Short-range wireless communication technologies such as Bluetooth or ZigBee represent an important part of the Internet of Things ecosystem. By design, this category of smart devices has physically limited reachability inside their Wireless Personal Area Network (WPAN) and are not directly compatible with the TCP/IP stack. However, users may need to access them from anywhere at any moment. To address this problem, we design a new application-agnostic approach called RCM (Remote Connection Manager) enabling transparent communication between an application and out-of-range devices. It creates new IoT use cases by seamlessly mixing remote and local devices. We implemented an open-source prototype for Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) technology on top of Linux and Android BLE stacks and demonstrated its efficiency through experiments performed on real devices.

1. Transparent remote connectivity to
short-range IoT devices
Natalya Rozhnova
natalya.rozhnova@nokia-bell-labs.com
June 13th, 2019
© 2019 Nokia Public

2. What does the IoT world look like?
2 © 2019 Nokia Public

3. 3 © 2019 Nokia Public

4. 4 © 2019 Nokia Public
Basics of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE)

5. Basics of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE)
Connection establishment
5 © 2019 Nokia Public

6. Basics of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE)
Connection establishment
5 © 2019 Nokia Public

7. Basics of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE)
Connection establishment
5 © 2019 Nokia Public

8. Basics of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE)
Connection establishment
5 © 2019 Nokia Public

9. Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE)
Data representation
6 © 2019 Nokia Public
• A Profile is a pre-defined set of Services
− e.g. Home Light Profile
• A Service is a set of Characteristics used to obtain a
specific functionnality
− e.g. LED control Service
• A Characteristic is a data value transferred between
devices
− e.g. LED color, Temperature

10. Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE)
Data representation
6 © 2019 Nokia Public
• A Profile is a pre-defined set of Services
− e.g. Home Light Profile
• A Service is a set of Characteristics used to obtain a
specific functionnality
− e.g. LED control Service
• A Characteristic is a data value transferred between
devices
− e.g. LED color, Temperature

11. 7 © 2019 Nokia Public
Everything looks fine so far...
What’s a problem?

12. Remote access to the short-range devices
Problem
8 © 2019 Nokia Public
• Short range IoT devices may need to be accessed from anywhere
However...
Objective...

13. Remote access to the short-range devices
Objective
9 © 2019 Nokia Public
Provide transparent connectivity to the
out-of-range devices
Connectivity is said transparent when the native applications can access both local
and remote short-range devices without any modification

14. 10 © 2019 Nokia Public
Interconnection between heterogeneous
networks

15. Interconnection between heterogeneous networks
Existing approaches
• Gateway/Proxy-based approaches
+ Two networks are totally decoupled
– Specific requirements to the applications
– Technology constraints (e.g. WiFi, UPnP etc.)
• IP-enabled approaches
+ No need for gateways or protocol conversion
– Modification of the smart devices and the native short-range protocols APIs
• Virtualization-based approaches (SDN …)
+ Long-range connectivity to the short-range devices
– Too complex, SDN controller becomes a single point of failure
• Third-party architectures (Cloud-based solutions)
– Scalability, latency, privacy, stop of a service etc.
11 © 2019 Nokia Public

16. Commercially available solutions
Proprietary gateways
• Multi-technology IoT gateways
− Proprietary multi-service applications
– Manual configuration needed for each Bluetooth device
– Reverse engineering needed for proprietary devices
• Bluetooth gateways
− Adjusted native applications
– Not universal
– Not backward compatible
12 © 2019 Nokia Public

17. Commercially available solutions
Proprietary gateways
• Multi-technology IoT gateways
− Proprietary multi-service applications
– Manual configuration needed for each Bluetooth device
– Reverse engineering needed for proprietary devices
• Bluetooth gateways
− Adjusted native applications
– Not universal
– Not backward compatible
12 © 2019 Nokia Public
Complex
and
Time consuming!

18. 13 © 2019 Nokia Public
Application-agnostic remote access
Design objectives
Remote Connection Manager (RCM)
Implementation & Experimental evaluation

19. Remote access to the short-range devices
Existing approaches vs. Our vision
14 © 2019 Nokia Public
- Application-dependency
- Impact on the end devices
- Proprietary devices are ignored
- Privacy : third-party (e.g. Clouds)
- User-friendliness : too complex
- Application-agnostic
- No impact on the end devices
- Proprietary devices are managed
- Privacy : direct connection
- User-friendliness : transparent

20. 15 © 2019 Nokia Public
Application-agnostic remote access
Design objectives
Remote Connection Manager (RCM)
Implementation & Experimental evaluation

21. Application-agnostic remote access
Big picture of the proposal
16 © 2019 Nokia Public
• Two kinds of central devices: client and proxy
(*) Remote Connection Manager (RCM) provides a transparent connectivity to the
remote BLE devices

22. Remote Connection Manager (RCM)
System elements
17 © 2019 Nokia Public

23. Remote Connection Manager (RCM)
System elements
17 © 2019 Nokia Public
→ Any application for a given BLE
device: native, open source,
custom etc.

24. Remote Connection Manager (RCM)
System elements
17 © 2019 Nokia Public
→ Any application for a given BLE
device: native, open source,
custom etc.
→ Enables connectivity to the
remote peripherals as if they
were local

25. Remote Connection Manager (RCM)
System elements
17 © 2019 Nokia Public
→ Any application for a given BLE
device: native, open source,
custom etc.
→ Enables connectivity to the
remote peripherals as if they
were local
• Allows to connect to one or more remote
peripherals and access their services
• No need for a physical Bluetooth
interface

26. Remote Connection Manager (RCM)
System elements
17 © 2019 Nokia Public
→ Any application for a given BLE
device: native, open source,
custom etc.
→ Enables connectivity to the
remote peripherals as if they
were local
• Allows to connect to one or more remote
peripherals and access their services
• No need for a physical Bluetooth
interface
• Exposes its local peripherals
• Caches for multicast support
• Must have a physical Bluetooth interface

27. Remote Connection Manager (RCM)
Global picture of the system design
18 © 2019 Nokia Public

28. Remote Connection Manager (RCM)
Communication example for starting discovery
19 © 2019 Nokia Public

29. 20 © 2019 Nokia Public
Application-agnostic remote access
Design objectives
Remote Connection Manager (RCM)
Implementation & Experimental evaluation

30. Remote Connection Manager (RCM)
Implementation
21 © 2019 Nokia Public
Implementation:
- Linux/bluez-5.43 & Android/fluoride BLE stacks
- Tested with native (Android) and open source (Linux) applications
- RCM open-source implementation publicly available on Nokia GitHub under GPLv2
- Ported and tested on Nokia IoT Connector gateway
Publications:
- N. Rozhnova, M. Buob and R. Douville, “Application-agnostic remote access for Bluetooth Low Energy”
IEEE INFOCOM 2018 (INFOCOM WKSHPS), Honolulu, HI
- N. Rozhnova, V. Verdot, “Transparent remote connectivity to Bluetooth Low Energy devices”, demo
paper, IEEE INFOCOM 2019, Paris, France

31. Android native application (from Google Play)
Mixing local and remote devices
22 © 2019 Nokia Public

32. An example of a Linux open-source application use
WebBluetooth
23 © 2019 Nokia Public

33. Implementation on top of Linux and Android Bluetooth stacks
Client & Proxy examples
24 © 2019 Nokia Public
Linux open source application (from
https://github.com/urish/web-lightbulb)
Android BLE native application (from Google Play)
Proxy vision (bluez implementation)

34. Remote Connection Manager (RCM)
Experimental evaluation (I)
• Bluez 5.43
− Official Bluetooth Protocol Stack implementation on Linux
• Three Linux PCs: two clients and one proxy
• One BLE peripheral: Light Bulb
• WebBluetooth-based Smart Light Bulb Web app on the client nodes
25 © 2019 Nokia Public

35. Remote Connection Manager (RCM)
Experimental evaluation (II)
26 © 2019 Nokia Public
• Client/proxy mean RTT: 1.8ms
• RTT variations: 10ms to 100ms [tc netem]
• Client 1 starts before the client 2

36. Remote Connection Manager (RCM)
Experimental evaluation (II)
26 © 2019 Nokia Public
• Client/proxy mean RTT: 1.8ms
• RTT variations: 10ms to 100ms [tc netem]
• Client 1 starts before the client 2
0
20
40
60
80
100
120
140
160
180
200
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100
Connectiondelay,[ms]
IP network Round Trip Time, [ms]
C1
C2
SC1,P
SC2,P

37. Conclusion
• We presented a new solution for remote access and control to Bluetooth Low
Energy devices
− Remote Connection Manager (RCM): client and proxy
• Presented approach is
− independent from the third-party architectures
− transparent to the applications
• We implemented and tested our solution on real devices
• We demonstrated that RCM performs as designed
27 © 2019 Nokia Public

38. Future work
• Multiple RCM proxies support
• Discovery of proxies
• Integration of other short-range technologies
• Technology-independent service composition
• Overall security of the system
28 © 2019 Nokia Public