Internet of Things – Protocols and Challenges

This one-day training talks about the different wireless protocols and standards that can be used both in the area of short range and more longer-range technologies. In many cases we need to use both in combination to solve a specific use case.

We discuss the challenges we will met in the areas of security and device management. Another topic is the use smart sensors e.g. using local machine learning to optimize the network traffic and make fast smart decisions without the need to talk to the cloud.

COURSE SYLLABUS

General overview
• Background to IoT and Industry 4.0, Industrial IoT (IIoT).

Overview of IoT technologies and protocols.
• Protocol hierarchy. Application level protocols and connectivity level protocols.
• Protocols for sensors/devices directly connected to the cloud and with the help of gateways.

Devices connected via gateways – important standards and protocols
• For all technologies, regulatory and certification issues are discussed.

Bluetooth, Bluetooth Low Energy and Bluetooth Mesh
• Standard evolution summary.
• Protocols for sensors/devices directly connected to the cloud and with the help of gateways.
• Details on Bluetooth Low Energy. Long range, high throughput, extended advertisements, and Bluetooth Mesh. Indoor positioning using beacons and Angle of Arrival/Angle of Departure (AoA/AoD).
• The Bluetooth Mesh standard of today and soon to come improvements.
– How are mesh applications defined (models, opcodes). Important built-in models.

Live demonstration; Create a mesh application by defining a custom model. Perform provisioning of a node and add it to a mesh network.

Wi-Fi
• Standard evolution summary.
• Current state-of-art, Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac). Sub-GHz Wi-Fi for IoT (802.11ah).
• The importance of Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) and added frequency bands (6 GHz) for the IoT use cases.

Live demonstration; Using Wi-Fi to send data to a cloud service.

802.15.4
• Standard evolution summary for 802.15.4 protocol family.
• Zigbee PRO => Zigbee 3.0. What is included in the current standard? Application layer protocols (Zigbee´s own and Dotdot).
• Thread. Description of the technology and protocol stack. Application layer protocols; Dotdot, LWM2M.
• UWB. New version of the standard (IEEE 802.15.4z).

Devices connected directly to Internet – important standards and protocols
• For all technologies, regulatory and certification issues are discussed.

LoRa/LoRaWAN
• Description of the technology and protocol structure.
• Large-scale networks (e.g. city networks) as well as “private” networks (e.g. building and agriculture use cases).

SigFox
• Short overview of the technology and protocol structure.

Low category cellular network – Cat-M, NB-IoT, GSM
• Description of the technologies and protocol structures. Using licensed band and how the operators comes into the picture (SIM cards, world-wide coverage).

Live demonstration; Send data from the Bluetooth Mesh network to the cloud using NB-IoT. Shows the use of a gateway between the Bluetooth nodes and the cellular network.

The role of 5G in future IoT
• Features in 5G to support IoT use cases.
• Support for different use cases; Massive IoT, Broadband IoT, Critical IoT and Industrial Automation IoT.

Application layer protocols
• RestFUL APIs. LWM2M as an example of a RestFUL API.
• MQTT, CoAP and other application layer protocols.

Security for “IoT that really matters”
• Secure Boot/FW. Why is important and an example of how it can be implemented.
• End-to-End security. Description of using protocols like TLS/DTLS and OSCORE (application layer security).

Live demonstration; E2E security from a Bluetooth Mesh end node (sensor) to a cloud service using the OSCORE protocol.

Device Management
• Handle large scale IoT device deployment including firmware updates (FOTA).
• Using LWM2M as a standard for cloud-based device management and FOTA.