IoT-DMCP: An IoT Data Management and Control Platform for Smart

Cities

Sahar Boulkaboul

1,2

, Djamel Djenouri

, Sadmi Bouhafs

and Mohand Ouamer Nait Belaid

Abderrahmane Mira University, Bejaia, Algeria

CERIST Research Center, Algiers, Algeria

ESI, Algiers, Algeria

Keywords:

IoT, Data Management, Big Data, Embedded Systems, Web/Mobile Application, Security, Micro-services.

Abstract:

This paper presents a design and implementation of a data management platform to monitor and control smart

objects in the Internet of Things (IoT). This is through IPv4/IPv6, and by combining IoT speciﬁc features and

protocols such as CoAP, HTTP and WebSocket. The platform allows anomaly detection in IoT devices and

real-time error reporting mechanisms. Moreover, the platform is designed as a standalone application, which

targets at extending cloud connectivity to the edge of the network with fog computing. It extensively uses the

features and entities provided by the Capillary Networks with a micro-services based architecture linked via

a large set of REST APIs, which allows developing applications independently of the heterogeneous devices.

The platform addresses the challenges in terms of connectivity, reliability, security and mobility of the Internet

of Things through IPv6. The implementation of the platform is evaluated in a smart home scenario and tested

via numeric results. The results show low latency, at the order of few ten of milliseconds, for building control

over the implemented mobile application, which conﬁrm realtime feature of the proposed solution.

1 INTRODUCTION

The Internet of Things (IoT) is an emerging technol-

ogy in telecommunications and computer networks

continuously evolving to ﬁt various domains. This

evolution will be accompanied by an evolution of the

technological ecosystem in all its complexity. Indeed,

this technology has nowadays taken a large part of

the computer systems market due its ﬂexibility and

adaptability in several ﬁelds. The use of IoT in smart

cities like other areas has been a major success. It

is considered to be the extension of the Internet to

things and places in the physical world and claims to

model data exchanges from real-world devices to the

Internet. Each object must be autonomous, able to

interact and cooperate with other objects in order to

achieve common goals. It has a unique address or ID,

and should not consume a lot of energy. IoT-based

solutions leverage advances in web and mobile ap-

plications, especially with the emergence of service-

oriented architecture, to provide ﬂexible, dynamic,

adaptable, and above all, easy-to-use administrative

and control applications. Software applications will

be installed on mobile devices (smart phones, tablets,

PCs, etc.) which will considerably increase the scope

of the solutions. However, despite the wide efforts

in web technologies adoption and standardization for

the IoT, designing a scalable and extensible IoT plat-

form that meets IoT functional requirements remains

challenging. This has been considered in this work,

where designed and implemented a data management

platform to monitor and control of web/mobile appli-

cations in IoT using IPv4/IPv6 and higher layer pro-

tocols such as CoAP, HTTP, WebSocket. The plat-

form allows anomaly detection in IoT devices and

real-time error reporting mechanisms. Further, it is a

standalone application and targets at extending cloud

connectivity to the edge of the network with fog com-

puting. It addresses the challenges in terms of con-

nectivity, reliability, security and mobility of the In-

ternet of Things through IPv6. As an instantiation of

the proposed framework, we consider the smart home

scenario for the implementation and tests. We thus

implemented the different modules for smart home

control via an IoT enabled mobile application, and

made extensive tests. The results conﬁrm realtime

feature of the proposed solution and show latency at

the order of few ten of milliseconds for building con-

trol actions.

578

Boulkaboul, S., Djenouri, D., Bouhafs, S. and Belaid, M.

IoT-DMCP: An IoT Data Management and Control Platform for Smart Cities.

DOI: 10.5220/0007861005780583

In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Cloud Computing and Services Science (CLOSER 2019), pages 578-583

ISBN: 978-989-758-365-0

2 RELATED WORK

Even though IoT paradigm is somehow new, there

are various technologies, protocols and platforms that

target it. For such we can cite ZigBee, 6LoW-

PAN, BLE, IPv6, CoAP, MQTT, etc as known tech-

nologies and protocols used in Internet of things to

enhance and evaluate the performance of product

(Chouali et al., 2017),(Al-Fuqaha et al., 2015),(Tan-

ganelli et al., 2015). Also there are different construc-

tors of the IoT devices, which makes IoT industry

more challenging. Existing IoT platforms present a

variety of issues. We take as example SmartThings

framework (Jia et al., 2017), it allows third party

apps over privileged access to all devices capabilities,

which exposes the insecurity of the framework as de-

scribed in the research paper (Fernandes et al., 2016).

The other known alternative taken from the open-

source world is openHab (Heimgaertner et al., 2017),

many parts of its installation require text conﬁgura-

tion, potential access to log ﬁles for debugging, and

other insecure practices. The conﬁguration of open-

Hab is therefore mainly reserved for technophiles. It

is not a commercial product available on the market,

ready to go. In addition openHab does not support

many types of devices which present a compatibil-

ity issue. Thus, we designed our platform to take the

main IoT issues and challenges.

3 SYSTEM DESCRIPTION

(IoT-DMCP)

The proposed model allows heterogeneous resources,

connectivity reliability and mobility, ensures security

and contains application framework and platform ar-

chitecture. The composition of each layer is illus-

trated in Figure 1 and described in the following.

3.1 Heterogeneous Resources

Since IoT ecosystems will be composed of a high

range of technologies, a suitable support for the het-

erogeneity needs to be provided by the IoT communi-

cation architecture.In our proposed solution, we take

into consideration sensors, actuators and tags.

The use a REST full API to expose every object in

its part boosts heterogeneity and facilitate the exten-

sibility of the system. In addition the wireless tech-

nologies exposed in our solution permit integration of

different resources easily.

Figure 1: IOT-DMCP description.

3.2 Connectivity/Reliability

The base of the Internet of Things is providing con-

nectivity and reliability. IPv6 is the main enabler for

extending the Internet of Things to the Future Inter-

net. This work presents how the architecture has been

an homogeneous, scalable, and interoperable medium

for integrating heterogeneous devices built on tech-

nologies such as 6LoWPAN, Bluetooth Low Energy

(BLE). Using IPv6 allows each device to connect di-

rectly to the Internet and would allow billions of de-

vices to connect and exchange information in a stan-

dardized way over the Internet.

As BLE doesn’t natively communicate with IP, the

best way to achieve this is to use 6LoWPAN. This

simpliﬁes the IP headers, compresses data and en-

capsulates the IP packets to allow them to be sent

via Bluetooth efﬁciently, conserving bandwidth and

power. The combination of BLE and IPv6 brings us

much closer to the goal of having small, low-power

devices that can communicate directly with each other

and the Internet without using different hubs from

each manufacturer sitting in the middle.

Nowadays, a variety of IEEE 802.11n wireless

access-points (APs), including a dedicated commer-

cial AP, a software AP, and a mobile router, can

be used for wireless local-area networks (WLANs).

Along this trend, we use the Raspberry Pi as a Gate-

way that interconnects beacons and also as a device to

run the software AP, because it provides a cost effec-

tive, energy saving, and portable embedded system.

In this paper, we present a conﬁguration of Raspberry

Pi for the software AP using IPv4/IPv6. We conﬁgure

IoT-DMCP: An IoT Data Management and Control Platform for Smart Cities

579

our software AP package which provides a script that

combines hostapd package, which has WPA2 support,

dnsmasq and iptables for the good functioning of the

access point.

Since ipv6 infrastructure is not yet deployed in

some countries, the communication to an IPv6 net-

work is not possible through an IPv4 one, our plat-

form surpass this constraints by offering a transla-

tion mechanism by the implementation of a CoAP-

http proxy that translates the http-IPv4 requests to

a CoAP-IPv6 requests and the same is done for re-

sponses.

3.3 Mobility

The use of an IPv6 based architecture will permit ad-

dressing large set of devices, and make them uniquely

identiﬁable in the internet. Further, the adoption of

a micro-services architecture will address more than

one object using the same ip address and differenti-

ate between them using the URI. This will make the

communication with the objects independent of their

location in the globe, which improves objects mobil-

ity. Additionally the exploitation of fog computing

will essentially simplify direct communication with

mobile devices and therefore enhance mobility.

3.4 Security

The security of our platform is ensured using Token-

based authentication, DTLS (The Datagram Transport

Layer Security) protocol and passwords encryption.

3.4.1 Token-based Authentication

Token-based authentication is a very powerful con-

cept that provides a very high level of security. It is

used to manage access to system resources by using

a token without the need to send authentication data

whenever a resource is requested. The sequence is as

follows:

1. The client requests an access token for authentica-

tion by sending an HTTP request to the authenti-

cation server that contains the user name and pass-

word.

2. A response containing an access token and a re-

fresh token is sent by the server if the received

data is correct. An error message is sent other-

wise. The sent token is unique and associated to

a single user. It is characterized by an expiration

date after which refreshment is necessary.

3. The client uses the token to request access to a

resource. The token will be included in the header

of each sent request.

4. Upon receipt of a request, the server checks the

validity of the token. If it is not valid, an error

message is returned.

the ﬁgure below shows the exchanges between the

client and the server:

Figure 2: Token mechanism.

3.4.2 DTLS

The Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS) pro-

tocol (Granjal et al., 2015) provides communications

privacy for datagram protocols. The protocol al-

lows client/server applications to communicate in a

way that is designed to prevent eavesdropping, tam-

pering, or message forgery. DTLS uses two algo-

rithms ECDHE (Elliptic Curve Difﬁe-Hellman Ex-

change) and ECDSA (Elliptic curve digital signature

algorithm). In our solution, we implement DTLS in

two parts: i) server: which contain implementation

of DTLS in Contiki(Dunkels et al., 2004) using tiny-

dtls(Vu

cini

c et al., 2015) library. tinydtls has become

an important tool for experimenting with DTLS in

constrained devices by users from the academia as

well as the industry, this part is used in the devices.

ii) client : which contains implementation of scan-

dium (Kovatsch et al., 2014) and is used in mobile

application.

3.4.3 Passwords Encryption

The user database is a critical element of the system,

if a hacker gets access to it he will have access to all

accounts of users, hence the importance of securing

the users passwords. To ensure security, there are sev-

eral hash functions such as Hash function with a ﬁxed

salt, Hash function with one salt per user and Slow

hash functions (Bcrypt). After studying the different

hash functions, we opted for the use of Bcrypt which

gives us a high level of security. Bcrypt takes approx-

imately 100 milliseconds to execute. It’s fast enough

so that the user does not notice it when connecting,

but still slow enough to make it extremely expensive

CLOSER 2019 - 9th International Conference on Cloud Computing and Services Science

580

to run it to chop up a large list of frequent passwords.

Bcrypt runs an internal encryption function multiple

times, which slows down its execution. The number

of loops is conﬁgurable which means that if we ever

get processors or GPUs 1000 times more powerful

than the ones we have today, we can just re-conﬁgure

the system and increase the number of loops. This

will cancel the advantage of the new processors.

3.5 Application Framework

There are a various application frameworks available

for web and mobile development, each one has its

speciﬁcities that make it good for use in some cases

and a bad choice in some others. Because our plat-

form aims at an IoT environment, for the development

of the web platform we opted to use a Javascript stack

technologies in both frontend and backend because of

the advantages offered by this language such as ra-

pidity, asynchronous requests, interoperability with

other languages, simplicity and extended function-

ality with third party add-ons. This stack is called

MEAN Stack which refers to (MongoDB, ExpressJs,

Angular, NodeJs). The mobile application will ex-

ploit the backend beside the frontend. Hereafter we

explain in details each part and the technologies used:

3.5.1 Backend

It uses NodeJs an open-source, cross-platform

JavaScript run-time environment and exposes a Rest-

ful api with ExpressJS, to access data stored in a

NoSql database managed by MongoDB, the commu-

nication with objects insured by an IoT application

protocol such as MQTT(Chouali et al., 2017) and

CoAP(Shelby et al., 2011), in our case we use CoAP

with the implementation Node-CoAP.

3.5.2 Frontend

It uses a component oriented framework which is

Angular based on typescript which is a superset of

JavaScript, that allows to speed up development and

facilitate code reuse.

This used technologies stack called MEAN Stack

works together as follows:

3.5.3 Mobile Client

The mobile client is implemented with Java, the

communication with objects is achieved using Cali-

fornium, an implementation of CoAP with java. Our

choice of Node-Coap and Californium CoAP imple-

mentations is based on a comparison done by (Tan-

ganelli et al., 2015), he shows that these implemen-

Figure 3: MEAN Stack.

tations offer all CoAP functionalities and extensions.

Node-Coap is more suitable for applications WEB,

its implementation in Javascript which is a fast and

non-blocking language and makes it easier to inte-

grate with WEB applications. For the mobile appli-

cation, the most suitable implementation for Android

is Californium which implements all the features of

CoAP.

3.6 The Platform Architecture

The IOT-DMCP platform architecture is depicted as

shown in the ﬁgure 4 bellow,

Figure 4: Platform architecture.

3.6.1 The Data Acquisition Service

Objects intercept changes in the environment and

communicate the data to the data acquisition service

via the CoAP protocol. This service is also respon-

sible for translating HTTP requests from the client

to CoAP requests for querying objects. The local

database will permit the principal of fog computing.

3.6.2 The Data Processing Layer

It is responsible for the analysis of requests from the

client, it deals with management of users and homes,

and redirects the those concerning the control of ob-

jects to the acquisition service.

IoT-DMCP: An IoT Data Management and Control Platform for Smart Cities

581

3.6.3 The Data Access Layer

It manages the different connections with the

database(Add, update, delete), the databases synchro-

nization and the control of objects.

3.6.4 The Presentation Layer

It represents the interface of the system with the user,

it includes the mobile interface built with Android and

the interface of the website built with Angular.

4 PERFORMANCE EVALUATION

Our solution is tested in a smart home environment,

which provides a set of sensors and actuators includ-

ing light, motion, temperature, power, fan and a lamp

connected directly to a Nordic beacons nRF51822,

these latter are connected using Bluetooth low energy

to a Gateway represented by a Raspberry Pi, the IP6

camera is connected to the Internet. Figure 5 below

illustrates the IoT hardware platform:

Figure 5: IoT platform.

Figure 6: Web Application.

We evaluate our platform with several tests, we

present the response time of objects to query GET

in both web and mobile applications, the results is

shown in table 1 and table 2.

Figure 7: Mobile application.

Table 1: Web application requests delay.

Object Test 1 Test 2 Test 3

Lamp 133 ms 141 ms 119 ms

Motion 141 ms 121 ms 111 ms

power 89 ms 98 ms 138 ms

Light 158 ms 189 ms 138 ms

Temperature 88 ms 109 ms 156 ms

Table 2: Mobile application requests delay.

Object Test 1 Test 2 Test 3

Lamp 120 ms 118 ms 147 ms

Motion 129 ms 96 ms 111 ms

power 112 ms 162 ms 97 ms

Light 78 ms 96 ms 110 ms

Temperature 128 ms 131 ms 138 ms

Ventilator 103 ms 127 ms 127 ms

A response time shown in both mobile and web ap-

plication dont exceed 190ms, according to (Miller,

1968) to evaluate the performance of our system, Re-

sults is perceived as instantaneous and conﬁrm that

our system enables realtime services .

5 CONCLUSION

In this paper, we presented an IoT data management

and control platform that supports ipv6/ipv4 and takes

into consideration heterogeneous resources, connec-

tivity/reliability, security and mobility. The proposed

framework is applied in smart home environment.

The system allow to manage and interrogate smart ob-

jects (sensors and actuators), the collection of data in

real time to follow the evolution of each object as a

graph, and to apply rules allowing objects to cooper-

ate to accomplish a speciﬁc tasks like turning light on

when presence detected or start the ventilation when

the temperature exceeds a certain degree. The dif-

ferent rules can be customized by the user. The im-

plemented system allows the user to receive real-time

notiﬁcations, and to be alerted for any changes in the

CLOSER 2019 - 9th International Conference on Cloud Computing and Services Science

582

environment. An access rights management is applied

to limit the actions that can be performed by a user.

The security of the system is ensured by the exploita-

tion of some techniques such as token access, DTLS,

encryption of passwords and secure sessions. The

platform has been used to develop a smart home con-

trol mobile application, which has been extensively

tested. The results conﬁrm realtime feature of the pro-

posed solution and show latency at the order of few

tens of milliseconds for building control actions. This

work open perspectives for future works in the appli-

cation we considered for the implementation. This

include the integration of a virtual assistant to facili-

tate interaction with the system, the integration of ma-

chine learning to allow the system to learn habits of

users and plan actions, and the use of artiﬁcial intel-

ligence algorithms to enable the system to make au-

tonomous decisions when necessary.

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