A PhD abstract presentation on Cluster Framework for Internet of People, Things and Services (IoPTS)

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a revolutionary technology, where devices around us are capable of sensing, reacting, responding and working autonomously to provide services to the users /people, e.g. smart homes, enterprise, utilities and e-Health. In the IoT paradigm, every device will be connected to the Internet to provide services to the user. Bringing this together makes it relevant to talk about the "Internet of People, Things and Services (IoPTS)."However, managing such a huge number of devices is a major challenge for IoPTS. In any given context, a number of devices will work together to provide appropriate services to the user. Information sensed by the group of devices is raw and unstructured in nature due to heterogeneity, and hence there is a need of the mechanism that converts raw information into structured and machine-readable format. Furthermore, the group of devices must somehow announce their services to those who need them.
Users can access these services with the help of widely interconnected devices. To access the services user has to provide some personal data. In IoPTS services are large in numbers, and to protect the user data there is a need to ensure that these services are not prone to attack. Secure services should be provided only to legitimate users while others should be prevented from access. The authenticity of the end user must be verified by strong authentication and access control policies. Traditional security measures may not be readily applied to IoPTS, which includes many devices that are resource constrained in size, memory and computational ability. Hence, there is a need to design a new framework for formation and management of the cluster of devices and service architecture to provide secure access to services for the end user.
This research work will deal with the questions like: How to manage a huge number of devices? How to protect the group of devices from attackers? How can a user be made aware about services provided by devices at a particular location? Whom to grant /deny access for services? This PhD project is to address above-mentioned challenges including cluster formation, cluster authentication, service discovery, authentication and authorization of users requesting usage of services. The expected outcome will be a design of a framework, which can enable secure interaction between users, clusters and services in a variety of contexts, and validation of the concept by implementation of a demonstrator.