The proliferation of widely deployed Internet of Things (IoT) has changed the way people access information, transforming every aspect of their daily life. Given different data transmission and service requirements, various different wireless protocols have been developed and applied to IoT. This device heterogeneity issue has become the major stumbling block to the scalability, flexibility, and dependability of real IoT systems, such as industrial IoT, smart manufacturing, and connected healthcare. This project is developing a novel network-layer design in a hierarchical architecture for current IoT systems, where an intermediate layer will be introduced to help collect data from heterogeneous IoT devices. In particular, the first research thrust will focus on network stability for large-scale data collection by leveraging mobile multi-protocol gateways (M-MGs) as the intermediate layer to support dynamic data traffic patterns. In face of the limited spectrum resource on coexisting wireless protocols, the second research thrust will design adaptive and hierarchical resource management schemes to better utilize available M-MGs for data collection. Various types of uncoordinated protocols coexist in the same wireless environment, which inevitably raises serious concerns on the security of each communication link. The third research thrust will investigate secrecy capacity enhancement approaches to prevent wireless attacks from compromising the system dependability. The research activities are being thoroughly evaluated via a combination of simulation, experiments, prototyping, and implementation in practical IoT systems.
The success of this project will serve as a key enabler to the network-level design of future heterogeneous IoT systems. The proposed novel architecture can better handle the coexistence issue in large-scale IoT systems, providing strong stability to the network performance. By leveraging the inexpensive M-MGs or even smartphones, existing IoT infrastructures do not need to have a complete retrofitting, which greatly reduces the renovation costs and extends their application scenarios. The developed theoretical analysis on the secrecy capacity of IoT will enhance the existing knowledge to provide high-security standards in addition to existing cryptographic approaches.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
