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Middleware Solutions for Wireless Internet of Things

A special issue of Sensors (ISSN 1424-8220). This special issue belongs to the section "Sensor Networks".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (15 January 2019) | Viewed by 71236

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Special Issue Editors


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Guest Editor
Department of Computer Science & Engineering (DISI), University of Bologna, 40136 Bologna, Italy
Interests: wireless sensor and actuator networks; middleware for sensor and actuator networks; vehicular sensor networks; edge computing; fog computing; online stream processing of sensing dataflows; IoT and big data processing; pervasive and mobile computing; cooperative networking; cyber physical systems for Industry 4.0
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Guest Editor
Department of Mathematics and Computer Science (DMI), University of Ferrara, Via Giuseppe Saragat, 1, 44122 Ferrara, Italy
Interests: IIoT; blockchain; software-defined networking; location/context awareness
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Guest Editor
Department of Computer Science, 315 Computer Science Bldg, Missouri University of Science and Technology, Rolla, MO 65409, USA
Interests: cyber-physical systems; security and privacy; smart environments (smart city, smart grid, smart healthcare); wireless and sensor networks; mobile and pervasive computing; data analytics; parallel, distributed, and cloud computing; social networks; systems biology; applied graph theory and game theory

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Guest Editor
Department of Computing, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hung Hom, Kowloon, Hong Kong
Interests: distributed computing; mobile and pervasive computing; wireless sensor networks; cloud computing; big data
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

The proliferation of powerful but cheap devices, together with the availability of a plethora of wireless technologies, has pushed for the spread of the Wireless Internet of Things (WIoT), and is typically much more heterogeneous, dynamic, and general-purpose if compared with the traditional Internet of Things. The WIoT is characterized by the dynamic interaction of traditional infrastructure devices, e.g., sensors and actuators, provided by municipalities in Smart Cities, and other portable devices, such as smartphones, opportunistically integrated to dynamically extend and enhance the WIoT environment.

A key enabler of this vision is the advancement of software and middleware technologies in various mobile-related sectors, ranging from the effective synergic management of wireless communications to mobility/adaptivity support in operating systems and differentiated integration and management of devices with heterogeneous capabilities in middleware, from horizontal support to crowdsourcing in different application domains to dynamic offloading to cloud resources, only to mention a few.

Overall, this delves into deployment scenarios providing a set of services that can significantly change over their lifetime, supported by smartphones providing additional sensing/actuating capabilities, networking/computing resources, and services. Eventually, the WIoT can be characterized by the lack of an administrative controller in charge of selectively allowing/denying devices willing to join the network with provided networking/service capabilities, or the presence of multiple administrative controllers that should interact in a federated manner.

In this Special Issue, articles regarding the use of technologies, methodologies, and applications for WIoT environments characterized by a heterogeneous, distributed, and dynamic nature are invited. Authors are encouraged to submit articles that describe original research and present results that advance the state-of-the-art in the field and report about experiences based on real-world use cases and deployments, including survey/tutorial manuscripts.

Prof. Paolo Bellavista
Prof. Dr. Carlo Giannelli
Prof. Sajal K. Das
Prof. Jiannong Cao
Guest Editors

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Keywords

  • middleware, architectures, and protocols for the WIoT
  • things/edge/fog/cloud continuum for the WIoT
  • middleware for WIoT data processing and dispatching
  • middleware for latency and reliability constrained WIoT
  • dynamic service composition and adaptation
  • support for containerization
  • overlay networking for dynamic and distributed management
  • heterogeneous device and connectivity management
  • software defined networking
  • infrastructure-based and device-to-device communication
  • wireless access networks for IoT
  • inter-domain joint management and federation
  • energy-efficient applications, services, and middleware
  • mobile crowdsourcing and people-centric collaborative sensing
  • integration of WIoT and Smart City environments
  • WIoT and Industry 4.0
  • WIoT to support end-user mobile companions
  • interoperability and open interfaces for integration
  • trustworthiness, security, and privacy

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Published Papers (12 papers)

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Research

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25 pages, 6541 KiB  
Article
Wireless Middleware Solutions for Smart Water Metering
by Stefano Alvisi, Francesco Casellato, Marco Franchini, Marco Govoni, Chiara Luciani, Filippo Poltronieri, Giulio Riberto, Cesare Stefanelli and Mauro Tortonesi
Sensors 2019, 19(8), 1853; https://doi.org/10.3390/s19081853 - 18 Apr 2019
Cited by 42 | Viewed by 8994
Abstract
While smart metering applications have initially focused on energy and gas utility markets, water consumption has recently become the subject of increasing attention. Unfortunately, despite the large number of solutions available on the market, the lack of an open and widely accepted communication [...] Read more.
While smart metering applications have initially focused on energy and gas utility markets, water consumption has recently become the subject of increasing attention. Unfortunately, despite the large number of solutions available on the market, the lack of an open and widely accepted communication standard means that vendors typically propose proprietary data collection solutions whose adoption causes non-trivial problems to water utility companies in term of costs, vendor lock-in, and lack of control on the data collection infrastructure. There is the need for open and interoperable smart water metering solutions, capable of collecting data from the wide range of water meters on the market. This paper reports our experience in the development and field testing of a highly interoperable smart water metering solution, which we designed in collaboration with several water utility companies and which we deployed in Gorino Ferrarese, Italy, in collaboration with CADF (Consorzio Acque Delta Ferrarese), the water utility serving the city. At the core of our solution is SWaMM (Smart Water Metering Middleware), an interoperable wireless IoT middleware based on the Edge computing paradigm, which proved extremely effective in interfacing with several types of smart water meters operating with different protocols. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Middleware Solutions for Wireless Internet of Things)
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22 pages, 1361 KiB  
Article
Container Migration in the Fog: A Performance Evaluation
by Carlo Puliafito, Carlo Vallati, Enzo Mingozzi, Giovanni Merlino, Francesco Longo and Antonio Puliafito
Sensors 2019, 19(7), 1488; https://doi.org/10.3390/s19071488 - 27 Mar 2019
Cited by 89 | Viewed by 6936
Abstract
The internet of things (IoT) is essential for the implementation of applications and services that require the ability to sense the surrounding environment through sensors and modify it through actuators. However, IoT devices usually have limited computing capabilities and hence are not always [...] Read more.
The internet of things (IoT) is essential for the implementation of applications and services that require the ability to sense the surrounding environment through sensors and modify it through actuators. However, IoT devices usually have limited computing capabilities and hence are not always sufficient to directly host resource-intensive services. Fog computing, which extends and complements the cloud, can support the IoT with computing resources and services that are deployed close to where data are sensed and actions need to be performed. Virtualisation is an essential feature in the cloud as in the fog, and containers have been recently getting much popularity to encapsulate fog services. Besides, container migration among fog nodes may enable several emerging use cases in different IoT domains (e.g., smart transportation, smart industry). In this paper, we first report container migration use cases in the fog and discuss containerisation. We then provide a comprehensive overview of the state-of-the-art migration techniques for containers, i.e., cold, pre-copy, post-copy, and hybrid migrations. The main contribution of this work is the extensive performance evaluation of these techniques that we conducted over a real fog computing testbed. The obtained results shed light on container migration within fog computing environments by clarifying, in general, which migration technique might be the most appropriate under certain network and service conditions. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Middleware Solutions for Wireless Internet of Things)
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19 pages, 1253 KiB  
Article
A Fog Computing Solution for Context-Based Privacy Leakage Detection for Android Healthcare Devices
by Jingjing Gu, Ruicong Huang, Li Jiang, Gongzhe Qiao, Xiaojiang Du and Mohsen Guizani
Sensors 2019, 19(5), 1184; https://doi.org/10.3390/s19051184 - 8 Mar 2019
Cited by 13 | Viewed by 4235
Abstract
Intelligent medical service system integrates wireless internet of things (WIoT), including medical sensors, wireless communications, and middleware techniques, so as to collect and analyze patients’ data to examine their physical conditions by many personal health devices (PHDs) in real time. However, large amount [...] Read more.
Intelligent medical service system integrates wireless internet of things (WIoT), including medical sensors, wireless communications, and middleware techniques, so as to collect and analyze patients’ data to examine their physical conditions by many personal health devices (PHDs) in real time. However, large amount of malicious codes on the Android system can compromise consumers’ privacy, and further threat the hospital management or even the patients’ health. Furthermore, this sensor-rich system keeps generating large amounts of data and saturates the middleware system. To address these challenges, we propose a fog computing security and privacy protection solution. Specifically, first, we design the security and privacy protection framework based on the fog computing to improve tele-health and tele-medicine infrastructure. Then, we propose a context-based privacy leakage detection method based on the combination of dynamic and static information. Experimental results show that the proposed method can achieve higher detection accuracy and lower energy consumption compared with other state-of-art methods. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Middleware Solutions for Wireless Internet of Things)
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23 pages, 902 KiB  
Article
Ontology-Defined Middleware for Internet of Things Architectures
by Víctor Caballero, Sergi Valbuena, David Vernet and Agustín Zaballos
Sensors 2019, 19(5), 1163; https://doi.org/10.3390/s19051163 - 7 Mar 2019
Cited by 15 | Viewed by 4716
Abstract
The Internet of Things scenario is composed of an amalgamation of physical devices. Those physical devices are heterogeneous in their nature both in terms of communication protocols and in data exchange formats. The Web of Things emerged as a homogenization layer that uses [...] Read more.
The Internet of Things scenario is composed of an amalgamation of physical devices. Those physical devices are heterogeneous in their nature both in terms of communication protocols and in data exchange formats. The Web of Things emerged as a homogenization layer that uses well-established web technologies and semantic web technologies to exchange data. Therefore, the Web of Things enables such physical devices to the web, they become Web Things. Given such a massive number of services and processes that the Internet of Things/Web of Things enables, it has become almost mandatory to describe their properties and characteristics. Several web ontologies and description frameworks are devoted to that purpose. Ontologies such as SOSA/SSN or OWL-S describe the Web Things and their procedures to sense or actuate. For example, OWL-S complements SOSA/SSN in describing the procedures used for sensing/actuating. It is, however, not its scope to be specific enough to enable a computer program to interpret and execute the defined flow of control. In this work, it is our goal to investigate how we can model those procedures using web ontologies in a manner that allows us to directly deploy the procedure implementation. A prototype implementation of the results of our research is implemented along with an analysis of several use cases to show the generality of our proposal. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Middleware Solutions for Wireless Internet of Things)
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16 pages, 1937 KiB  
Article
Microservice-Oriented Platform for Internet of Big Data Analytics: A Proof of Concept
by Zheng Li, Diego Seco and Alexis Eloy Sánchez Rodríguez
Sensors 2019, 19(5), 1134; https://doi.org/10.3390/s19051134 - 6 Mar 2019
Cited by 16 | Viewed by 4520
Abstract
The ubiquitous Internet of Things (IoT) devices nowadays are generating various and numerous data from everywhere at any time. Since it is not always necessary to centralize and analyze IoT data cumulatively (e.g., the Monte Carlo analytics and Convergence analytics demonstrated in this [...] Read more.
The ubiquitous Internet of Things (IoT) devices nowadays are generating various and numerous data from everywhere at any time. Since it is not always necessary to centralize and analyze IoT data cumulatively (e.g., the Monte Carlo analytics and Convergence analytics demonstrated in this article), the traditional implementations of big data analytics (BDA) will suffer from unnecessary and expensive data transmissions as a result of the tight coupling between computing resource management and data processing logics. Inspired by software-defined infrastructure (SDI), we propose the “microservice-oriented platform” to break the environmental monolith and further decouple data processing logics from their underlying resource management in order to facilitate BDA implementations in the IoT environment (which we name “IoBDA”). Given predesigned standard microservices with respect to specific data processing logics, the proposed platform is expected to largely reduce the complexity in and relieve inexperienced practices of IoBDA implementations. The potential contributions to the relevant communities include (1) new theories of a microservice-oriented platform on top of SDI and (2) a functional microservice-oriented platform for IoBDA with a group of predesigned microservices. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Middleware Solutions for Wireless Internet of Things)
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19 pages, 1725 KiB  
Article
A Semantic-Enabled Platform for Realizing an Interoperable Web of Things
by Jorge Lanza, Luis Sánchez, David Gómez, Juan Ramón Santana and Pablo Sotres
Sensors 2019, 19(4), 869; https://doi.org/10.3390/s19040869 - 19 Feb 2019
Cited by 9 | Viewed by 4424
Abstract
Nowadays, the Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem is experiencing a lack of interoperability across the multiple competing platforms that are available. Consequently, service providers can only access vertical data silos that imply high costs and jeopardize their solutions market potential. It is necessary [...] Read more.
Nowadays, the Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem is experiencing a lack of interoperability across the multiple competing platforms that are available. Consequently, service providers can only access vertical data silos that imply high costs and jeopardize their solutions market potential. It is necessary to transform the current situation with competing non-interoperable IoT platforms into a common ecosystem enabling the emergence of cross-platform, cross-standard, and cross-domain IoT services and applications. This paper presents a platform that has been implemented for realizing this vision. It leverages semantic web technologies to address the two key challenges in expanding the IoT beyond product silos into web-scale open ecosystems: data interoperability and resources identification and discovery. The paper provides extensive description of the proposed solution and its implementation details. Regarding the implementation details, it is important to highlight that the platform described in this paper is currently supporting the federation of eleven IoT deployments (from heterogeneous application domains) with over 10,000 IoT devices overall which produce hundreds of thousands of observations per day. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Middleware Solutions for Wireless Internet of Things)
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16 pages, 1747 KiB  
Article
CDSP: A Solution for Privacy and Security of Multimedia Information Processing in Industrial Big Data and Internet of Things
by Xu Yang, Yumin Hou, Junping Ma and Hu He
Sensors 2019, 19(3), 556; https://doi.org/10.3390/s19030556 - 29 Jan 2019
Cited by 4 | Viewed by 4407
Abstract
With the widespread nature of wireless internet and internet of things, data have bloomed everywhere. Under the scenario of big data processing, privacy and security concerns become a very important consideration. This work focused on an approach to tackle the privacy and security [...] Read more.
With the widespread nature of wireless internet and internet of things, data have bloomed everywhere. Under the scenario of big data processing, privacy and security concerns become a very important consideration. This work focused on an approach to tackle the privacy and security issue of multimedia data/information in the internet of things domain. A solution based on Cryptographical Digital Signal Processor (CDSP), a Digital Signal Processor (DSP) based platform combined with dedicated instruction extension, has been proposed, to provide both programming flexibility and performance. We have evaluated CDSP, and the results show that the algorithms implemented on CDSP all have good performance. We have also taped out the platform designed for privacy and security concerns of multimedia transferring system based on CDSP. Using TSMC 55 nm technology, it could reach the speed of 360 MHz. Benefiting from its programmability, CDSP can be easily expanded to support more algorithms in this domain. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Middleware Solutions for Wireless Internet of Things)
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22 pages, 11083 KiB  
Article
A Virtual Reality Soldier Simulator with Body Area Networks for Team Training
by Yun-Chieh Fan and Chih-Yu Wen
Sensors 2019, 19(3), 451; https://doi.org/10.3390/s19030451 - 22 Jan 2019
Cited by 25 | Viewed by 7144
Abstract
Soldier-based simulators have been attracting increased attention recently, with the aim of making complex military tactics more effective, such that soldiers are able to respond rapidly and logically to battlespace situations and the commander’s decisions in the battlefield. Moreover, body area networks (BANs) [...] Read more.
Soldier-based simulators have been attracting increased attention recently, with the aim of making complex military tactics more effective, such that soldiers are able to respond rapidly and logically to battlespace situations and the commander’s decisions in the battlefield. Moreover, body area networks (BANs) can be applied to collect the training data in order to provide greater access to soldiers’ physical actions or postures as they occur in real routine training. Therefore, due to the limited physical space of training facilities, an efficient soldier-based training strategy is proposed that integrates a virtual reality (VR) simulation system with a BAN, which can capture body movements such as walking, running, shooting, and crouching in a virtual environment. The performance evaluation shows that the proposed VR simulation system is able to provide complete and substantial information throughout the training process, including detection, estimation, and monitoring capabilities. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Middleware Solutions for Wireless Internet of Things)
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23 pages, 2359 KiB  
Article
A Processing-in-Memory Architecture Programming Paradigm for Wireless Internet-of-Things Applications
by Xu Yang, Yumin Hou and Hu He
Sensors 2019, 19(1), 140; https://doi.org/10.3390/s19010140 - 3 Jan 2019
Cited by 14 | Viewed by 7842
Abstract
The widespread applications of the wireless Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the leading factors in the emerging of Big Data. Huge amounts of data need to be transferred and processed. The bandwidth and latency of data transfers have posed a new [...] Read more.
The widespread applications of the wireless Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the leading factors in the emerging of Big Data. Huge amounts of data need to be transferred and processed. The bandwidth and latency of data transfers have posed a new challenge for traditional computing systems. Under Big Data application scenarios, the movement of large scales of data would influence performance, power efficiency, and reliability, which are the three fundamental attributes of a computing system. Thus, changes in the computing paradigm are demanding. Processing-in- Memory (PIM), aiming at placing computation as close as possible to memory, has become of great interest to academia as well as industries. In this work, we propose a programming paradigm for PIM architecture that is suitable for wireless IoT applications. A data-transferring mechanism and middleware architecture are presented. We present our methods and experiences on simulation-platform design, as well as FPGA demo design, for PIM architecture. Typical applications in IoT, such as multimedia and MapReduce programs, are used as demonstration of our method’s validity and efficiency. The programs could successfully run on the simulation platform built based on Gem5 and on the FPGA demo. Results show that our method could largely reduce power consumption and execution time for those programs, which is very beneficial in IoT applications. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Middleware Solutions for Wireless Internet of Things)
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18 pages, 669 KiB  
Article
Managing Devices of a One-to-One Computing Educational Program Using an IoT Infrastructure
by Felipe Osimani, Bruno Stecanella, Germán Capdehourat, Lorena Etcheverry and Eduardo Grampín
Sensors 2019, 19(1), 70; https://doi.org/10.3390/s19010070 - 25 Dec 2018
Cited by 4 | Viewed by 4062
Abstract
Plan Ceibal is the name coined in Uruguay for the local implementation of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative. Plan Ceibal distributes laptops and tablets to students and teachers, and also deploys a nationwide wireless network to provide Internet access to these [...] Read more.
Plan Ceibal is the name coined in Uruguay for the local implementation of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative. Plan Ceibal distributes laptops and tablets to students and teachers, and also deploys a nationwide wireless network to provide Internet access to these devices, provides video conference facilities, and develops educational applications. Given the scale of the program, management in general, and specifically device management, is a very challenging task. Device maintenance and replacement is a particularly important process; users trigger such kind of replacement processes and usually imply several days without the device. Early detection of fault conditions in the most stressed hardware parts (e.g., batteries) would permit to prompt defensive replacement, contributing to reduce downtime, and improving the user experience. Seeking for better, preventive and scalable device management, in this paper we present a prototype of a Mobile Device Management (MDM) module for Plan Ceibal, developed over an IoT infrastructure, showing the results of a controlled experiment over a sample of the devices. The prototype is deployed over a public IoT infrastructure to speed up the development process, avoiding, in this phase, the need for local infrastructure and maintenance, while enforcing scalability and security requirements. The presented data analysis was implemented off-line and represents a sample of possible metrics which could be used to implement preventive management in a real deployment. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Middleware Solutions for Wireless Internet of Things)
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17 pages, 1919 KiB  
Article
Performance Analysis of Latency-Aware Data Management in Industrial IoT Networks
by Theofanis P. Raptis, Andrea Passarella and Marco Conti
Sensors 2018, 18(8), 2611; https://doi.org/10.3390/s18082611 - 9 Aug 2018
Cited by 27 | Viewed by 5251
Abstract
Maintaining critical data access latency requirements is an important challenge of Industry 4.0. The traditional, centralized industrial networks, which transfer the data to a central network controller prior to delivery, might be incapable of meeting such strict requirements. In this paper, we exploit [...] Read more.
Maintaining critical data access latency requirements is an important challenge of Industry 4.0. The traditional, centralized industrial networks, which transfer the data to a central network controller prior to delivery, might be incapable of meeting such strict requirements. In this paper, we exploit distributed data management to overcome this issue. Given a set of data, the set of consumer nodes and the maximum access latency that consumers can tolerate, we consider a method for identifying and selecting a limited set of proxies in the network where data needed by the consumer nodes can be cached. The method targets at balancing two requirements; data access latency within the given constraints and low numbers of selected proxies. We implement the method and evaluate its performance using a network of WSN430 IEEE 802.15.4-enabled open nodes. Additionally, we validate a simulation model and use it for performance evaluation in larger scales and more general topologies. We demonstrate that the proposed method (i) guarantees average access latency below the given threshold and (ii) outperforms traditional centralized and even distributed approaches. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Middleware Solutions for Wireless Internet of Things)
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Review

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29 pages, 1462 KiB  
Review
Review and Evaluation of MAC Protocols for Satellite IoT Systems Using Nanosatellites
by Tomás Ferrer, Sandra Céspedes and Alex Becerra
Sensors 2019, 19(8), 1947; https://doi.org/10.3390/s19081947 - 25 Apr 2019
Cited by 38 | Viewed by 7303
Abstract
Extending the internet of things (IoT) networks to remote areas under extreme conditions or for serving sometimes unpredictable mobile applications has increased the need for satellite technology to provide effective connectivity. However, existent medium access control (MAC) protocols deployed in commercial satellite networks [...] Read more.
Extending the internet of things (IoT) networks to remote areas under extreme conditions or for serving sometimes unpredictable mobile applications has increased the need for satellite technology to provide effective connectivity. However, existent medium access control (MAC) protocols deployed in commercial satellite networks were not designed to offer scalable solutions for the increasing number of devices predicted for IoT in the near future, nor do they consider other specific IoT characteristics. In particular, CubeSats—a low-cost solution for space technology—have the potential to become a wireless access network for the IoT, if additional requirements, including simplicity and low demands in processing, storage, and energy consumption are incorporated into MAC protocol design for satellite IoT systems. Here we review MAC protocols employed or proposed for satellite systems and evaluate their performance considering the IoT scenario along with the trend of using CubeSats for IoT connectivity. Criteria include channel load, throughput, energy efficiency, and complexity. We have found that Aloha-based protocols and interference cancellation-based protocols stand out on some of the performance metrics. However, the tradeoffs among communications performance, energy consumption, and complexity require improvements in future designs, for which we identify specific challenges and open research areas for MAC protocols deployed with next low-cost nanosatellite IoT systems. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Middleware Solutions for Wireless Internet of Things)
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