Developing a Scalable IoT Architecture for Precision Agriculture Using Edge Computing

The interoperability of more devices onto the IoT and the addition of the low-power applications like sensors and other embedded systems have posed severe security challenges. Many cryptographic protocols are ineffective for such devices since they demand high functionalities, thus the development of lightweight kinds of authentication. Based on this we would like to present a new lightweight authentication protocol suitable for IoT constrained devices. This protocol uses Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) for key exchange part of the communication while using symmetric key cryptography for the actual data exchange. The feasibility and performance of the proposed protocol is analyzed and tested on real time sensed data obtained from the Intel Berkeley Research Lab dataset involving a make-believe IoT network of hundred devices. The performance evaluation shows enhanced energy reduction, the time taken in authentication, the amount of chatter in the network, and the amount of memory occupied, when compared with other approaches. The protocol is very flexible and can be integrated into any system; it also has the ability to counter most security threats hence suitable for low power IoT devices. The future work will also investigate other additional improvements and how other methods can be incorporated to improve security as well as performance.