Comprehensive monitoring and controlling system for stores

What is it about?

In the era of digitization and computer information, cyber-attacks have been increasing on IoT devices all over the world. Additionally, web-based IoT dashboards are costly. Since data exchange through the Internet is a must for almost every system, a sudden interruption on the Internet may disrupt or crash the system immediately. This paper presents a new cyber-secured MQTT-based offline system addressing all the above issues that can automate various systems (e.g., superstores, warehouses, buildings, and factories) integrated into a single dashboard where monitoring and controlling can be simultaneously executed.

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Photo by Adrian Sulyok on Unsplash

Photo by Adrian Sulyok on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Many protocols are used in the IoT devices, such as Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP), Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP), Extensible Messaging, and Presence Protocol (XMPP), and Message Queue Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocol [6]. Among them, MQTT is considered to be the most widely adopted connection protocol, standardized by ISO (ISO/IEC 20922: 2016) for machine to machine (M2M) and IoT. MQTT is very reliable as it has the ability to secure multicast messages and also has some advanced functionalities (e.g., exactly-once delivery, message persistence, etc.) [7]. It uses less amount of data and consumes less battery power. MQTT generally works on default TCP/IP with port 1883 [8]. It is standardized by OASIS Technical Committee. This protocol is very easy to work with and also provides Quality of Services (QoS) to the network with the minimum network bandwidth [9]. In MQTT, publishers and subscribers exchange messages through a centralized broker using MQTT control packets. The publishers generate data and publish that data to the message broker. In order to receive the message from the publishers, the subscribers need to subscribe based on the topic of interest [10]. At the present time, a large number of security threats are happening in the field of IoT. A report which was released by L3 communications in 2016 suggests that some bots had infected about one million devices and were hosted in Colombia, Brazil, and Taiwan [11]. Moreover, a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack had been made to the krebsonsecurity.com site. It was performed by botnets, which were embedded in the IoT devices. As the IoT attacks have increased and the security of the IoT devices are also being challenged, this paper proposes an application-specific secured framework. More specifically, we propose a secured scheme for offline monitoring and controlling of ACs, chillers, and refrigerators in a superstore using the MQTT server-broker-client system.

Perspectives