I. Introduction

The new wave of the embedded is definitely the internet of things (IOT), the basic idea of this concept is many of objects (sensors, actuators, tags …) that can interact and cooperate with each other, to reach a specific purpose.

The Air Quality sensor Board (AQSB) is a Mu-Electronics’ IoT secured solution. It is able to measure the variation of gases that impact the Air Quality in real time, provides a Graphical User Interface (GUI) for displaying and monitoring. When a sensor detects an abnormal gas concentration, the Mu-Electronics AQSB alerts the users by displaying a warning in the GUI and sending an e-mail.

The core of this Mu-Electronics prototype can be saved to deal with others requested applications in others fields.

II. AQSB Architecture

The AQSB Application manages two types of sensors (air quality and temperature sensors) with the possibility of adding others types of sensors depending on user’s needs. It transmits the measurements of the gas concentration and the temperature in secured mode to the server (that can be a PC or a Smart Phone) using wireless area network via TCP/IP protocol.

For the present prototype the WIFI has

been used to establish communications, because it is the most common way used for domestic applications. Although it offers significant transfers debit and can be replaced with other IoT communication protocols such as LoRa, Sigfox etc.

Figure 1: AQSB Architecture

The AQSB application offers the possibility to read from the flash memory (Non-volatile memory) and write new values that are relative to the AQSB device information (AQSB ID, Customer ID, Location, Serial Number, Installation date and the Validity date).

Figure 2: AQSB GUI

The AQSB Graphic User Interface (GUI) is

designed to satisfy user’s needs with an easy access, understanding and use to facilitate actions. It offers to the user the possibility to activate/deactivate any connected AQSB, lists all connected device and

presents them with an icon that describes the air quality level detected by every device. The GUI gives measures evaluation through time, it displays the detected warnings.

III. AQSB Security

For each communication between connected objects, the data transfer over the network must be extremely secured to address other applications like Medical or automotive ones. Thus, the security constraint is seriously taken into consideration during the implementation of Mu-Electronics’ AQSB solution.

On our first prototype, the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) has been chosen as cryptographic primitive because it requires shorter keys, faster processing, and low consumption but asymmetric algorithms (3DES, RSA, ECC…) can be used depending on clients’ demand.

The AQSB integrates a symmetric mutual authentication that aims to prove both, the identity of the AQSB by the server and the identity of the server by the AQSB, in order to establish a secured communication. Both entities client/server need to communicate securely preserving confidentiality, integrity and authenticity. Therefore, a secure session is opened after giving authenticity proof of the two communication partners.

After a successful authentication, each request and response during the secured communication contains also the cyclic redundancy check (CRC) to ensure the integrity of data.

The scheme is summarized in the figure bellow:

Figure 3: Authentication process

IV. Smart Configuration

The smart configuration is an easy way to integrate the AQSB device into the network simply by configuring the required information as the Access Point SSID name, the security passcode when WEP/WPA/WPA2 is enabled, the IP address for server that well manages the data sent by AQSB devices and the address mail that will receive the email alert. It allows the user to configure the device when it’s needed and this without updating the firmware.

In this process a Wi-Fi enabled device (smartphone, tablet or laptop) is used to send the information to the AQSB device.

Figure 4: AQSB Smart configuration interface

V. Conclusion

The present AQSB application represents a prototype that is used in the environment domain with including air quality and temperature sensors, but it can be used as well for others domains such as medical, home automation or industrial domain by including other kinds of sensors.

Other types of communication than Wi-Fi can be chosen like Sigfox and LoRa… Also several ways of notifications in case of warning can be used as SMS.