Internet of Things (IoT) has become a fundamental content of any engineering program due to the emerging need of experts in this field. However, the complexity of technologies that interact in IoT environments and the amount of different professional profiles required to design, implement and manage IoT environments, considering cybersecurity as a must, has led to a huge challenge in the educational world. This paper proposes an integral pedagogical strategy for learning IoT cybersecurity structured in three different stages, in a higher education institution. These stages focus not only on the content about IoT and cybersecurity but also on the competencies to acquire, the most suitable learning methodologies and the expected learning outcomes. The association of these concepts in each stage is detailed. Examples of courses are explained, the related competencies and learning outcomes are specified, and the contents and methodologies to achieve the expected results are described. An analysis of student results and stakeholder evaluations is provided to verify if the pedagogical strategy proposed is suitable. Furthermore, students’ feedback is included to corroborate the innovation, the suitability of the acquired skills, and the overall student satisfaction with the related courses and consequently with the proposed IoT cybersecurity pedagogical strategy.

Sensor networks and the Internet of Things have driven the evolution of traditional electric power distribution networks towards a new paradigm referred to as Smart Grid. However, the different elements that compose the Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) layer of a Smart Grid are usually conceived as isolated systems that typically result in rigid hardware architectures which are hard to interoperate, manage, and to adapt to new situations. If the Smart Grid paradigm has to be presented as a solution to the demand for distributed and intelligent energy management system, it is necessary to deploy innovative IT infrastructures to support these smart functions. One of the main issues of Smart Grids is the heterogeneity of communication protocols used by the smart sensor devices that integrate them. The use of the concept of the Web of Things is proposed in this work to tackle this problem. More specifically, the implementation of a Smart Grid’s Web of Things, coined as the Web of Energy is introduced. The purpose of this paper is to propose the usage of Web of Energy by means of the Actor Model paradigm to address the latent deployment and management limitations of Smart Grids. Smart Grid designers can use the Actor Model as a design model for an infrastructure that supports the intelligent functions demanded and is capable of grouping and converting the heterogeneity of traditional infrastructures into the homogeneity feature of the Web of Things. Conducted experimentations endorse the feasibility of this solution and encourage practitioners to point their efforts in this direction.

The smart grid can be seen as a hybrid system composed by many systems. From a large scale point of view, it combines the electric power system itself and a heterogeneous information and communication technology (ICT) infrastructure. Additionally, these systems are composed by many building blocks that are designed and managed as separated systems which are hard to fully integrate between each other. Relying on the experiences arisen and the knowledge gathered from the partners during the development of the FP7 European projects INTEGRIS (intelligent electrical grid sensor communications) and FINESCE (future internet smart utility services), this paper presents the software defined utility (SDU) concept for the management of the smart grid and its security, which advocates for the migration of the utility infrastructure to software systems instead of relying on complex and rigid hardware based systems. Following this approach, SDU proposes the evolution of power systems’ ICT and the usage of programmable commodity hardware, low-cost sensors, and reliable high-speed IP-based communications underneath. More concretely, this paper proposes some building blocks for the deployment of the SDU (flexible data management infrastructure, context-aware security and web of things interface) and evaluates their functionalities and benefits for the smart grids of the future.

FINESCE is the Smart Energy use case project of the Future Internet Public Private Partnership Programme. It aims at defining an open infrastructure based on Information and Communications Technology (ICT) used to develop new solutions and applications in all fields of Future Internet related to the energy sector. To accomplish this goal a cloud-based environment is proposed, providing high scalability, fast provisioning, resilience and cost efficiency, while facilitating the deployment of applications and services for utilities.The proposed solution for Smart Energy system encompasses Cloud Computing technologies taking advantage of the service delivery models that it provides (Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)) over different cloud deployment solutions (Private, Public, Hybrid, Community). Therefore, it is necessary to study their implications, particularly with regard to security and data privacy, whether in transit or stored data, of the cloud solution chosen.The present paper aims to gather basic security requirements in deploying a solution based on Cloud Computing highlighting issues in hybrid clouds because this is the deployment model used in Smart Energy use case. It also exposes attacks and vulnerabilities related to Cloud Computing to be considered for implementing a secure environment for FIDEV, the private platform implementation. Moreover, the security requirements for Smart Energy use case are defined. And, finally, the results of a security audit performed over the testbed platform that simulates a distributed storage solution for FINESCE project are presented.

Automatic meter reading (AMR) presents many parallelisms with the fast emerging field of wireless sensor networks (WSN) even if for this purpose they use the power cables as transmission medium. Among these parallelisms it is worthwhile to mention that both systems are essentially multihop and operate in a very noisy environment. For this reason the present paper reviews relevant results in the field of WSN with application to PLC based AMR systems and extracts lessons applicable to AMR and to PLC in general. Based on these lessons, this paper develops a theoretical model called the "star of chains model" with regularly spaced devices forming chains that connect to a concentrator station, which is useful to derive the capacity of a system and to provide some basic rules of the thumb for creating it. A specific and simple MAC layer protocol based on the WSN protocol known as "ripple control" is proposed to take the most out of the presented model. This protocol allows for good throughput while coping with the necessary retransmissions in noisy environments and with the necessary creation of periods of contention for the automatic registration of new nodes. The protocol may useful also for other applications in narrow band PLC as well as in broadband powerline communications (BPL). A simulation based on OPNET modeler has been developed to check the capacity calculations. The model and protocol presented are a first step that will be refined and extended in the future.