A fast, secure, reliable, and resilient data transfer framework for pervasive IoT applications

The number of online devices with on board sensors is growing steadily in the last years, leading to many solutions depending on data crowd-sourcing. In these scenarios, usually the collected data need to be transferred on a cloud infrastructure, where can later be aggregated and analyzed using specialized data processing algorithms. The simple task of data transfer becomes a problem in stressed environments such as space communication systems, drone monitoring or marine ecosystems, where the network connectivity is unstable and not available for long period of times. In this paper, we propose a novel Internet of Things (IoT) data transfer framework for cloud-based applications in delay tolerant environments. The framework implements a protocol that is i) elastic, taking advantage of short connection times; ii) lightweight, which makes it suitable for IoT devices; and iii) secure, which makes it a good choice also for applications with sensitive data. We evaluate the framework in a real system with a marine navigation application, demonstrating its benefits in terms of performance, resiliency, and security.