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Publications

Publications by Nuno Alexandre Pereira

2013

How many are you (an approach for the smart dust world)?

Authors
Albano, M; Pereira, N; Tovar, E;

Publication
2013 IEEE 1ST INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON CYBER-PHYSICAL SYSTEMS, NETWORKS, AND APPLICATIONS (CPSNA)

Abstract
As the size and cost of embedded devices continue to decrease, it becomes economically feasible to densely deploy networks with very large quantities of such nodes, and thus enabling the implementation of networks with increasingly larger number of nodes becomes a relevant problem. In this paper we describe a novel algorithm to obtain the number of live nodes with a very low time-complexity. In particular, we develop a mechanism to estimate the number of nodes or the number of proposed values (COUNT), with a time complexity that increases sublinearly with the number of nodes. The approach we propose is based on the wise exploitation of dominance-based protocols and offers excellent scalability properties for emerging applications in dense Cyber Physical Systems.

2015

A microscope for the data centre

Authors
Pereira, N; Tennina, S; Loureiro, J; Severino, R; Saraiva, B; Santos, M; Pacheco, F; Tovar, E;

Publication
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SENSOR NETWORKS

Abstract
Data centres are large energy consumers. A large portion of this power consumption is due to the control of physical parameters of the data centre (such as temperature and humidity). However, these physical parameters are tightly coupled with computations, and even more so in upcoming data centres, where the location of workloads can vary substantially due, for example, to workloads being moved in the cloud infrastructure hosted in the data centre. Therefore, managing the physical and compute infrastructure of a large data centre is an embodiment of a cyber-physical system (CPS). In this paper, we describe a data collection and distribution architecture that enables gathering physical parameters of a large data centre at a very high temporal and spatial resolution of the sensor measurements. We detail this architecture and define the structure of the underlying messaging system that is used to collect and distribute the data.

2020

Improving Quality-Of-Service in LoRa Low-Power Wide-Area Networks through Optimized Radio Resource Management

Authors
Sallum, E; Pereira, N; Alves, M; Santos, M;

Publication
JOURNAL OF SENSOR AND ACTUATOR NETWORKS

Abstract
Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN) enable a growing number of Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications with large geographical coverage, low bit-rate, and long lifetime requirements. LoRa (Long Range) is a well-known LPWAN technology that uses a proprietary Chirp Spread Spectrum (CSS) physical layer, while the upper layers are defined by an open standard-LoRaWAN. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective method to improve the Quality-of-Service (QoS) of LoRaWAN networks by fine-tuning specific radio parameters. Through a Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) problem formulation, we find optimal settings for the Spreading Factor (SF) and Carrier Frequency (CF) radio parameters, considering the network traffic specifications as a whole, to improve the Data Extraction Rate (DER) and to reduce the packet collision rate and the energy consumption in LoRa networks. The effectiveness of the optimization procedure is demonstrated by simulations, using LoRaSim for different network scales. In relation to the traditional LoRa radio parameter assignment policies, our solution leads to an average increase of 6% in DER, and a number of collisions 13 times smaller. In comparison to networks with dynamic radio parameter assignment policies, there is an increase of 5%, 2.8%, and 2% of DER, and a number of collisions 11, 7.8 and 2.5 times smaller than equal-distribution, Tiurlikova's (SOTA), and random distribution, respectively. Regarding the network energy consumption metric, the proposed optimization obtained an average consumption similar to Tiurlikova's, and 2.8 times lower than the equal-distribution and random dynamic allocation policies. Furthermore, we approach the practical aspects of how to implement and integrate the optimization mechanism proposed in LoRa, guaranteeing backward compatibility with the standard protocol.

2019

Key Distribution Protocol for Industrial Internet of Things Without Implicit Certificates

Authors
Eldefrawy, MH; Pereira, N; Gidlund, M;

Publication
IEEE INTERNET OF THINGS JOURNAL

Abstract
The deployment of the Internet of Things (IoT) in industry, called the Industrial IoT (IIoT), is supporting the introduction of very desirable improvements, such as increasing production flexibility, self-organization, and real-time and quick response to events. However, security and privacy challenges are still to be well addressed. The IIoT requires different properties to achieve secure and reliable systems and these requirements create extra challenges considering the limited processing and communication power available to IIoT field devices. In this research article, we present a key distribution protocol for IIoT that is computationally and communicationally lightweight (requires a single message exchange) and handles node addition and revocation, as well as fast rekeying. The scheme can also resist the consequences of node capture attacks (we assume that captured nodes can be detected by the gateway and previous works have shown this assumption to be acceptable in practice), server impersonation attacks and provides forward/backward secrecy. We show formally the correctness of our protocol and evaluate its energy consumption under realistic scenarios using a real embedded platform compared to previous state-of-theart key-exchange protocols, to show our protocol reliability for IIoT.

2020

Performance optimization on LoRa networks through assigning radio parameters

Authors
Sallum, E; Pereira, N; Alves, M; Santos, M;

Publication
2020 IEEE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON INDUSTRIAL TECHNOLOGY (ICIT)

Abstract
Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN) enable a growing number of Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications with large geographical coverage, low bit -rate, and long lifetime requirements. LoRa (Long Range) is a well-known LPWAN technology that uses a proprietary Chirp Spread Spectrum (CSS) physical layer, while the upper layers are defined by an open standard - LoRaWAN. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective method to improve the Quality-of-Service (QoS) of LoRa networks by fine-tuning specific radio parameters. Through a Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) problem formulation, we find optimal settings for the Spreading Factor (SF) and Carrier Frequency (CF) radio parameters, considering the network traffic specifications as a whole, to improve the Data Extraction Rate (DER) and to reduce the packet collision rate and the energy consumption in LoRa networks. The effectiveness of the optimization procedure is demonstrated by simulations, using LoRaSim for different network scales. In relation to the traditional LoRa radio parameter assignment policies, our solution leads to an average increase of 6% in DER, and a number of collisions 13 times smaller. In comparison to networks with dynamic radio parameter assignment policies, there is an increase of 5% and 2% of DER, and a number of collisions 11 and 2.5 times smaller than equal-distribution, and random distribution, respectively.

2019

Security Risk Analysis of LoRaWAN and Future Directions

Authors
Butun, I; Pereira, N; Gidlund, M;

Publication
FUTURE INTERNET

Abstract
LoRa (along with its upper layers definition-LoRaWAN) is one of the most promising Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) technologies for implementing Internet of Things (IoT)-based applications. Although being a popular technology, several works in the literature have revealed vulnerabilities and risks regarding the security of LoRaWAN v1.0 (the official 1st specification draft). The LoRa-Alliance has built upon these findings and introduced several improvements in the security and architecture of LoRa. The result of these efforts resulted in LoRaWAN v1.1, released on 11 October 2017. This work aims at reviewing and clarifying the security aspects of LoRaWAN v1.1. By following ETSI guidelines, we provide a comprehensive Security Risk Analysis of the protocol and discuss several remedies to the security risks described. A threat catalog is presented, along with discussions and analysis in view of the scale, impact, and likelihood of each threat. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this work is one of the first of its kind, by providing a detailed security risk analysis related to the latest version of LoRaWAN. Our analysis highlights important practical threats, such as end-device physical capture, rogue gateway and self-replay, which require particular attention by developers and organizations implementing LoRa networks.

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