Effective interoperability and security support for constrained IoT networks

The Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm brings together various applications and use cases, in several domains such as Smart City, e-Health, Industrial IoT, etc. The characteristics of these applications range from high-data rate streams to sporadic transmissions of small packets, including critical and low-latency traffic. Some of them such as telemetering, smart agriculture, asset tracking and environment monitoring also require an extended coverage and a long battery life (up to 10 years). Both non-3GPP and 3GPP technologies, such as Sigfox, LoraWAN, NB-IoT and LTE-M, were specifically designed to meet these specific requirements, by reducing for instance the bandwidth and the achievable data rate. These networks are so constrained that it is very challenging for them to support a standard, interoperable network stack, including security protocols. Nevertheless, these features would be highly desirable in order to ease and accelerate the deployment of IoT solutions involving various types of devices, from very constrained low-power sensors to high data rate cameras and critical actuators. In this paper, we study standard, interoperable and secure solutions and we show how Static Context Header Compression (SCHC), a generic compression and fragmentation mechanism, can be used to enable their support over constrained IoT networks. With our implementation, typical messages are shrunk from 80-100 bytes down to as little as 20-30 bytes.