Abstract

Keywords

۱٫ Introduction

۲٫ Overview of IoT network management

۳٫ Management of IoT low power networks

۴٫ Challenges and future research directions

۵٫ Conclusion

Declaration of Competing Interest

References

Abstract

During this last past decade, the Internet of Things (IoT) has gained much attention because it encompass intelligent devices such as smart sensors and actuators, which enable a wide range of applications that improve our daily life (e.g. smart agriculture). However, due to the presence of an important number of heterogeneous and resources constrained devices (in terms of memory, CPU and bandwidth) communicating over error-prone and lossy radio channels and often deployed in hostile environments (e.g. war zone), IoT networks are experiencing various network performance problems (e.g. excessive energy consumption resulting from network device failure). In this context, an efficient management of IoT networks is needed in order to ensure good network performances. This has fueled the development of different protocols and frameworks for management of IoT networks. In this paper we present a comprehensive study of representative works on IoT network management. The paper analyzes existing solutions for IoT low power networks management and presents a taxonomy of those solutions. Moreover, this paper also compares existing research proposals on management of IoT low power networks based on different requirements. At the end, this survey identifies remaining challenges for an efficient mangement of IoT low power networks.

۱٫ Introduction

Internet of Things (IoT) has attracted a lot of attention these recent years from both researchers and industrials. Coined by Kevin Ashton (Ashton et al., 2009), the term IoT refers to a paradigm where the physical objects of our daily life (e.g. sensors, actuators, home appliances and so forth) are connected to the Internet and are able to communicate in an intelligent fashion. The IoT aims at making our daily life agreeable, more connected and more productive. The recent technological advances in low power devices contributed to foster the development of IoT applications ranging over smart healthcare, smart agriculture, smart transportation, factory of the future and so forth.

Nowadays, IoT environments are characterized by the presence of a large number of heterogeneous and resource constrained devices often massively deployed in an area of interest to enable an IoT application. Moreover, IoT networks have experienced the development and standardization of a wide range of protocols in order to enable a wide range of IoT applications. This includes wireless communication technologies (e.g. Zigbee, BLE, LoraWAN and Sigfox (Palattella et al., 2016)), lightweight network management protocols (e.g. LWM2M (Klas et al., 2014), CoMI (Veillette et al., 2017)), communication protocols for resource constrained devices (e.g. 6LowPAN (Hui et al., 2010)), routing protocols for resource constrained devices (e.g. RPL (Vasseur et al., 2011)). However, because of their constraints (e.g. heterogeneity, resource limitations, etc.), IoT networks are experiencing many problems that affect their performance. These problems include: link quality deterioration, network congestion, failure of devices, and contribute to a significant reduction of the performance of IoT networks. In this context, it is therefore important to perform an efficient management of IoT networks in order to ensure good network performances (e.g. low end-to-end delay, energy efficiency and so forth).