# Rapidly Deployable IoT Architecture with Data Security: Implementation and Experimental Evaluation
## 1 Introduction  
Internet of Things (IoT) is a world-wide network of interconnected objects that are uniquely addressable, based on standard communication protocols [1]. The \"Thing\" in IoT can be anything from toasters, thermostats, wearable electronics, assistive devices, smart-vehicles, structural health monitoring systems, environmental monitoring, agriculture, smart homes, and industrial automation systems [2, 3]. More devices are now connected with the internet, as pervasive computing proliferates at a blistering pace to reduce human intervention, increase ease of use and improve efficiency. As the technology pervades different facets of our lives, it also brings its own share of challenges as all these sensors and smart devices are constantly collecting and sharing data about our surroundings, inherently putting consumer data privacy and security at risk [4, 5]. As the IoT system collects and exchanges sensitive, private data, ensuring security across all levels of the architecture is essential yet most IoT devices at the end nodes have significant security concerns. Typically, IoT devices are constrained with low memory, limited power, and computational capabilities to implement traditional encryption algorithms [6, 7]. In resource constrained IoT architectures, it is necessary to employ a lightweight encryption to provide security to sensitive information while minimizing the overhead in memory, time [8] and power [9].  
Implementation of an IoT system involves interconnecting a large number of devices from diverse manufacturers and industries, and performance varies by applications and user requirements, and therefore, heterogeneity of devices and information is an important consideration in a unified architecture for IoT. Accordingly, architecture is the backbone of an IoT system [10]. Furthermore, it is imperative to have a flexible layered architecture, especially at a time when the ever-increasing number of architectures have not yet converged to a reference model [11]. While numerous IoT architectures have been published, each has been customized to a respective application [12; 13; 14], with not much emphasis on modularity for replication in diverse application, and rapid deployment. Addressing these challenges, this research presents a modular architecture termed, Lab-in-a-Box (LiB), a lightweight, low-cost sensor platform for rapid deployment in diverse applications. It attempts to provide a solution by providing a versatile, flexible and modular architecture that can be easily modified depending on the application and can be rapidly deployed requiring minimum set-up time and effort. The core concept of the LiB is a perceptible modular IoT architecture that enables a wide range of application-specific layers to interact with other sub-layers of the whole structure seamlessly, reducing complications, while integrating the different sections of an IoT application.  
The existing research provides many solutions for security in resource-constraint devices [15; 16; 17; 18; 19; 20; 21; 22; 23] and IoT architectures for specific applications [10; 12; 24]. However, no study has addressed these issues together and provided insight into how encryption affects the performance of an IoT system in terms of system memory, timing, and energy consumption. This paper attempts to tie in those issues into one work to investigate the effects and implications of encryption algorithms on IoT applications. This paper is organized as follows: Section 2 highlights current research on light-weight encryption algorithms and modular IoT architecture. Section 3 describes the LiB architecture and expands on widely accepted encryption algorithms. Section 4 expands on the proposed LiB architecture with data encryption for three different applications. Comparative results and discussions are presented in Section 5, followed by conclusions in Section 6.