CIS-5710 (Software for the Internet of Things) Home Page

This is the home page for CIS-5710 course notes for the Fall 2019 semester. Here you will find class handouts, slides used during the lectures, homework assignments, and links to other references of interest.

The course syllabus gives an overview of the course and its content, lists course resources, and describes the grading policy and related issues.
The official course outline: CIS-5710.
The homework submission area and grade book are on Canvas but all other course resources are here.
Here is a list of the IoT Technologies chosen by the class members in connection with Homework #3.
I've prepared some general information on submitting assignments.
My home page contains other resources of potential interest.

Topics

This list is only partial.

Introduction to the course and to IoT systems.
Introduction to nesC and TinyOS.
Described how to read mote sensors using nesC and TinyOS.
Described basic radio communications using nesC and TinyOS.
Introduced Homework #1. Described spanning tree construction in sensor networks. Introduced Lightweight Time Syncrhonization.
Discussed the concepts of staged programming and how it relates to building software for constrained embedded systems.
Introduced Contiki and described how to set up a Contiki development system.
Introduced MQTT and Homework #2.
Went over some sample code related to Homework #1. Discussed the structure of the a program that broadcasts sensor data periodically. The sample code did not cover issues related to receiving packets (and rebroadcasting them), nor how to deal with time and time synchronization.
2019-10-31. Introduced homework-03.html.

Slides

Introduction

Samples

This minor modification of a TinyOS demonstration application shows how to read the temperature sensor on telosb motes.

Papers

A detailed bibliography in BibTeX format.

Internet of Things: A Survey on Enabling Technologies, Protocols, and Applications by Al-Fuqaha, et al.
The nesC Language: A Holistic Approach to Networked Embedded Systems by Gay, et al.
Lightweight Time Synchronization for Sensor Networks by Greunen and Rabaey.
Optimal Distributed Algorithms for Minimum Weight Spanning Tree, Counting, Leader Election and related problems by Awerbuch.
Comparison of Operating Systems TinyOS and Contiki by Reusing, et al.
Health Care Applications: A Solution Based on the Internet of Things by Bui and Zorzi.

Homework

Review the paper IoT: A Survey on Enabling Technologies...
Get a TinyOS development system set up (see the resources section below for more information).
Read the paper The nesC Language...
Homework #1: TinyOS Temperature Sensing. In this assignment you will write the baseline program for the temperature sensing application.
Read the paper Lightweight Time Synchronization...
Get a Contiki development system set up (see the resources section below for more information). You will want a GUI environment available, so Lemuria isn't an option.
Homework #2: Contiki Temperature Sensing. In this assignment you will write a temperating sensing program for Contiki, similar to that in Homework #1, except that uses the MQTT protocol for handling both commands and temperature data.
Homework #3: IoT Technologies. In this assignment you will research an IoT technology of your choice and prepare a short presentation about it. Demonstrations are encouraged where possible.

Resources

The following are links to relevant resources for this class.

TinyOS

TinyOS is an operating system for wireless sensor networks. Here are some notes about setting up and using TinyOS.
nesC 1.3 Reference Manual. This is a formal description of the nesC language. It is not a tutorial.
Tutorial on Mote-to-Mote radio communications.
Tutorial on Mote-to-PC serial communications.
Tutorial on using printf to send debugging information from a mote to the PC.
The sensors in our SensorNet deployment.
The datasheet on the Tmote Sky.
The datasheet on the MSP430F1611 MCU used in the Tmote Sky mote.
The datasheet on the CC2420 radio used in the Tmote Sky mote.
The datasheet on the SHT11 temperature/humidity sensor used in the Tmote Sky mote.
Tutorial on TOSSIM, the TinyOS simulator.

Contiki

Contiki is an IoT operating system. The development system is most easily used in a docker container.
MQTT is a machine-to-machine (M2M) lightweight publish/subscribe protocol for IoT applications.
The Mosquitto MQTT Broker

Other

RFC-6120 on the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP), RFC-6121 on using XMPP for instant messaging. The XMPP official web site contains a number of interesting bits of information about the protocol. Here is a description of how XMPP relates to IoT.
The Jolie Programming Language. This is a specialized language used for combining microservices.
Web of Things. This is an effort to use Web protocols and applications to implement the Internet of Things.
OMA SpecWorks is an organization dedicated to rapidly developing standards for the wireless and IoT communities. It joins together the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) and the Internet Protocol for Smart Objects (IPSO) Alliance.
RFID, QR code, and ucode are some passive identification technology that can be used to "tag" objects in the Internet of Things.
Sign up for Azure as a student. Use your VSC email address (aaannnnn@vsc.edu) to verify your student status.