Inetlab Platform: A Full-Size Laboratory for Connected Objects

Over 1,000 connected objects, accessible to everyone

The national SILECS initiative aims to address this need through its IoT-Lab service by providing infrastructure featuring over one thousand connected objects. These connected objects are spread over seven sites in France, including one at the ICube laboratory of the University of Strasbourg, operated by the Inetlab platform, which includes several hundred pieces of equipment. “It is important to note that our main activity is contributing to a national infrastructure network,” says Guillaume Schreiner, a technical engineer for the Inetlab platform, at the ICube laboratory. “Moreover, the service will soon be part of a project covering all of Europe.” SILECS will then become the French node of the European SLICES initiative (anagram of SILECS).

The IoT-lab service is now free and accessible to everyone. All users need to do is create an account on the dedicated portal to book the equipment available throughout France and carry out large-scale experiments. The infrastructure also offers so-called “constrained” connected objects, which means they are low-power and energy efficient objects equipped with standard sensors.

The platform users can therefore come from diverse backgrounds, ranging from individual IoT enthusiasts to start-ups and large corporations. In practice, however, the community is primarily composed of academics from around the world. For researchers, it provides a means of sharing their experiments with their peers and scientifically validating the results obtained.

Monitoring performance and energy consumption

IoT-Lab is therefore particularly well-known for testing communication protocols for connected objects. The tool makes it possible to assess their performance using various measurements, including radio power, data transmission speed, latency, and the message loss rate. “Our community of researchers frequently uses it to test meshed networks of connected objects,” says Guillaume Schreiner. “It is possible, for example, to design a network with a single gateway connected to the internet in a building. And within this meshed network, each object will pass through its neighbors to repeat its message, until it reaches the exit point.” This design facilitates the deployment of this kind of network of equipment, since only one of them must then be connected to the internet.

The service also allows users to track the equipment’s energy consumption. This measurement is crucial in the design of networks of connected objects, and not only because of their ecological impact. Because some devices are designed to operate self-sufficiently on battery, optimizing their energy consumption is essential in order to maximize their lifespan.

Rainfall in an isolated region of Uganda

In addition, for practical applications of networks of connected objects, the Inetlab platform team works directly with researchers in various fields, including industry, health, and meteorology. It then uses its network expertise to promote multi-disciplinary partnerships, as in the case of the connected city of the Eurometropolis of Strasbourg .

The Inetlab team was approached by two researchers from the University of Maryland (USA), Inbal Becker-Reshef and Catherine Nakalembe, who are respectively World and Africa directors of NASA’s Harvest program, which consolidates projects related to agriculture and food safety. The objective: deploy a network of very long-range weather stations to measure the amount of rainfall in an isolated valley in Uganda, on the border with Kenya. “For this project, we relied on work we had done in Strasbourg,” the technical manager recalls. “A notable difference in that case: there was no internet connection point near the measurement instruments. We then deployed our own mobile antennas, using LoRaWAN autonomous long-range radio technology, and then connected the measurement instruments within a radius of 10 to 15 km.” This network made it possible to collect weather data from distant points of the valley and to report it in real-time to servers located in Strasbourg.

For NASA’s Harvest program, this deployment was first and foremost a response to a scientific challenge: to cross-check telemetry data with data collected in the field via weather stations in order to more accurately and reliably assess the intensity of precipitation. This is crucial information in this part of the world. First of all, it can identify where and when it is necessary to irrigate a field and places where it is not necessary, in a country where water is a valuable resource. It can also help protect people by sending warnings of possible landslides, depending on the amount of water absorbed by the soil.

Towards monitoring the entire data lifecycle

This example illustrates the wealth of possible applications for connected objects. The Inetlab platform is not short on ambition when it comes to promoting the development of such objects, always as part of national and European initiatives. “Our next goal is to be able to track data throughout its entire lifecycle,” says Guillaume Schreiner. “We now have data producers: connected objects. Now we want to study the rest of the path, starting with the large Internet networks, which must adapt to the new traffic of small messages arriving in bulk. We also want to add the last link in the chain to our experimental suite: data centers, which collect, store and process data.” The idea is to reproduce the experiments that are already in place in each phase, in order to monitor performance and energy consumption throughout the lifecycle of the data. By seeking to answer new problems, such as the question of centralization or decentralization (“fog computing”) of data processing.

TSN Carnot Institute has supported this development, which the technical manager deems important: “Today, we benefit from a solid reputation and strong credibility in the eyes of the academic community. But companies do not necessarily know all the possibilities offered by the platform. We want to change this, and gain even greater visibility thanks to the TSN Carnot Institute, with the aim of creating more links with the industrial world, by providing guarantees on the serious nature of our work.”