In the emerging Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) scenario machine-to-machine communication is a key technology to set up environments wherein sensors, actuators, and controllers can exchange information autonomously. However, many current communication frameworks do not provide enough dynamic interoperability and security. Therefore, we propose a novel communication framework, based on MQTT broker bridging, which, in an Industrial IoT scenario, can foster dynamic inter-operability across different production lines or industrial sites, guaranteeing, at the same time, a higher degree of isolation and control over the information flows, thereby increasing the overall security of the whole scenario. The solution we propose does also support dynamic authentication and authorization and has been practically implemented and evaluated in a proper small-scale IIoT testbed, encompassing PLCs, IIoT gateways, as well as MQTT brokers with novel and extended capabilities.The evaluation results demonstrate a linear time complexity for all the considered implementations and bridging modes of the extended brokers. Moreover, all considered access token encapsulation techniques demonstrate a minimum overhead in comparison with standard MQTT brokers.

Anomaly detection in network traffic is a hot and ongoing research theme especially when concerning IoT devices, which are quickly spreading throughout various situations of people’s life and, at the same time, prone to be attacked through different weak points. In this paper, we tackle the emerging anomaly detection problem in IoT, by integrating five different datasets of abnormal IoT traffic and evaluating them with a deep learning approach capable of identifying both normal and malicious IoT traffic as well as different types of anomalies. The large integrated dataset is aimed at providing a realistic and still missing benchmark for IoT normal and abnormal traffic, with data coming from different IoT scenarios. Moreover, the deep learning approach has been enriched through a proper hyperparameter optimization phase, a feature reduction phase by using an autoencoder neural network, and a study of the robustness of the best considered deep neural networks in situations affected by Gaussian noise over some of the considered features. The obtained results demonstrate the effectiveness of the created IoT dataset for anomaly detection using deep learning techniques, also in a noisy scenario.

In recent years, virtual learning environments are gaining more and more momentum, considering both the technologies deployed in their support and the sheer number of terminals directly or indirectly interacting with them. This essentially means that every day, more and more smart devices play an active role in this exemplary Web of Things scenario. This digital revolution, affecting education, appears clearly intertwined with the earliest forecasts of the Internet of Things, envisioning around 50 billions heterogeneous devices and gadgets to be active by 2020, considering also the deployment of the fog computing paradigm, which moves part of the computational power to the edge of the network. Moreover, these interconnected objects are expected to produce more and more significant streams of data, themselves generated at unprecedented rates, sometimes to be analyzed almost in real time. Concerning educational environments, this translates to a new type of big data stream, which can be labeled as educational big data streams. Here, pieces of information coming from different sources (such as communications between students and instructors, as well as students’ tests, etc.) require accurate analysis and mining techniques in order to retrieve fruitful and well-timed insights from them. This article presents an overview of the current state of the art of virtual learning environments and their limitations; then, it explains the main ideas behind the paradigms of big data streams and of fog computing, in order to introduce an e-learning architecture integrating both of them. Such an action aims to enhance the ability of virtual learning environments to be closer to the needs of all the actors in an educational scenario, as demonstrated by a preliminary implementation of the envisioned architecture. We believe that the proposed big stream and fog-based educational framework may pave the way towards a better understanding of students’ educational behaviors and foster new research directions in the field.