level, which
are relayed through gateways to upper layers via wireless,
wired, or hybrid networks. Table 2 shows a list of short
range radio technologies that are currently being used in
IoT applications.
B. DATA CONNECTIVITY
It actually behaves as a gateway to translate the
captured event from the sensor devices into a standard
format and deliver it through broadband or wireless net-
works to the cloud platform. According to the technologies
used in realizing the communication between the sensing
networks and carrier’s networks, the existing solutions
for data connectivity are summarized in the following
two domains.
1) 3G/4G SUBSCRIBER IDENTIFICATION
MODULE (SIM) MODULE
With the advantages of well developed telecom operators
3G/4G wireless networks, it is straightforward and relatively
low cost to develop SIM card based IoT applications. The
SIM based solutions are primarily used in low dense wireless
sensor networks or rural area where Internet access is
impossible.
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TABLE 2. Short range radio technologies and applications mapping in industrial WSN.
2) IoT GATEWAY
It primarily relies on the Ethernet connection to deliver
reliable Internet access for WLAN. Especially for those WSN
running incompatible radio or communication protocols
with the gateway, it is important to integrate the proxy
implementation into the IoT gateway and allow any
wireless sensor devices to talk to end users via Internet.
In our previous work [26], we integrate IEEE 802.15.4
connectivity into an open source gateway and implement
the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP)-CoAP proxy to
realize remote access from any IP terminal to IPv6 sensor
devices.
C. CLOUD MANAGEMENT PLATFORM
It is a horizontal platform that forms the kernel of the
IoT architecture by providing a unified set of common
operation functions such as device management, protocol
conversion, route forwarding, to application verticals.
Moreover, the additional feature of big data analytics is
needed to cope with massive IoT applications.
In fact, due to the complex deployment and the stringent
requirements imposed by various services, it is a challenge
to maintain a large scale IoT system across different layers.
The emerging IoT management can thus play an important
role in providing reliable and efficient method to monitor and
control wireless sensor devices in a unified manner, which
can show clear advantages: (1) it can abstract the common
IoT components and reuse, thereby reducing the application
development cost and ensuring quick deployment through
reduction in development time; (2) it can provide efficient
data collection, semantically inter-operable data exchange
across verticals, and an easy-to-use application development
environment to IoT service providers; (3) it can minimize the
system costs (e.g., device energy and network congestion),
while maximize the utilization of computing resources in an
integrated manner.
In order to successfully operate IoT device management
in such an architecture, two essential management entities
are particularly important and discussed in details in
the following sections:
• Management protocol: It is necessary to develop an
efficient and reliable management protocol for WSN
without consuming extensive resources. In essence, it
includes provisioning and management, configuration
of network parameters, firmware upgrades and
performance monitoring, etc.
• Management data analytics on cloud platform: It works
on the top of the sensor device and is designated to
integrate and elaborate diverse sensing data from
multiple source of edge devices by using big data
analysis tools, so as to deliver intelligent and customized
services to users in the pervasive world.
IV. SENSOR DEVICE MANAGEMENT PROTOCOL
The IoT must excel not only in terms of offering constantly
evolving application development and management environ-
ments, but also in terms of supporting a communication
protocol to deliver semantics efficient management functions.
A. INDUSTRY STANDARDS IN DEVICE MANAGEMENT
Traditionally, device management solutions used to target
devices such as computer, mobile phone, set-top box and
gateway, etc. In order to address the interoperability of
connected devices, a number of standards have been
developed and recognized by international communities.
There are two widely used DM solutions for networked
devices.
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OMA Device Management (OMA DM) is for manage-
ment of small mobile devices, offering platform scalability
and horizontality. Essentially, the first step before a device
can communicate with an OMA DM server is the bootstrap
configuration called provisioning. OMA client provisioning
specifications define the OMA client provisioning object as
an SyncML4 document containing the initial provisioning
parameters for end devices. This document includes config-
uration parameters for proxy servers, network access points
and access rules. Once the device is provisioned, it can be
remotely managed by the OMA DM server according to
the configured and verified relationship with management
servers.
TR-069 is a Wide Area Network (WAN) management
protocol defined by the Broadband Forum for managing
an increasing number of Internet access devices such as
modems, routers, gateways, set-top box and VoIP-phones.
It is a bidirectional Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP)5/
HTTP-based protocol for remote management of end-user
devices. TR-069 provides the communication between
customer-premises equipment (CPE) and auto configuration
servers (ACS). It includes both safe auto configuration and
control of other CPE management functions within an
integrated framework.
Although these solutions are not optimized for emerging
IoT applications, their recent efforts have started to inves-
tigate the IoT device management, i.e., OMA DM starts
to address the M2M device management (LWM2M) by
extending the OMA DM through a gateway to sensor devices
using a lightweight M2M protocol. Moreover, BBF TR-069
recent IoT activities include use cases study to verify
extended vertical scenarios impact to TR-069, and identifi-
cation of new constraints from IoT (local) area networks and
new objects including data modelling and protocols.
There are also proprietary solutions from industry
players, such as wireless M2M Protocol (WMMP) [27]
proposed by telco operator and iDigi Device Cloud, and
traditional solutions, such as Simple Network Management
Protocol (SNMP) and command line interface (CLI) [28],
as well as emerging solutions, such as Message Queue
Telemetry Transport Protocol (MQTT) [29] and Extensible
Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) in supporting
M2M device management. However, we should admit that
unlike traditional networked devices, IoT devices usually
come with new features, such as low cost and power, limited
processing capability, heterogeneous and intelligence. With
increasing amount of different type of these devices being
connected over Internet, it is essential to maintain and control
wireless sensor devices in a lightweight, open and universal
method.
4Synchronization Markup Language (SyncML) is an XML-based,
industry-standard protocol for synchronizing mobile data across a variety
of multiple networks, platforms and devices.
5SOAP is a protocol specification for exchanging structured information
in the implementation of Web Services in computer networks.
B. NEW RESEARCH TREND
So far the enterprise level solutions are more preferable to use
the Big Web Services (or WS-*) architecture which may bring
extensive overheads for resource constrained devices. More
recent works are dedicated for creating a loosely coupled
system by developing Representation State Transfer (REST)
style IoT systems which is better suited for simple and
flexible integration scenarios [30]. REST, a design concept
that all the objects in the Internet are abstracted as resources,
is a lightweight web service implementation to provide
sharable, reusable and loose coupling services.
Motivated by the fact that the TCP/IP protocol is the
de-facto standard for computer communications in today’s
networked world, IP based solution could be the future for
IoT networks [31], e.g., IP Smart Object Alliance (IPSO)
actively promotes IPv6 embedded devices for IoT
applications. In order to tackle the technical challenges,
such as extensive protocol overheads against memory
and computational limitations of sensor devices, IETF6
takes the lead to standardize communication protocols for
resource constrained devices and develop a number of
Internet protocols, including the Constrained Application
Protocol (CoAP)7 [10] for pervasive IoT applications.
Although considerable research has been done on the
implementation of CoAP in various resource constrained
sensor devices, the system level management is not well
explored. Jung et al. [32] proposes dedicated application
protocol on top of CoAP to map all application functions in
building automation, and van der Stok and Greevenbosch [33]
proposes the latest integration of CoAP with SNMP (draft-
vanderstok-core-comi-04), however, they all either build
management capabilities on top of CoAP or need to support
multiple protocols simultaneously, which may bring extra
overheads to resource constrained devices. To promote
organic-growth of IoT systems, open technologies are
preferred for IoT management and the RESTful approaches
are promising. Specifically, we propose software platforms
using CoAP method directly for managing sensor devices.
Moreover, the proposed real-time big data analysis engine
is able to elaborate diverse management data from multiple
sources and directly map management functions into
CoAP methods. In essence, the proposed method not only
integrates WSN into the Internet, but also manages them via
the ‘‘web’’.
In Fig. 3, we mainly compare the complexity of
management protocol stacks among three solutions.
Regarding to the RESTful approach, we propose efficient
naming and addressing solutions based on CoAP Uni-
form Resource Identifier (URI) such that each onboard
6The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is a large open international
community of network designers, operators, vendors and researchers con-
cerned with the developments and promotions of Internet standards of the
Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP).
7The CoAP is based on the exchange of short messages which, by
default, are transported over UDP. The protocol has a registered scheme
of < coap : // ∼> with a default port of 5683. CoAP messages are encoded
in a simple binary format.
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FIGURE 3. Comparisons of RESTful management protocol with OMA and TR-069, and its interaction with cloud platform.
resource can be represented and traced in a more compatible
format.
C. MANAGEMENT FUNCTIONS
We propose the management functions in Fig. 4 (a) which
shows the interactions between a wireless sensor device and
cloud platform. Due to the requirements imposed to IoT
services, such as no direct human interaction, reliable remote
control and scalable features of applications, we define
five major management functions which are essential
to WSN:
1) Registration: It is a primary function to allow a sensor
device to register/de-register with a remote cloud
platform, maintain and update registration
information.
2) Provisioning: It is to initialize and synchronize
essential information (e.g., setup or configuration) of
a sensor device with the cloud platform.
3) Management Services: Once the sensor device is
registered with the cloud platform, a number of
essential management services should take in charge to
maintain IoT services, such as parameter configuration,
connection diagnose, status inquiry and remote
control, etc.
4) Observing: It is the unique feature of CoAP to allow the
cloud platform to ‘‘observe’’ resources on IoT devices,
i.e., to periodically update a resource to the remote
cloud over a period of time.
5) Application Data Transmission: It includes any
other dedicated or proprietary applications based
above CoAP.
Although the management functions can be defined in
different manners, they all share common resources on one
sensor device and we abstract these resources as parameters,
status and data, which are defined as abstract layer. The
interactions with the cloud platform (i.e., operations and
software/firmware updates) can be directly triggered with
these resources via GET, PUT, POST and DELETE methods
provided by CoAP.
D. NAMING AND ADDRESSING OF RESOURCE IDENTITIES
It is necessary to define efficient naming and addressing solu-
tions such that each resource can be represented and traced in
a compatible format. We define a simple resource model in
which resources are logically organized into class. A class
defines a group of resources, for example the Hardware class
contains all the resources that can be used for provisioning
purposes. A resource is identified by the path:
∼ /{Class ID}.{Resource ID}.{Sub-Resource ID}.{Method ID}
where the Class ID, Resource ID and Sub-Resource ID are
with size of 1 byte. The Method ID is to represent access
methods available to a resource. It is 4 bits and each bit
from the Most significant bit (MSB) represents an authorized
operation in a sequence of GET, PUT, POST and DELETE.
The value ‘‘1’’ means authorized and ‘‘0’’ means non-
authorized. The Method ID provides an efficient way of
informing cloud/users the access methods of a resource.
Furthermore, the CoAP server may assign different
method IDs to a same resource as long as users’ access
levels are different. Fig. 4 (b) shows the detailed naming and
addressing assignment on our sensor testbed.
E. CoAP-BASED MANAGEMENT PROTOCOL
The CoAP is based on the exchange of short messages which,
by default, are transported over UDP. The protocol has a
registered scheme of < coap : // ∼> with a default port
of 5683. CoAP messages are encoded in a simple binary
format.
Fig. 4 (c) shows the detailed CoAP methods mapping to
management functions. Each management function can be
abstracted as a recall process to conduct with resources on
sensor device, thus the RESTful approach provided by the
CoAP protocol can be adopted as a lightweight method to
access from application servers to sensor devices. Especially,
the Uri-Path Option is to indicate management resource
identities and the Location-Path Option is to indicate
the address of remote registration server for future update
and delete operations.
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FIGURE 4. The proposed RESTful management protocol for WSN based on CoAP. (a) The proposed management functions on WSN. (b) Resources
naming and addressing assignment. (c) CoAP methods mapping to management functions.
It is worth noting that each management function can
be abstracted as a recall process to conduct with resources
of sensor device, thus the RESTful approach provided
by the CoAP protocol can be adopted as a lightweight
method to access from application servers to sensor
devices. The RESTful interactions illustrated in Fig. 3 also
gives an example of registration and retrieval process of
onboard resources, i.e., humidity, illumination and temper-
ature (defined in Fig. 4 (b)), using the proposed manage-
ment method.
F. A CROSS LAYER APPROACH TO ENSURE RELIABLE
WSN MANAGEMENT
In [34], we have shown the simplicity and efficiency of the
proposed device management solution for WSN. The perfor-
mance evaluation results tell that the overhead imposed by
CoAP protocol is negligible and thus the CoAP based device
management is a promising solution for future IoT.
To further evaluate the efficiency of the proposed CoAP
based management solution, we compare it with the standard
CoAP method in terms of packet length. Fig. 7 (b) shows the
onboard resources defined by both standard CoAP method
(human-readable string) and the proposed method.
The URI length is calculated from the space occupied in
the RAM. It is clear that the proposed URI representa-
tion takes far less memory space than the standard URI
representation in which the main space are consumed by
‘‘Attributes’’. Through the resource discovery, we can
receive a list of available resources and the total length of
transmission packets for both methods are 420 bytes and
109 bytes, respectively. Since the CoAP is transmitted in a
block-wise fashion (6 blocks for the standard method, only
2 blocks for the proposed method), the memory saving of
311 bytes is composed of URI savings and 4 extra CoAP
block headers. The total transmitting packets can be reduced
by 74%, which shows promising for resource constrained
sensor devices.
Although the proposed application protocol can help
manage IoT sensor devices in an efficient way, we should
admit that there are still challenges in providing a reliable
communication channel to fulfill management tasks,
especially for a large scale WSN deployment. It is well
known that packet size directly affects the reliability as larger
packets suffer higher loss rates [35]. In our previous study
in [34], we have shown that the proposed device management
protocol can significantly reduce packet overheads, which
in turn improves the packet loss rate of the management
communication by nearly 20%. However, in most of indus-
trial WSN applications, wireless sensor devices are deployed
in a large scale and communications are convoyed in a
multi-hop fashion. In our experiment, we have shown that
the proposed management protocol leads to a packet loss
rate of 44.21% for a maximum number of 6 hops, because
of severe environmental interference in an open office
area with strong Wi-Fi background noise and co-channel
congestions, etc.
Errors in the packet transmissions occur due to channel
variations such as fading and interference from adjacent
sensor nodes [36]. For reliability concerns, the traditional
transmission of a message is initiated by marking the
message as ‘‘confirmable’’ in the CoAP header. It requires
an end-to-end ACK and retransmission strategy, which can
result in a poor throughput and longer transmission time. This
concept lacks proactive means for error correction as well
as results in increased communication latency. Therefore,
a fundamental approach to reduce the packet loss of
IoT communication is necessarily to be integrated together
with upper layer protocols to deliver reliable WSN
management.
We propose to use the approach of Error Correction
Coding (ECC) to improve transmission reliability.
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ECC adds redundancy in the system to improve the
transmission reliability. Although additional redundancy
reduces the efficiency, it is still a more preferable solution,
because it helps to improve both reliability and latency.
ECC, such as Bose-Chaudhuri-Hocquenghem (BCH) and
Reed-Solomon (RS), are well known in wireless local area
networks (WLANs). However, they are yet to be implemented
in IoT systems. Hence, we further evaluate the performance
of the WSN in terms of the packet error rate and energy
efficiency, and compare it with the state of the art
Automatic Repeat reQuest (ARQ) scheme that is widely used
in IEEE 802.15.4 radio.
1) ANALYSIS OF PACKET ERROR IN ARQ SCHEME
In ARQ scheme, data is decoded by cyclic redundancy
check (CRC) codes and the erroneous data is re-transmitted
from the sender. Here we consider stop and wait ARQ
method. Assuming the ACK bits are received without error,
the packet error rate of the ARQ scheme is given by
PERARQ = 1 − (1 − Pb)l
, (1)
where l is the packet length of the payload transmitted
in a single transmission, Pb is the bit error rate. Pb for
IEEE 802.15.4 based sensor motes is given in [37].
2) ANALYSIS OF PACKET ERROR IN ECC SCHEMES
In [38], a MAC layer ECC scheme was proposed and its
flexibility and compatibility with IEEE 802.15.4 is shown.
We use the same framework for showing the validity of our
ECC schemes. For BCH and RS codes, we use a (n, k, t)
t-error control method with n − k redundant bits appended
to the k-data bits. We further assume that the transmission of
the packets between the sensor node and sink node/gateway
is in bursts of n-bit data. Therefore, the packet loss rate at the
sink node is given as
PERECC = 1 −
1 −
n
i=t+1
n
i
Pi
b(1 − Pb)n−i
l
k
, (2)
where . is the ceiling function. The expected number of
retransmissions is given by
E(T) =
PERARQ/ECC
1 − PERARQ/ECC
. (3)
3) ENERGY EFFICIENCY
One of the major overheads for ECC is the energy
consumption during its transmission and reception, which is
also known as its communication energy. Let PRX and PTX
be the receiver power and the transmitted power, respec-
tively, during reception and transmission. Given the encoding
energy for block codes is negligible [39], the total energy
consumed is
Pavg = (PTX + PRX ) + E(T) × (PTX + PRX ). (4)
FIGURE 5. Analytical results of different coding schemes for MICAz Mote.
(a) Packet loss versus SNR for MICAz Mote at different coding schemes.
(b) Energy Consumption with respect to SNR for MICAz Mote at different
coding schemes.
We perform a theoretical analysis to find out the packet loss
rate of the MICAz mote.8 The systems signal to noise ratio is
varied from 0dB to 20dB. The packet error rate is generated
for BCH (128,78,7) and RS (128,122,3). These values of n
are taken to correlate with the packet load of 133 bytes
(payload of 127 bytes and 6 bytes of header). The power
consumption of MICAz mote is taken as 721.5mW [37].
From Fig. 5(a), it can be inferred that ECC schemes provide
approximately a gain of 4 dB in SNR as compared to
ARQ scheme for the same packet loss rate. This is equivalent
to a power gain of around 2 watts, which is essential savings in
case of energy constrained IoT systems. BCH code provides
slightly better gain of around 0.5dB, owing to its better error
correction capability compared to RS code. In terms of energy
efficiency in Fig. 5(b), ECC schemes are approximately 6dB
8The MICAz is a 2.4 GHz Mote module used for low power wireless
sensor networks. It runs the TinyOS operating system with a TI CC2420
radio module.
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TABLE 3. Packet loss rate in a multi-hop network.
more energy efficient as compared to ARQ scheme. RS code
is more energy efficient due to its better coding rate (k/n) as
comparison to BCH code.
We further analysis its performance in the same
multi-hop wireless sensor network [34]. The sensor platform
is equipped with CC2530 MCU with 8051 CPU core running
at 32MHz, 8KB SRAM and 256KB flash block to support
IEEE 802.15.4-compliant radio transceiver. To support CoAP,
all sensor devices are running Contiki v2.6 operating system
with implementation of 6LoWPAN, IPv6 and RPL protocols
based on IEEE 802.15.4. Given the limited memory size, we
can configure a maximum number of 6 hops by optimizing
the communication system. The test is carried out in an open
office area with strong Wi-Fi background noise and lowest
possible WSN radio frequency output power to ensure a
multi-hop fashion, which makes a sensor device can only
communicate to each other within around 30 cm.
Table 3 shows the packet loss rate, where the values
of packet loss rate for the proposed management method
and the standard CoAP method using ARQ scheme are
taken from [34]. It shows that the ECC can achieve better
performance for multiple hops. Specifically, ECC schemes
combined with the proposed management method provides
acceptable packet loss rate till 5 hops transmissions, whereas
methods not using ECC have acceptable packet loss rate
till 3 hops only.
V. MANAGEMENT DATA ANALYTICS ON THE CLOUD
With the fast penetration of IoT technologies in a variety of
vertical industry domains, plethora of data are expected to
be generated from diverse applications that is aggregated at
a very high-velocity, thereby increasing the need to better
index, store and process such data. In order to foster
the rapid deployment of IoT applications by overcoming
the incompatible architecture across industry domains, the
latest industrial research & development trend indicates a
favor of building open and horizontal platform for future
IoT [40], [41].
The motivation behind a horizontal model is to foster rapid
growth and innovation in the industry by allowing multiple
providers to work with a common framework, such that users
can concentrate their efforts on creating devices and services.
Furthermore, by working on a common framework, those
devices and services can more easily share information and
resources.
One fundamental aspect of the IoT system is the tight
connection with cloud computing which provides great
benefits for applications hosted on the web with flexible
computational and storage requirements. Therefore, it is
reasonable to build IoT platforms based on existing cloud
infrastructures in order to provide great scalability and
interoperability through open access and direct interfaces for
communication and data management.
In the following, we summarize the key benefits of open
cloud platform for IoT:
1) Low Cost for Deploying a IoT Service: Due to the large
scale deployment of IoT, it is desirable to maintain low
development and maintenance costs during the entering
operation of the service. With cloud platforms, there
is no need to setup or maintain the entire software
and hardware infrastructures, e.g., operation system,
management software, servers and routers, for hosting
online IoT applications and storing sensor data.
2) Scalability on Resource Utilization: It is flexible to
reuse much of the existing software and hardware for
hosting different IoT services. Furthermore, depends
on the scale of the application, extend storage or web
server resources can be directly purchased from the
cloud service providers.
3) Interoperability Across Application Domains: It is
easier to manage and share data across different
IoT applications, and allow service providers to
compose a new service from existing services, i.e.,
IoT Mashups [42].
4) Quick and Easy Implementation: It is not a necessary
condition of expertise in setting up a web-based appli-
cation, configuring webserver and database system,
and making connections to launch IoT services, but a
focus on the data and application that need to be hosted
on the cloud platform [43].
5) Quality of Service (QoS) Guarantee: The cloud service
provider can ensure the availability of the software and
hardware with minimum system failures and power
interruptions, e.g., Microsoft Azure guarantees at least
99.9% availability of its cloud services.
6) Anywhere Access: The IoT data is accessible from any
kind of computational device that has access to the
cloud platform over Internet.
Table 4 lists some of the most popular free open cloud
platforms ideally for managing wireless sensor devices.
In the following, we introduce our latest work in design an
efficient and effective management cloud platform for IoT.
The platform works on top of the wireless sensor networks.
It is designated to integrate and elaborate diverse sensing data
from multiple source of edge wireless sensor devices, so as
to deliver intelligent and customized services to users in the
pervasive world. Also, it provides the development environ-
ment to support the development of different personalized
IoT applications. Fig. 6 shows our management platform on
the cloud, which adopts a hierarchical architecture with the
following three layers.
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TABLE 4. Examples of free open cloud platforms for IoT management.
FIGURE 6. Architecture of the management platform on the Cloud.
A. CLOUD GATEWAY LAYER
This layer works as a bridge between WSN and the
management platform of IoT cloud, so as to form a seam-
less management platform across wireless sensor nodes and
cloud. For instance, the communications between these two
sides can employ the standard web service format based on
the HTTP protocol and Extensible Markup Language (XML)
data format. In addition, although most of the current service
interactions on the cloud are SOAP based which is a protocol
specification for exchanging structured information in the
implementation of web services in computer networks,
the RESTful based web services are more preferable to
management of lightweight wireless sensor devices, hence
the SOAP-REST transformation can be achieved using addi-
tional adapters. This adapter can receive the REST service
invocation request, and transform it into the SOAP service
invocation request [44].
B. IoT MANAGEMENT LAYER
Beyond the basic management services like data storage,
visualization and failure handling, we propose the real-time
big data analysis as a key service in this layer.
Consider the limited resource of sensor devices, diverse
management (or contextual) data need to be uploaded to
the IoT cloud platform for further processing. Such data
collected from independent IoT sources often have implicit
but disparate assumptions of interpretation. For example, data
standard about temperature collected from a sensor device
in the US (Fahrenheit) is different from that collected in
Europe (Celsius). Such implicit assumptions of data
interpretation have to be addressed before the services can
be dynamically composed and delivered. Thus, to make
the management data from different sources be context-
aware, one possible way is to require service providers
to pre-specify the context definition for their sensor devices
and register them to the cloud. Further, as introduced in our
earlier works, we use a lightweight ontology which contains
a modifier using to capture additional information that affects
the interpretations of generic concepts [45]. Specifically, the
generic concept in the ontology can have multiple modifiers,
each of which indicates an orthogonal dimension of the
variations in data interpretation. The data analysis engine can
understand the context of data sources and therefore know
how to interpret the data based on the values of the modifiers
associated with the corresponding context, which is more
flexible and adaptable to the dynamic IoT environment. More
details about the setting of the cloud platform, e.g., the BPEL
engine presented in Fig. 7, can be found from our previous
work [44].
C. CUSTOMIZED APPLICATION AND SERVICE LAYER
This layer is built upon the specifications and methodologies
of RESTful web services and provides the managed interfaces
which consists of development environment and APIs to sup-
port customized IoT applications and services. Similar to our
prior work [44], the managed interface can be implemented
by integrating the Apache ODE (http://ode.apache.org/) man-
agement interface, the JBoss jBPM (http://jbpm.jboss.org/)
management interface and series of open source packages.
During a sensor device’s run-time, once this layer receives
a web service request from a user, it can automatically analyze
the requested URI and the related parameters encapsulated by
HTTP, so as to determine the specific class (e.g., JAVA class)
to invoke the corresponding web services based on the config-
uration files. After the operation of the related web services,
the IoT cloud will return the results to the user in the form of
REST-style data through HTTP.
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FIGURE 7. User-cloud-sensor interactions and its performance in the proposed IoT system. (a) An illustration of management web portal. (b) URI
length comparison between standard CoAP method and the proposed management method. (c) Overall system performance of the IoT cloud.
Thus, compared to traditional service-oriented
architecture (SOA) based solutions, the advantage of the pro-
posed architecture is that developers can focus on developing
the functions of IoT applications without concerns of trans-
forming raw data to contextual information, and the mapping
between specific service request and the corresponding
context information in run-time. Fig. 7 shows the user-cloud-
sensor interactions in the proposed M2M system.
VI. IoT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM EVALUATION
We develop a prototype system to connect sensor devices
via the cloud platform using the proposed CoAP based man-
agement protocol. The snapshot of the management portal is
shown in Fig. 7 (a). Through the pre-defined CoAP APIs,
interactions with application data can be easily managed
and retrieved in a unified manner without remembering all
string URIs.
By integrating the proposed management protocol into the
IoT cloud system, we evaluate the system performance in
terms of time efficiency by setting up a test environment in
which 5 sensor devices are used to upload computing tasks
to the cloud platform with a total average rate of E = 5/min.
The ε£-GALEN ontology [46] is adopted as benchmark, and
the computing tasks are to index and calculate the similarities
of concepts on this ontology under the condition of
four different size assertions (1000, 1500, 2000, 36000).
We take 5 tests and each lasts for 30 minutes. The average
results are shown in Fig. 7 (c). The time delay when
performing the task via cloud consists of: (1) response and
communication time between the remote IoT cloud platform
and the sensor device; and (2) processing time of the task.
The results show closed performance of response time with
an average of 4.5s, while the process time mostly depends on
the size of the data set. As a comparison, we replace the cloud
server with a Nexus 4 smart phone, which is a reasonable
example to illustrate local processing capability, and it shows
that the cloud platform can better achieve communication and
computation efficiently and widely support large data
IoT applications in real-world. It is worth noting that depends
on specific scenarios of IoT applications and computing
capacities of wireless sensor devices, we can choose different
size of dataset for real-world deployments.
VII. FUTURE WORK
In the future work, a more robust and reliable device man-
agement system for IoT needs to be built. Especially, the
following research issues need to be considered with higher
priorities:
1) Real-time management is a challenging issue for
resource constrained sensor networks. In this case, the
IoT system needs to rely on efficient service gateway
design to minimize the amount of data to be sent by
constantly reviewing the data from users, and
intelligent data oriented middleware design to only
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transmit real time information when a reading is
out-of-threshold.
2) Security, trust and privacy are also important issues
to be considered in practical applications. There are
both hard way and soft way methods to achieve
different degrees of security. In our case, the CoAP
based management principle can utilize the transport
layer bindings of UDP or SMS protocols. Thus, the
security mechanisms of these channel bindings can
be utilized to implement access control and policy
enforcement for M2M systems. For example, the UDP
channel security defined by the Datagram Transport
Layer Security (DTLS) can support multiple key
models, i.e., pre-shared or public key, depending on
the system requirements. Also the encryption key
exchanges through SMS can also provide an alternative
to establish a secure channel. These security methods
are appropriate for M2M deployments where there is
an existing trust relationship between the devices and
server.
3) Dynamic registration, bootstrap and management will
be particularly considered for a large scale deployment
with devices coming in and out and changing their
characteristics and functionalities. The IoT device
management should be suitable to develop an open and
universal ecosystem with sustainable interactions and
interoperability among things.
VIII. CONCLUSION
In this paper, we have introduced the IoT ecosystem and key
technologies to support IoT communications, and described
the essential management mechanisms for IoT system.
Specifically, we have introduced a cross layer design of
a lightweight and scalable RESTful web service based
infrastructure to enable efficient and reliable management of
wireless sensor networks. Through performance evaluations,
we have shown the simplicity and efficiency of the proposed
solution, which is promising to drive the new IoT device
management standardization. In our view, these benefits will
enable future IoT to effectively and efficiently combat
network complexities while meeting the requirements of
high-quality services.
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ZHENGGUO SHENG received the B.Sc. degree
from the University of Electronic Science
and Technology of China, in 2006, and the
M.S. (Hons.) and Ph.D. degrees from Imperial
College London, in 2007 and 2011, respectively.
He was with The University of British
Columbia (UBC) as a Research Associate, and
France Telecom Orange Laboratories as a Senior
Researcher and Project Manager in M2M/IoT.
He was also a Research Intern with the IBM
T. J. Watson Research Center, USA, and U.S. Army Research Laboratories.
He is currently a Lecturer with the School of Engineering and Informatics,
University of Sussex, U.K. He is also a Visiting Faculty Member with
UBC. He has authored over 30 international conference and journal papers.
His current research interests cover IoT/M2M, cloud/edge computing,
vehicular communications, and power line communication. He was a
recipient of the Auto21 TestDRIVE Competition Award in 2014, and the
Orange Outstanding Researcher Award in 2012.
CHINMAYA MAHAPATRA received the
B.Tech. degree in electronics and communi-
cation engineering from the National Institute
of Technology, Rourkela, India, in 2009, and
the M.A.Sc. degree in electrical and computer
engineering from The University of British
Columbia (UBC), in 2013, where he is currently
pursuing the Ph.D. degree with the Department
of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Prior to
joining UBC, he was a Scientist with the Indian
Defense Research Laboratory, and a Systems Engineer with the Ciena
Research and Development Center, Ottawa, Canada. His current interests
include the Internet of Things, body sensor area networks, embedded
systems, sensor cloud, and smartphone energy optimization.
CHUNSHENG ZHU (S’12) received the
B.E. degree in network engineering from the
Dalian University of Technology, China, in 2010,
and the M.Sc. degree in computer science from
St. Francis Xavier University, Canada, in 2012.
He is currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree
with the Department of Electrical and Computer
Engineering, The University of British Columbia,
Canada. He has around 40 papers published
or accepted by refereed international journals
(e.g., the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRIAL ELECTRONICS, the IEEE
TRANSACTIONS ON COMPUTERS, the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INFORMATION
FORENSICS AND SECURITY, the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON EMERGING TOPICS IN
COMPUTING, and the IEEE SYSTEMS JOURNAL) and conferences (e.g., the IEEE
Globecom and the IEEE ICC). His current research interests are mainly in
the areas of wireless sensor networks and mobile cloud computing.
VICTOR C. M. LEUNG (S’75–M’89–SM’97–
F’03) received the B.A.Sc. (Hons.) degree in elec-
trical engineering from the University of British
Columbia (UBC), in 1977, and was awarded the
APEBC Gold Medal as the head of the grad-
uating class in the Faculty of Applied Science.
He attended graduate school at UBC on a Nat-
ural Sciences and Engineering Research Council
Postgraduate Scholarship and completed the Ph.D.
degree in electrical engineering, in 1981.
He was a Senior Member of the Technical Staff and Satellite System
Specialist with MPR Teltech Ltd., Canada, from 1981 to 1987. In 1988, he
was a Lecturer with the Department of Electronics, Chinese University of
Hong Kong. He returned to UBC as a Faculty Member in 1989, where he
is currently a Professor and TELUS Mobility Research Chair in Advanced
Telecommunications Engineering with the Department of Electrical and
Computer Engineering. He has co-authored over 700 technical papers in
international journals and conference proceedings, 29 book chapters, and
co-edited eight book titles. His research interests are in the areas of wireless
networks and mobile systems. Several of his papers had been selected for
best paper awards.
Dr. Leung is a Registered Professional Engineer in the Province of
British Columbia, Canada. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada,
the Engineering Institute of Canada, and the Canadian Academy of
Engineering. He was a recipient of the IEEE Vancouver Section Centennial
Award and the 2012 UBC Killam Research Prize. He was a Distinguished
Lecturer of the IEEE Communications Society. He is a member of the
Editorial Boards of the IEEE WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS LETTERS, Computer
Communications, and several other journals. He has served on the
Editorial Boards of the IEEE JOURNAL ON SELECTED AREAS IN COMMUNICATIONS–
WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS SERIES, the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON WIRELESS
COMMUNICATIONS, the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON VEHICULAR TECHNOLOGY, the
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON COMPUTERS, and the Journal of Communications and
Networks. He has guest-edited many journal special issues, and contributed
to the organizing committees and technical program committees of numerous
conferences and workshops.
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