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A Reference Architecture for the Internet of Things

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This is the first article of a two article series in which we try to work from the abstract level of IoT reference architectures towards the concrete architecture and implementation for selected use cases. This first article will cover the definition of a more concrete and comprehensible architecture whereas the second part will then apply this architecture to actual use cases.

We are at the edge of a new interconnected world. Under the name “Internet of Things” (IoT) or “Industry 4.0” companies are developing a new network of intercommunicating objects of our everyday life. The IoT interconnects the Things in order to exchange information to fulfill tasks for the users. Ideas of fridges communicating not only with your smart-phone, but with the producer's server farm or an energy power plant will soon become reality. Companies behind this new technology and communication boom come from all industries - not only the big-data-software players like Google, Microsoft or Apple are heading in this direction, also big insurance companies, peripheral device producers and car manufacturers are pushing the IoT.

The key to enabling communication between all of these diverse “Things” is standardization. Standardization, however, is easy to be claimed in a research environment, but difficult to be achieved in the real world. Reference architectures are of great help for standardization, as they define guidelines that can be used when planning the implementation of an IoT system.

In order to achieve standardization it is necessary to create high level reference architectures like the one defined by IoT-A. However, high-level reference architectures are difficult to understand because they are very abstract. If you are in a consulting job you will see that it is impossible to show such high-level reference architectures to actual customers in the industry.

We would like to go a step further and provide guidelines on how to substantiate a more concrete architecture from the IoT-A reference architecture. The idea is to take the abstract IoT-A reference architecture and create a less high level architecture out of it that can even be put into a “management summary” – that’s what is happening in this article. Additionally we select some use cases and instantiate our reference architecture for them to show the complete life-cycle down to the implementation of an actual system within the IoT – that will happen in a follow-up article.

First things first, let’s define some terms:

  • Thing: An object of our everyday life placed in our everyday environment. A thing can be a car, fridge but can also be abstracted to a complete house or city depending on the use case.
  • Device: A sensor, actuator or tag. Usually the device is part of a thing. The thing processes the devices’ context information and communicates selected information to other things. Furthermore, the thing can pass actions to actuators.

There is a certain amount of “inevitable IoT components” that you will find (in one form or another) in every IoT reference architecture (as for example in Google’s Brillo, IoT-A or Z-Wave):

  • Interoperability and integration components towards things and devices,
  • Context aware computing techniques such as the definition of a context- and action-model as well as the goal definition by rule engines.
  • Security guidelines that range over the complete architecture.

In a way the current architectures for the IoT can be seen as a larger-scale version of Anind K. Dey’s context toolkit. The context toolkit was designed on an application level, as it was designed for Geographical Information Systems (GIS). In the IoT we have to extend the context toolkit towards the intercommunication between things. However, the basic idea of goal, context information and resulting actions remains in the IoT world.

In the IoT world we don’t only define the goal on the user level (i.e. by application), but things themselves can work towards certain goals without actively including the user. In the end the devices still serve the user but they act autonomously in the background – which is exactly the idea of ubiquitous computing.

In order to get a better picture of the term “context” we will first introduce our context model and then jump into the introduction of our reference architecture. Context defines the state of an environment (usually the user’s environment) in a certain place at a certain time. The context model usually distinguishes between context elements and context situation. Context elements define specific context, usually on the device level. A context element can be for example a temperature value at a certain time and location.

Location and time are context elements themselves, but they play a special role as they are needed to locate sensor values in space and time. Without knowing where and when a temperature was measured the temperature does not help much for making conclusions.

Certain context elements can be standardized right away (e.g. a temperature value is already defined by a double value and a measurement unit such as Celsius or Fahrenheit). Other context elements are application specific (“thing-specific”) and cannot just be standardized right away. These elements are defined as “high-level” context and require a mechanism to define them for each thing.

The context situation is an aggregation of context elements. The context situation is thus a view on the environment in a certain location at a certain time.

As mentioned earlier, certain context elements can be standardized right away (because they are already standardized) but others cannot (because they are use-case specific). In order to let a thing know, if it can actually communicate with another thing a certain communication standard has to be agreed on. For this purpose we introduce the context situation schema. The context situation schema defines what the thing is capable of in ways of context.

You can drive the context model further and define certain “standard functionality” that has to be introduced by everything and additional functionality that is to be defined by each thing as for example done by the Z-Wave standard.

Similarly to the context model you can also define an action model that defines what things can trigger (e.g. open a window, take a photo). Actions can only be triggered with the combination of context information (e.g. a context situation) and defined goals. Goals are usually depicted as rules of a rule engine (e.g. IF temperature > 25* THEN open window). Whenever a context situation is given to a thing the thing evaluates if an action is to be triggered according to its defined goals (i.e. rules). Depending on the use-case the context, action and goal model can be more or less complex for a certain thing. Some things might only consume actions and won’t even produce context information, while others will publish context information (or even goals) to be consumed by other things.

Now that we are on the same page about the role of context aware computing in the IoT we can jump right into the definition of our Reference IoT Layered Architecture, short “RILA”. In the IoT context RILA acts between things, devices and the user as shown in the following figure.

RILA consists of 6 layers.Besides these layers there are two “cross-section-layers” that affect all other layers, namely “Security” and “Management”.

Let’s take a look at each RILA layer and the component inside. We start from the bottom (Device Integration) and work ourselves towards the top.

The device integration layer connects all the different device types and consumes device measurements as well as it communicates actions (on device level). This layer can be seen as a translator that speaks many languages. The output of the sensors and tags depends on the protocol they implement. The input of the actuators is also defined by the protocol they implement.

The device integration layer consists of three main components. The lowermost component is the driver component which communicates with the different sensors, tags and actuators on low level, vendor specific, communication protocols. It contains driver instances for every type of low level device known to the system. The next component is the device discovery component. It can be triggered by two events, one from the device management layer, which tells this component to add a new device and by the driver component, which notifies this component in case a new device is added. Similarly the device discovery also handles deregistration of devices. The last component is the device communication component. It is the bridge between the device management layer and the driver component. This component decides which driver is called when the device management layer addresses a device.

The device management is in charge of taking device registrations and sensor-measurements from the device integration layer. Furthermore it communicates status changes for actuators down to the device integration layer. The device integration layer then just validates that the status change (i.e. the action) is conform with the actuator and then translates the status change to the actuator.

The device management layer is in control of the devices in the way that it knows which devices are connected to the system. Each change to a device’s registration as well as incoming measurement data has to be communicated from the device integration layer to the device management layer, so the information can be updated and stored. That way the device integration layer manages device registration (which includes meta-data enrichment, as for example in which unit or frequency a sensor is sending data) and device communication (take the actual measurements and pass them to the data management, as well as pass actions down to the actuator-devices).

The data management can be seen as a central database that holds all data of a “thing”, but this is only one possible implementation. For larger things within the system (e.g. a device life-cycle monitoring system collecting data from other things) data management might be a data warehouse or even a complete data farm. The implementation of the data management layer thus strongly depends on the use-case for the specific thing.

The context management defines the central business logic within RILA and is responsible for six tasks:

  1. Define the goals of the thing.
  2. Consume the context situation(s) of other things
  3. Produce the (own) context situation of the thing.
  4. Evaluate the (own) context situation towards the goal.
  5. Trigger actions that help to fulfill the goal according to the evaluated rules.
  6. Publish context situations for other things.

According to these tasks we can divide the context management into eight components as shown in the next figure.

Rule Engine & Artificial Intelligence (AI): Define and manage all of the rules necessary for context evaluation. This includes the goal (which is basically as set of rules) as well as rules for creating the context situation and actions.

Context Situation Integration Module: Listens to context situations of other things and integrates the incoming context situations.

Action Integration Module: Incoming actions of other things are evaluated and passed on to the device management layer by this component. Rules have to be considered, that define in which situations an action received from another thing can be passed on for triggering an actuator.

Context Situation Creator Module: Collects data from the system and builds the context situation(s). This can also be driven by rules.

Action Creator Module: Similar to the context situation creator module, action objects have to be created once triggered during rule evaluation.

Context Situation Publisher Module: Provide context situations to the thing integration layer. According to the sophistication level of the implementation the context situation publisher can provide a set of context situations for different things that are subscribed or one context situation for everybody. The context situation publisher module has to take care of data permission levels towards other things. Only trusted other things should receive selected context information. Furthermore this module has to take care of defining the context situation schemas that are communicated to other things that want to subscribe. The schema is used to evaluate whether a thing is capable of communicating with another thing.

Action Publisher Module: Similar to the context situation publisher module this module is responsible to communicate actions to the thing integration layer to be communicated to other things. Additionally the action schema(s) are managed by this component.

Context Evaluation Module: Evaluates the rules using the (current) context situation and triggers actions that are communicated down to the devices or to the action creator module. The action creator module in turn passes the created actions to the action publisher that communicates the actions to other things. One way to simply evaluate rules is to build decision trees from the rules defined by the rule engine.

The concrete architecture and complexity of offered functionality strongly depends on the use case for the thing under development. Especially the rule engine & artificial intelligence component might not have to be very sophisticated for less intelligent things (e.g. a fridge). For things that collect context information from other systems these components will, however, be very sophisticated. Higher sophistication can be for example data science and data mining techniques.

The thing integration layer is responsible for finding other things and communicating with them.

Once two things found each other they have to undergo a registration mechanism. The thing integration layer has to evaluate if the communication with the thing to be partnered with is possible. For this purpose the context situation and/or action schemata have to be compared. These are provided by the context management layer.

If the schema-match is evaluated positively, the thing can notify the other thing upon new context situation or action creation. The context situations and actions to be communicated to other things are provided by the context management layer.

The thing registration can be done in a central component or by the thing itself (e.g. auto-discovery network scan).

The application integration layer connects the user to the thing. Applications that are (directly) on top of the RILA architecture are located here. The application integration can be seen as a service layer, or even as a simple UI on top of the stack. The concrete implementation of the layer depends on the use case.

At this point we are finished with the layers. Now let’s remember the cross-layer challenges and take a look at security. When building an IoT system we have to consider security on all layers. Attack vectors have to be identified in order to identify appropriate security standards.

The following attack vectors can be identified:

User: The end user is a possible attack vector because it can affect the system either on purpose or without its knowledge. One common attack of this type is a phishing attack, that attempts to acquire sensitive information from the victim.

Web interface: If the application offers a web interface, then this can be subject to 'conventional' attacks like SQL injection or XSS. OWASP (Open Web Application Security Project) created a list of the 10 most likely attack scenarios against websites.

Thing: Smart devices often communicate with an external system via an app, which relies on a form of operating system. The two main liabilities are the app itself which might not offer sufficient security mechanisms or the operating system underneath that could be hacked or infected.

Low level hardware components: When considering hardware components and the security they provide, one must take their computing power into consideration. The main liability is represented by low power devices that simply do not have the required CPU power for secure encrypted communication. When working with many sensors, one can eliminate the outliers to get an accurate picture but security cannot be achieved. If the correctness of the data provided by the sensors is essential, then more powerful hardware is required, increasing the cost of acquisition by an order of magnitude.

Communication channels: Securing the communication channel depends on the protocol used. We will discuss the protocols relevant for IoT and what they offer for securing their communication:

  • RFID and NFC: Communication between tag and reader is wireless and can easily be eavesdropped. Encryption of the data is therefore essential. The symmetric encryption algorithms that are today considered sufficiently secure are 3DES and AES-128. When writing data to a new tag, the default authentication key should be changed. The key management for the tags is done by the system that controls the reader. RFID tags themselves are very diverse and security must also be taken into account when acquiring them. The Mifare Plus tag for example is an upgrade from the Mifare Classic tag, because it offers AES-128 encryption. The Mifare Classic tag uses a proprietary algorithm based on a 48-bit key which was already cracked.
  • Zigbee: the communication channel between a Zigbee device and the application is secure because the algorithm used for encryption is AES-128. The initial key exchange on the other hand must be considered insecure. When a new device is added to the network, the key is sent to the device in plain text and can be found by sniffing, given the timing is right.
  • Thread: the communication between two Thread devices is secured by an AES encryption. The key establishment between a new device and the application is done in a secure way using a key exchange algorithm.

Attack vectors can also be grouped into more technical attack vectors that target specific components of the system. These are:

  • Authentication
  • Authorization
  • Authenticity validation: signature for messages
  • Key exchange mechanisms
  • Encryption
  • Configurations – can pose a security threat from bad to default configurations
  • Third party libraries – may contain security breaches and well known exploits when not updated
  • Network security

The security-triangle shows us the dilemma of choosing the right amount of security according to our use-case.

The security triangle somehow represents a compromise that occurs in every use case. You can only choose one point inside the triangle that represents what you want or need in terms of security, cost and business requirements. Let us give you some examples:

Example 1. Acme Bank builds a bank vault: It is crucial to use secure hardware for this use case, that cannot be tampered with. In order to achieve maximum coverage on business and security requirements, the costs will increase a lot.

Example 2: Farmer Billy Bob wants to get some shiny sensors to know how his crops are doing on his smartphone, but he does not need a lot of security. For now, farmer Billy Bob got his requirements fulfilled, had small costs and can live happily. Well, at least until farmer Jimmy Junior’s son, Jimmy Junior Junior, went to study computer engineering …

So, finding the appropriate security measures throughout the complete architecture is always a tightrope walk, as business requirements and costs often contradict with high security measures. Furthermore if can happen that certain technical requirements restrict us from using the highest security measures, as for examples low-power devices might not be able to accept a certain overhead when sending packages as this would result in consuming more energy.

At this point we want to finish the introduction of our reference architecture. In this article we wanted to show that it is possible to break down the IoT world to a more comprehensible level. Context aware computing techniques help to make certain parts of this world more understandable. In a follow-up article we will show how use cases can be derived from the RILA reference architecture introduced here to provide a more complete picture on how RILA can actually help us with the implementation of IoT systems.

About the Authors

Hannelore Marginean is a developer at Senacor Technologies in Germany. She likes to discover new innovative technologies and has spent time researching about the possibilities, the security risks and the benefits of IoT. In her spare time she likes to paint with acrylics and play the guitar.

 

Daniel Karzel is a technical consultant at Senacor Technologies in Germany. Already during his master’s studies in Mobile Computing he was dealing with Context Aware Computing and the Internet of Things. Besides thinking about software architectures for the future he enjoys playing the accordion and traveling China in his free time.

Tuan-Si Tran is a software developer at Senacor Techologies in Germany. He is a frontend enthusiast and is interested in "bleeding edge" technology. In his spare time he likes to play tennis.

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Community comments

  • Drivers

    by truongtud nguyen,

    Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion.

    It's a great article. Perhaps you have focused more on context management layer than others. As mentioned above, ''The output of the sensors and tags depends on the protocol they implement. The input of the actuators is also defined by the protocol they implement. '' how much effort to discovery driver of devices there is when there are so many different protocols. I think we can define an interface driver for all drivers.

  • Real world issues

    by Tim Coote,

    Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion.

    Interesting piece. I designed a larg-ish IoT system (100M user target). I'd make a few observations:
    - Things and Devices are, essentially, analogue: they fail in interesting ways and show emergent behaviours. You need a lot of work on how to manage these, including how to identify rogue firmware releases/unexpected behaviours
    - many of the 'edge' protocols (inc. ZWave) are not designed for general IoT as from a CS point of view, they include all OSI layers. For the most part, the higher layers must be assiduously ignored if things are to interact, and many thing specifications need to be tightened up to be practical (e.g. a ZWave lock assumes that it is being observed when operated as it can only identify its own state, as opposed to the state of whatever it's locking; it is common to find timers in things, which present inconsistent points of view of what the time is).
    - the security model for authorisation should not be based on identity: it's much too hard to manage and cannot handle issues such as delegation easily.
    - the programming models require much more thought: stuff like rules sound attractive, but are very hard to test; IoT is a distributed environment with very few guarantees. It's too easy to code for the happy path and really confuse users when things go slightly wrong.
    - there's a market tension between 'thing makers', who get paid by volume, and 'IoT service providers' whose costs are driven by (lack of) implementation quality.
    - NAT and other external dependencies can create much pain....

  • Re: Real world issues

    by Luke Venediger,

    Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion.

    Thanks for your insights Tim. Can you elaborate on what security model would be a better fit for IoT?

  • Re: Real world issues

    by Tim Coote,

    Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion.

    Here's a high level synopsis, ignoring the issues around threats and countermeasures for the deployed hardware and software, including the naming of things and devices. The application level security model will, ultimately, need to naturally encapsulate the relevant authorities in the user interactions (closely following the physical world: if I lend you the keys to my garage, the implication is that you can use them, that they won't grant access to the rest of my house and that, should circumstances require it, you can further delegate attenuated authorisation to someone else. I can find out who's got rights to do what with what and revoke authority when I want). The closest model that I'm aware of takes us back to the Capability Security Model: possession of a reference to a resource includes the operations that can be carried out on it. The references are unforgeable. I've documented the approaches elsewhere.

    I say 'ultimately' as there is a security economics issue about whether market success depends on capturing more applications faster by ignoring security altogether (qv the way the Windows evolved, even where reasonable security technology was in place, it was in most on the supply side's interest to ignore them.) I'm not sure whether IoT has exactly the same interests as the direct interaction with the real world potentially increases the value of the security model to users.

    There are other economic drivers that don't align well (as a user, I want to be able to combine sensors and actuators that may be controlled through different service providers).

  • Re: Real world issues

    by Luke Venediger,

    Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion.

    Thanks Tim!

  • Re: Real world issues

    by Tim Coote,

    Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion.

    fwiw, there's another angle on data privacy in the IoT context. Many customers want to collect data. This approach needs working through in detail and would usually require explicit end user opt-in as it quickly becomes impossible to keep such data confidential.

  • Re: Drivers

    by Daniel Karzel,

    Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion.

    Yes, in a way we focused a lot on the context management layer because we see it as the heart of every IoT system. In the end it comes down to two questions:
    1. How much data can (and do I want) to collect?
    2. What meaningful tasks can I derive from the data collected?
    Context Aware Systems have dealt with these questions for many years already. In a way I see the IoT just as an extension of Context Aware Systems. What changes is the abstraction level. For Context Aware Systems we were on an application level. In the IoT we are on e multi-system level where many Context Aware Systems communicate with each other. But, to my mind, we can build on the architectures designed for Context Aware Systems (e.g. www.cc.gatech.edu/fce/contexttoolkit/pubs/chi99...) in order to create applications and systems in the IoT area. (IoT is just a buzzword anyway...)

    Concerning your remark about drivers: Sure, we want to encapsulate all the protocols and vendor specific stuff on the device integration layer. This is the exact purpose of that layer. Above the device integration layer we just deal with the measurements (data values) device-specific meta-data. If we implement the device integration layer in a modular and well encapsuled way we can add new devices and drivers (from different vendors, ...) without touching the implementation (and deployment) on the different layers. That's the idea. In a way the device integration is thus an abstraction layer.
    How the devices are discovered is not an answer the reference architecture can give. It has to be discussed for the concrete architecture according to the concrete use-case one wants to implement.

    P.S.: Sorry for the late reply

  • Re: Real world issues

    by Daniel Karzel,

    Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion.

    Hi Tim,

    I found it really nice that you provided some examples from your personal experience, thanks.

    I'd like to add a few remarks:
    1. I agree that it is difficult to separate the "device" and the "thing" term. However, I think it is necessary to separate the terms in some way, so we know what we are talking about in discussions about the IoT. In many discussions I heard people talk about things when they actually meant devices and the other way round.
    I try to stick to the definitions defined by the IoT-A (www.iot-a.eu/public/terminology). A device is always a sensor, actuator or tag for me. Things may include devices.
    Distinguishing that terms helps to separate the "device" communication (on a simple measurement level) from the "thing" communication (on an actual application-data, domain-object level)
    I totally agree that the terms cannot be separated with 100% precision (there are many examples where one can quarrel if something should be classified as thing or as device), but nevertheless I think it is important that we sharpen our definitions when we talk about the IoT. Otherwise there is just too much misunderstanding.

    2. On thing level I think the Internet is appropriate for communication. We tend to think too much in the OSI (or TCP-IP) model because that is what we learned. It will be interesting what other device-level protocols will emerge; or what protocols will be (mis-)used for it. For example for scalable low-power communication (...)

    3. Concerning security one of the most important issues that I noticed so far is, that security is just not recognized by the (project) management in the industry. The sensibility is just not there (yet). During the design phase, most projects just don't think about security. There are no risk plans, nobody thinks about the attack-vectors and the attackers (motivation, ...) in the design phase. Once the product is ready to be rolled out security suddenly becomes an issue. And then somebody creates some tests and puts a "safety sticker" on product.
    This thinking has to end. Security has to be taken seriously from the beginning (privacy questions too, for that matter). The IoT offers too many possibilities for attackers, and far more dangerous results as it interferes with our daily life in a matter that was not there before (danger to harm life and limb...). Security standards exist, but if we don't integrate security as an important issue in out project management the standards won't help much.
    I find this a good starting point for more information on that matter: www.dpunkt.de/buecher/5715/9783864903434-iot-ha...

    4. Yeah, rule engines can make a system really suck (on many levels, be it tractability, usability or just complexity). I would say it depends on the domain. When we plan a system we should analyze the domain (together with experts) and then decide what complexity we want to implement. I think for many use cases we will not need (complex) rule engines for decision making. For other use cases we will need them.

    In the end this article was an approach to create something more "touchable" and understandable out of really high-level reference architecture like the IoT-A (www.iot-a.eu/public).
    I think we need reference architectures (as an abstract level above software architectures) to be able to cope with the complexity of the Internet of Things. On the other hand it is very difficult to "constrain" the IoT in a concrete way, because it is the nature of the IoT to include "everything".

    P.S.: Sorry for the late reply

  • Link not working

    by Manuel Pais,

    Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion.

    link to "IoT-A reference architecture" doesn't work

  • More to read on the topic

    by Harriet Tewksbury,

    Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion.

    Thank you for the research, I think this article will be a good addition: goo.gl/JT9aWP. It discusses IoT reference architecture along with standardization.

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