MIOTY: As simple as that

MIOTY, pronounced my IoT, is a low power wide area technology and it is apart of Low Power Wide Area Network LPWAN family.

LPWAN technologies have the particularity to send small amout of data (sensor data) within long range garanteeing less energy consumption thus a longer battery life.

As shown in Figure 1, MIOTY is apart of unlicenced LPWAN as well as LoRa and Sigfox which means that MIOTY uses the open-use ISM (Industrial, Scientific, Medical) band and this use is limited by what is called Duty Cycle restrictions .

I don't want to get much through deep details, I aim at explaining the MIOTY architecture in an easy way. Also, it is crucial to distingush from the essential MIOTY technology parts and the other user parts.

The MIOTY network architecture consists of the following parts:

1. MIOTY end point: It is an RF-microcontroller equipped with a MIOTY stack. It is usually a battery operated. The RF-microcontroller interfaced with a sensor constitues a MIOTY end point.
2. MIOTY base station: It is is a bridge between the end points and the network server. It is equipped with a microcontroller, a MIOTY module to communicate with the end points, and a Wi-Fi module to have an Internet connection. The base station receives the whole encyrpted?? MIOTY packet from the end points and replaces the preamble and header with IP/UDP packet. It adds also the RSSI and SNR information. At this step, data are encrypted??.
3. MIOTY Service Center SC: The base station communicates with the MIOTY Service Center via BSSCI protocol and it forwards the encrypted data. Then the data would be authentified and managed.
4. MIOTY Application Center AC: The MIOTY application center serves at data decryption ??.

PS: In general the MIOTY SC and AC are built in one server like it is the case with the LORIOT network management server.

After passing through the AC, data are decrypted but not human readable, it is up to the user to interpret the data on his way. At this step, we are no more talking about a MIOTY architecture.

Figure 2 highlights the distribution of keys in a MIOTY network. APP-key are shared between the end points and the Application Center and the NWK-Key are shared between the end points and the MIOTY Service Center.

5. IoT application: The decrypted data could be forwarded to the IoT application (user interface) or the Cloud (AWS, Azure, google, IBM) via MQTT(s), websockets, HTTP push etc ..

A commonly used protocol in industrial environments is Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT). It is a Machine-to-Machine (M2M) data transfer protocol. MQTT is a publish-subscribe messaging protocol that uses a server (broker) based on the TCP/IP protocol.

Similarities between MIOTY and an Orange

I see a big similarity between the MIOTY end point and the orange.

Let's check these similarities together. Let's say we want to sent some amout of data within the MIOTY technology.

1. My data are considered as this peeled orange:

2. To send the data via the MIOTY technology, I need to encrypt them (NWK-KEY) and give them an authentification method (APP-KEY).

• NWK-KEY: Orange peel
• APP-KEY: Barre code

3. Passing through the base station, data integrity is verified and some other data information are being added (RSSI, SNR, Time).

If the data intergrity is missed (damaged orange) the data will be thrown by the BS and won't be forwarded to the Service Center.

4. The orange will be forwarded to the MIOTY Service Center in which it would be authicated via its NWK-KEY (barre code)

5. Within the MIOTY AC, data are being decrypted (peeled orange) ??.

As mentioned above, the data are decyrted but are not in human readable format. I mean, who will eat a whole peeled orange at once (maybe some would do, I have no clue ??) but the idea here is that after getting your orange, it is up to you to interpret your data as you prefer.

Some wants fresh orange juice, some would make an orange tasty cake and others would just like to take the seeds from the orange.

I am glad to share with you my thoughts, I hope this similarity makes sense for you as it does for me.

By Ons ZERAI