Essay: Effective, efficient and reliable IoT

A complex architecture is required for the realization of an effective, efficient and reliable IoT that takes into account the issues of sensing the real world, transmitting data, and managing the relevant services to build applications [1]. The Internet of the Future is expected to have huge content-oriented traffic, intensive interactions between billions of persons, heterogeneous communications among hosts and smart objects, and provisioning of millions of services, with strict real-time requirements and flexibility in connecting everyone and everything. Key component of the Internet of Future is the Internet of Service, which is aimed at making every possible service widely and easily available through the Internet yielding to higher productivity. Strictly linked to the IoS is the Internet of Things, which is aimed at embodying into the Internet a large number of objects that through standard communication protocols and unique addressing schemes provide services to the final users.
IoTis envisioned to bring together billions of devices, also denoted as smart objects, by connecting them in an Internet-like structure, allowing them to communicate and exchange information and to enable new forms of interaction among things and people. Smart objects are typically equipped with a microcontroller, a radio interface for communication, sensors and/or actuators. Smart objects are constrained devices, with limited capabilities in terms of computational power and memory. They are typically battery-powered, thus introducing even more constraints on energy consumption: this motivates the quest for energy-efficient technologies, communication/networking protocols and mechanisms. The Internet Protocol (IP) has been widely envisaged as the true IoT enabler, as it allows to bring the full interoperability among heterogeneous objects [3].
2. Social IoT and Service Search
The Internet of Things (IoT) integrates a large number of heterogeneous and pervasive objects that continuously generate information about the physical world [4]. A SIoT network is based on the idea that every object can autonomously establish a connection for the desired service by using its relationships, query in its friends and the friends of its friends in a distributed manner, guaranteeing an efficient and scalable discovery of objects and services following the same principles of social networks for humans
of objects connected to the network is increasing exponentially, leading to an enormous searching space.A centralized system has been proposed in [5] where objects are contacted based on a prediction model that calculates the probability of matching the query. In this way, the search engine does not need to contact all the sensors leading to good scalability with the number of objects; nevertheless, it is not scalable with the network traffic, since the number of possible results is significantly larger than the number of actual results, so a lot of sensors are contacted for no reason.
Like for human beings, one way of socialization among objects can be a parental object relationship, defined among similar objects, built in the same period by the same manufacturer. This relationship is easily implemented during the item production, will not change overtime and is only updated by events of disruption/obsolescence of a given device.
Moreover, objects can establish co-location object relationship and co-work object relationship, like humans do when they share personal or public experiences. These relations are determined whenever objects(e.g., sensors, actuators, RFID Tags, etc.) constantly reside in the same place (e.g., to offer home/industrial automation services) or periodically cooperate to provide a common IoT application, such as emergency response and telemedicine [6].A further type of relationship is ownership object relationship, defined for objects owned by the same user (mobile phones, game consoles, etc.). The last relationship is social object relationship, established when objects come into contact, sporadically or continuously, for reasons purely related to relations among their owners (e.g., devices/sensors belonging to friends).
Similarly to people exchanging their contacts (phone numbers, e-mail addresses, etc.), the device, if properly authorized, autonomously exchanges its social profile. The driving idea is that devices with similar characteristics and profile can share best practice to solve problems already faced by ‘friends’.
3. Security and Privacy
Inadequate security on Internet of Things devices could enable intruders to access and misuse sensitive information collected and transmitted by the device. In a complex system of Iot, introducing objects into the active control processes without human intervention, makes IoT security very difficult to address.
The confidentiality of private data and information is of utmost importance in order to ensure the privacy of users. The device authenticity can be easily achieved in network-dependent communication. However, in an autonomous network, device authentication is still an issue [7].The integrity of the data transmitted in huge amount of traffic that will be generate din the IoT environment needs to be ensured on an end-to-end basis on every link on a multi-hop route.
There are two types of security attacks in device-to-device communication in IoT:
1) Inference attack: This is an attack on privacy, which is carried out by logically or statistically studying data transmission patterns between devices.
2) Distributed denial-of-service attack: This can be carried out by jamming autonomous device-to-device communications to disable the operation of devices.
The general network architecture is divided into three layers: sensing layer, transport layer and application layer. The threat of RFID and Wireless sensor network’s security are the major security problems of sensing layer . There are many security problems in the sensor network, such as external attack and link layer security, Witch attack, HELLO flooding attack, wormhole and sewage pool, selective forwarding attack, broadcast authentication and flooding etc.
The transport layer is composed of a variety of networks, including the internet, 3G communication network and the cloud computing platform, it is the centre of the whole network, it is in charge of the transmission and processing of information which is obtained by perception layer. Key technologies of the transport layer include long distance wired and wireless communication protocol, network integration technology and magnanimous intelligent information processing technology etc. There are many security problems in the transport layer, such as DOS attack, DDOS attack, impersonation attack, middleman attacks, cross heterogeneous network attacks etc. [8].
The application layer is interface between the Internet of things and users, which uses data mining, cloud computing, fuzzy recognition and other intelligent computing technologies to process magnanimous data and provide effective information
1. Quick and decisive actions need to be taken to manage and protect the label identity, to use communication technology and biological recognition technology, to protect RFID security and privacy better. Wireless sensor network is an important part of the sensing layer. The password and key technology, secure routing, secure data aggregation, security and privacy protection should be studied more comprehensive.
2. Transport layer security mechanism can be comprehensive utilization of point to point encryption and end-to-end encryption mechanism. In addition, we should strengthen the transport layer of the cross domain authentication and cross network authentication.
3. Strengthen the database access control policy, Strengthen authentication mechanism and encryption mechanism of different scenarios, strengthen the data tracing ability and network forensics capability and improve the network crime forensics mechanism, then establish a comprehensive, unified efficient safety management platform.