Unit – III

IoT Protocols and Standards

 Introduction
• IoT enables things to communicate and coordinate decisions for various

applications.

• Few applications are healthcare, home automation, disaster recovery…

• IEEE, IETF and ITU defines various standards for IoT communication,

routing, network and session layer protocols.

IoT Ecosystem
 IoT Data Link Layer Protocol
• IEEE 802.15.4e
– IEEE 802.15.4 data link standard used by MAC layer
– Standard includes frame format, headers, destination address, source address and
identifies how communication happen between the nodes.
– Traditional frame format used in networking is not suitable for constrained IoT
devices.
– So, IEEE 802.15.4e was created to support low power communication.
– It uses channel hopping and time synchronization to enable high reliability, low cost
communication In IoT data links
– Mac Features
• Slotframe structure – sleep, transmit and receive state
• Scheduling – Mobility and handover requirements, centralized by manager node
• Synchronization – Node connectivity, acknowledge based, frame based
• Channel Hopping – Time slotted channel hopping
• Network Formation - Joining based on advertisement, Centralized – join request via manager node.
 Cont…
• IEEE 802.11 ah
– Applied for all digital devices,laptops,mobiles,tablets
and digital TVs.
– IEEE 802.11 standards used for wireless networking
– 802.11 ah task group supports for low overhead,
power friendly communication for sensors and motes
– Features include:
• Synchronization Frame: Probe Delay
• Efficient bidirectional packet exchange
• Short MAC Frame
• Null Data Packet
• Increase Sleep Time
 Cont..
• WirelessHart –
 Cont..
• ZigBee Smart Energy
– Medium Range communication – Smart homes, remote control, health care
– Cooordinator controls the networks
– Uses star, peer-to-peer or cluster-tree topology
– ZigBee(low energy, processing power) and ZigZee pro(Security)

• Bluetooth Low Energy

– Commonly used standard for short range communication in IoT
– Low energy – 10 times less than classic Bluetooth
– Latency 15 times than classic Bluetooth

• Z-Wave
– Low power consumption MAC standard for home automation
– Covers 30 meter distance, point to point communication
– Suitable for small messages
– Master slave architecture is used.
 Cont..
• LoRaWAN
– Long Range Wide Area Network
– Power Saving, Low cost, Mobility, Security and bidirectional
communication requirements
– Supports redundant operation, location free, low cost, low power and
energy harvesting technologies.
• G.9959
– Delay sensitive applications – live streaming, teleconferencing
– Designed for low bandwidth, low cost and half duplex reliable communication.
• HomePlug
– Home automation applications
– Designed to reduce cost and power consumption
– Maintains interoperability, reliability and coverage
• DASH7
– Wireless comm. Protocol for active RFID devices, operates in ISM band.
– Designed for scalable, long range, outdoor coverage.
 Cont..
• LTE – A
– CN : Core Network -Controlling mobile devices and keep track of IPs
– RAN: Random Access Network – Establishing control and data planes
– Mobile Nodes
 Cont..
• EnOcean
– Applied for automation
– Energy Harvesting approaches
– Mostly applied in ventilation, heating and air conditioning
• DECT/ULE
– Digital Enhances Cordless telecommunications designed for cordless
phones
– ULE – Ultra Low Energy (Low cost air interface technology)
– Has dedicated channel assignments so more tolerance for congestion
and interference
• Weightless
– Weightless N: Uses TDMA frequency hopping to minimize interference
– Use ultra narrow bands in the sub 1GHz ISM frequency band
– Weightless W provides same features with television band frequencies
 Network layer Routing Protocols
• Two Sublayers
– Routing – handles transfer of packets from source to
destination
– Encapsulation- Forms the packet
– Routing standards are
• RPL : Routing Protocol for Low power and Lossy networks
– Distance vector protocols
– DODAG – Destination Oriented Directed Acyclic Graph
– Have one route from leaf to root
– Stateful (keep track of its children and its parents)
– Stateless(Keep track of its parent only)
 Cont..
• CARP and E-CARP
– Channel Aware Routing protocol
– Designed for under water communication
– Network initialization(HELLO Packet)
– Data Forwarding (Hop by Hop)
– E-CARP – Sink node to save previously received sensory data
– Reduces communication overhead

• CORPL – Cognitive RPL

– Extension of RPL
– Opportunistic forwarding : Enables the packet to have multiple forwarders
set.
– Each node will maintain a forwarding list
– Best node will be chosen to forward
 Network Encapsulation Layer Protocol

• 6LoWPAN
– IPv6 – 128 bit addressing
– Features:
• Different network topologies, Low bandwidth, Low power consumption, cost
efficient , scalable networks,….

– Four types of header

• No 6loWPAN header (00) – any frame doesnot follow 6loWPAN
specifications is discarded
• Dispatch header(01) – for multicating
• Mesh header(10) – for broadcasting
• Fragmentation header(11) – to break long IPv6 header to fit into
120 byte fragments
 Cont..
• 6Lo
– Resource constrained nodes
• 6TiSCH
– It works in TSCH mode
– Stores available frequencies and their time slots in
a matrix called channel distribution usage matrix
– Matrix divided into multiple chunks, each chunk
contains time and frequencies
 Session Layer protocols
• To implement lower layers functions, session layer plays a role
– MQTT :
• Provides connectivity between application and users at one end,
network and communications at other end
 Cont..
• CoAP
– Constrained Application Protocol
– Designed for low overhead RESTful HTTP interface
– Two sub layers:
• Messaging
• Request/ response

• AMQP :
– Advanced Message Queuing protocol
– Designed for financial industry
– Runs over TCP, uses publish subscribe architecture

• SMQTT :
– Lightweight attribute based encryption
– Multicast – one message encrypted and delivered to multiple other nodes
– Stages : Setup, Encryption, Publish, Decryption
 Cont..
• DDS
– Data Distributions Service
– Uses Publish/ Subscribe architecture
– Supports QoS : Security, Priority, reliability, durability….
– Two sublayers :
• Data Centric Publish subscribe – Message Delivery
• Data local reconstruction sublayers – Simple integration of DDS
• XMPP
– Extensible Messaging Presence Protocol
– Designed for chats and message exchange applications
– Supports publish/ subscribe and request/response
– Efficient for low latency small messages.
– Not suitable for M2M applications
 IoT Management Protocols
Supports heterogeneous device management and communication
OMA-DA
– Designed by OMA (Open Mobile Alliance)
– Applied for remote provisioning, updating and managing faulty issues in M2M devices
– Uses XML messages for communication
TR-069
– Designed by Broadband forum
– Titled CPE WN management Protocol(CWMP) – Customer Premises Equipment
– Management is done by HTTP messages sent from server to client or desired devices
Smart Transducer Interface
– Provided by IEEE 1451
– Facilitate the management of different analog transducers and sensors
– This interface is to use plug and play identification by standardized transducers electronic data
sheets(TEDSs)
IEEE 1905.1 – Interconnection of Heterogeneous Data Links
– Handles interoperability by providing an abstraction layer
– Built on top of all heterogeneous MAC protocols
– Abstraction layer allows the exchange of messages
called control message data units(CMDU)
 Security in IoT Protocols
• Security threats raise in all layers
• Security within Protocol Layers
– Few protocols provides some security features in communication:
– Mac 802.15.4e provides different modes by utilizing security enabled bit.
– It provides confidentiality, authentication, integrity, access control
mechanism and secured time synchronize communications
– WirelessHART – use security techniques
– Technique include unique security for each message by AES-128 encryption
– Based on the application security levels varies
– RPL offers different levels of security using security field in its header
– This field specifies level of security and cryptography algorithm
– Supports data authenticity, semantic security, protection against replay
attacks, confidentiality and key management.
 Cont..
• Oauth 2.0 – Trusted third party servers to control access rights and permission
• SASL – Simple Authentication and Security Layer is security framework by IETF for supporting
authentication in IoT applications through servers
• ACE – Authentication and authorization in constrained environments.
• Blockchains – building smart contracts and security protection of IoT platforms.
– Its is distributed ledger technology
• TCG
– Trusted Computing Group
– It includes Root of trust for update(RTU) and trusted platform module(TPM) which is used
in TCG compatible devices.
• Ubiquitous Green Community Control Network Security
– IEEE 1888.3
– Provides high quality, energy saving and secure mechanisms
– Requirements include protection, integrity, confidentiality, authentication and access
control
• TLS/DTLS
– Transport Layer Security and datagram TLS
– Authentication, confidentiality and integrity used in CoAP protocols
– TLS provides for TCP communication
– DTLS provides for UDP communication
– Sublayers : record and handshaking for encapsulation and authentication
 IoT Challenges
• Developing an IoT applications faces lot of challenges like:

– Mobility

– Reliability

– Scalability

– Management

– Availability

– Interoperability

– Cost and complexity

– Power harvesting