No abstract

The smart home field has witnessed rapid developments in recent years. Internet of Things applications for the smart home are very heterogeneous and continuously increasing in number, making user management from a security perspective very challenging. Moreover, the resource-constrained nature of most of the devices implies that any security mechanisms deployed should be lightweight and highly efficient. In this article, we propose an authentication scheme based on symmetric key cryptography, combined with a capability-based access control system, to provide the different stakeholders (residents, recurring guests, or temporary guests) end-to-end secure access to the Internet of Things devices in a smart home, managed by the home owner in an anonymous way. The operations in our scheme only include a small number of communication phases and protect the identities of the entities involved (i.e. stakeholders and endnodes) from any outside entity. The proposed scheme ensures that even if the stakeholder's device or the Internet of Things device is attacked, the system remains secure.

Low Power Wide Area (LPWA) communication technologies have the potential to provide a step change in the enablement of cost-effective and energy efficient Internet of Things (IoT) applications. With an increase in the number of offerings available the real performance of these emerging technologies remain unclear. That is, each technology comes with its own advantages and limitations; yet there is a lack of comparative studies that examine their trade-offs based on empirical evidence. This poses a major challenge to IoT solution architects and developers in selecting an appropriate technology for an envisioned IoT application in a given deployment context.In this paper, we look beyond data sheets and white papers of LPWA communication technologies and provide insights into the performance of three emerging LPWA solutions based on real world experiments with different traffic loads and in different urban deployment contexts. Under the context of this study, specialized hardware was created to incorporate the different technologies and provide scientific quantitative and qualitative information related to data rates, success rates, transmission mode energy and power consumption, and communication ranges. The results of experimentation highlight the practicalities of placing LPWA technologies in real spaces and provide guidelines to IoT solution developers in terms of LPWA technology selection. Overall aim is to facilitate the design of new LPWA technologies and adaptive communication strategies that inform future IoT platforms.

People with disabilities face many issues when it comes to parking in urban areas which include the limited availability of spaces allocated for their use and the unauthorised usage of such spaces. This paper presents DisAssist which is a system designed and developed based on the principles brought forward by the Internet of Things and Smart Cities initiatives; it integrates sensors and smart phones along with wireless and mobile communications to provide for better utilisation and management of parking spaces allocated for use by people with disabilities. Through the use of DisAssist, people with disabilities may obtain realtime availability of parking slots in an area of interest, reserve a slot and authenticate themselves when parking assisting the authorities with usage monitoring for law enforcement as well as capacity planning purposes. Entitlement verification is possible through a multitude of ways enabling users to embrace technology at the level and format they wish.

The availability of off-the-shelf equipment that facilitates long range wireless connectivity can prove to be useful in maritime communications. By establishing terrestrial wireless links, vessels may exchange data between them or with shore-based stations avoiding the use of costly satellite connectivity. On the other hand, vessel mobility and large distances between its nodes make a wireless maritime network hard to manage; frequent disconnections are expected to be the norm in this primarily low node density environment. As such, maritime communications appear as an ideal environment for delay tolerant networking. To this extent, we use actual vessel mobility data to evaluate some existing delay tolerant networking routing algorithms and identify where they fall short from the perspective of our particular domain. It appears that a hybrid approach in the form of a new routing algorithm that addresses the particular characteristics of a maritime network can prove beneficial.