A Modular IoT Hardware Platform for Distributed and Secured Extreme Edge Computing
Centro de Electrónica Industrial, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, José Gutiérrez Abascal 2, 28006 Madrid, Spain
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Electronics 2020, 9(3), 538; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics9030538
Received: 25 February 2020 / Revised: 16 March 2020 / Accepted: 18 March 2020 / Published: 24 March 2020
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Recent Advances in Embedded Computing, Intelligence and Applications)
The hardware of networked embedded sensor nodes is in continuous evolution, from those 8-bit MCUs-based platforms such as Mica, up to powerful Edge nodes that even include custom hardware devices, such as FPGAs in the Cookies platform. This evolution process comes up with issues related to the deployment of the Internet of Things, particularly in terms of performance and communication bottlenecks. Moreover, the associated integration process from the Edge up to the Cloud layer opens new security concerns that are key to assure the end-to-end trustability and interoperability. This work tackles these questions by proposing a novel embedded Edge platform based on an EFR32 SoC from Silicon Labs with Contiki-NG OS that includes an ARM Cortex M4 MCU and an IEEE 802.15.4 transceiver, used for resource-constrained low-power communication capabilities. This IoT Edge node integrates security by hardware, adding support for confidentiality, integrity and availability, making this Edge node ultra-secure for most of the common attacks in wireless sensor networks. Part of this security relies on an energy-efficient hardware accelerator that handles identity authentication, session key creation and management. Furthermore, the modular hardware platform aims at providing reliability and robustness in low-power distributed sensing application contexts on what is called the Extreme Edge, and for that purpose a lightweight multi-hop routing strategy for supporting dynamic discovery and interaction among participant devices is fully presented. This embedded algorithm has served as the baseline end-to-end communication capability to validate the IoT hardware platform through intensive experimental tests in a real deployment scenario.
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Keywords:
extreme edge; embedded edge computing; internet of things deployment; hardware design; IoT security; Contiki-NG; trustability
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MDPI and ACS Style
Merino, P.; Mujica, G.; Señor, J.; Portilla, J. A Modular IoT Hardware Platform for Distributed and Secured Extreme Edge Computing. Electronics 2020, 9, 538. https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics9030538
AMA Style
Merino P, Mujica G, Señor J, Portilla J. A Modular IoT Hardware Platform for Distributed and Secured Extreme Edge Computing. Electronics. 2020; 9(3):538. https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics9030538
Chicago/Turabian StyleMerino, Pablo; Mujica, Gabriel; Señor, Jaime; Portilla, Jorge. 2020. "A Modular IoT Hardware Platform for Distributed and Secured Extreme Edge Computing" Electronics 9, no. 3: 538. https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics9030538
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