Time-To-Provision Evaluation of Iot Devices Using Automated Zero

Time-to-Provision Evaluation of IoT Devices Using Automated Zero-Touch Provisioning Ivan Boˇskov∗†, Halil Yetgin∗‡, MatevˇzVuˇcnik∗†, Carolina Fortuna∗, Mihael Mohorˇciˇc∗† ∗Department of Communication Systems, Joˇzef Stefan Institute, SI-1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia. †Joˇzef Stefan International Postgraduate School, Jamova 39, SI-1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia. ‡Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Bitlis Eren University, 13000 Bitlis, Turkey. {ivan.boskov | halil.yetgin | matevz.vucnik | carolina.fortuna | miha.mohorcic}@ijs.si Abstract—The Internet of Things (IoT) is being widely adopted thus to avoid manual provisioning process [3]. Therefore, ZTP in today’s society, interconnecting smart embedded devices that enables accomplishing and providing remote device provision- are being deployed for indoor and outdoor environments, such ing, where even an end-user that does not have the technical as homes, factories and hospitals. Along with the growth in the development and implementation of these IoT devices, their knowledge can simply connect a non-provisioned device to simple and rapid deployment, initial configuration and out- the network [3]. Having reviewed the paucity of the literature of-the-box operational provisioning are becoming prominent and the industry perspectives, the characteristics of a typical challenges to be circumvented. Considering a large number of ZTP can be summarized as follows. heterogeneous devices to be deployed within next generation IoT networks, the amount of time needed for manual provisioning • Ease of Use - provisioning could be performed by anyone of these IoT devices can significantly delay the deployment and even without technical background. manual provisioning may introduce human-induced failures and • Interoperability - ZTP should be independent of vendors. errors. By incorporating zero-touch provisioning (ZTP), multiple • Security - during the provisioning process, credentials heterogeneous devices can be provisioned with less effort and without human intervention. In this paper, we propose software- should not be compromised. enabled access point (Soft-AP)- and Bluetooth-based ZTP so- • Ease of Implementation - provisioning mechanism should lutions relying only on a single mediator device and evaluate be simple to implement without requiring additional their performances using LOG-A-TEC testbed against manual equipment and complex infrastructure. provisioning in terms of the time required for provisioning (time- • Scalability - since future generation networks are con- to-provision, TTP). We demonstrate that on average, Soft-AP- and Bluetooth-based ZTP solutions outperform manual provi- stantly evolving, provisioning process should adapt to the sioning with about 154% and 313% when compared to the expert changes in the existing network, e.g. additional devices, provisioning, and with about 434% and 880% when compared capacity expansion and more sophisticated services. to the non-expert provisioning in terms of TTP performances, respectively. Among these characteristics, our provisioning solution Index Terms—Zero-touch provisioning, automated configura- mainly focuses on interoperability, ease of use and ease of tion, embedded device, Internet of things. implementation. We propose a ZTP solution that the network devices can be provisioned with a single automated process I. INTRODUCTION requiring only minimal human intervention and without bring- The Internet of Things (IoT) has stimulated new trends ing any additional equipment, which is potentially the most and empowered innovative smart devices, which are tightly favorable way to address the manual provisioning challenge. arXiv:2009.09731v2 [cs.NI] 22 Sep 2020 interconnecting our physical world through many indoor and The main contributions of this paper are outlined as follows. outdoor applications [1]. With the growth in the develop- • We propose automated software-enabled access point ment and implementation of these smart devices, their simple (Soft-AP)- and Bluetooth-based ZTP solutions relying and rapid deployment, initial configuration and out-of-the- only on a single mediator device, which do not require box operational provisioning represent prominent challenges. additional hardware, while mainly considering the in- For example, according to a recent whitepaper from a device teroperability, ease of use and ease of implementation manufacturer, provisioning ten thousand smart light bulbs in characteristics of a typical ZTP. a factory can take nearly 2 years before they can actually • Our ZTP solutions are vendor independent and can be commence data stream [2]. Therefore, to realize efficient and applied to any IoT device having wireless connectivity sustainable large scale IoT deployments, also for the fifth and/or without external input/output capability, which generation (5G) and beyond, automated provisioning such as renders the solutions to be interoperable. zero-touch provisioning (ZTP) [2] is needed. • We evaluate the performance of the proposed automated In its essence, ZTP is an automation solution that is de- ZTP solutions on a testbed against manual provisioning in signed to reduce errors and cut down the required time when terms of the required amount of time (time-to-provision, network administrators need to bring new infrastructure online, TTP) during which an IoT device can be provisioned. c 2020 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works. The rest of this paper is organized as follows. In Section II, By scanning this QR code with a mediator device, which is the we provide the motivation and relevant background for ZTP. device acting as the configurator, we can thereafter send the Section III describes our proposed zero-touch provisioning configuration file to the device. Generally speaking, these so- solutions using both WiFi and Bluetooth, while experimental lutions often require additional hardware components, external details and performance evaluation are presented in Section IV. input and output capability and physical accessibility, which We conclude the paper in Section V. are usually infeasible for small-sized unobtrusive sensors. II. MOTIVATIONS AND BACKGROUND B. Vendor-based solutions Suppose a user purchases an IoT device and plans to deploy Vendor- and proprietary-based solutions require applications it within a smart environment. Perhaps, the first thing would be and other means of communication to accomplish the inter- to configure the device to have Internet access, and secondly to action between end-user and the device. These solutions are manually provision the device on-site [4]. The latter process mostly vendor-specific and are tailored to a specific range of would require a considerable amount of time if the user is devices. A large number of network equipment vendors, such not familiar with connected IoT devices. Hence, every new as Cisco, Juniper, Apple and Texas Instruments, partly imple- device integrated into the network is expected to introduce ment ZTP services into their devices. For example, Cisco’s additional setup delay, which may ultimately become a tedious ZTP feature provides a solution where a non-provisioned process. ZTP, in this regard, does not only aid in reducing the device communicates to a configuration engine in order to deployment delay and human-induced errors but also allows automatically retrieve a complete configuration file [10]. Ju- users to focus their attention on other operational tasks, which niper Networks provides a device-specific provisioning based eventually improves the reliability and user experience. on the location of the devices, which is achieved by leveraging Traditional provisioning has been conducted by manual han- Juniper Networks built-in functions [11]. Apple developed dling of the device prior to deployment, which often requires a software tool that allows the client to utilize their Apple an expert of the system and the device to be provisioned. products as a mediator device allowing to broadcast the Additionally, as the number of connected IoT devices grows configuration to nearby devices via its proprietary solution to exponentially, a key obstacle in reaching envisioned 50 billion seamlessly connect its smart devices to a network by using and more connected devices would be the current manual Apple wireless accessory configuration (WAC) feature [12]. provisioning methods [5], [6]. To circumvent these hindrances, Texas Instruments developed the SmartConfig technology [13], we aim to provide ZTP solutions for IoT devices in an efficient which utilizes a mobile or computer application to write and automated way with minimum human intervention, which the password of the network on which the mediator device may become particularly challenging due to small unobtrusive is connected to. However, one significant drawback of this sensors having limited external input and output capability, and solution is that it relies on an application that needs to constrained physical accessibility. be preinstalled on a smartphone or a computer. Generally The ZTP solutions for associating device to the network speaking, most of these solutions are strictly dependent on can be divided into two main categories, i.e., standard- and the proprietary

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