Time-to-Provision Evaluation of IoT Devices Using Automated Zero-Touch Provisioning

TL;DR

This paper evaluates automated zero-touch provisioning methods for IoT devices, demonstrating significant reductions in deployment time compared to manual approaches using Soft-AP and Bluetooth solutions.

Contribution

It introduces Soft-AP and Bluetooth-based zero-touch provisioning solutions for IoT devices and evaluates their performance against manual provisioning in real testbed scenarios.

Findings

Soft-AP ZTP reduces provisioning time by 154% compared to expert manual provisioning.

Bluetooth ZTP reduces provisioning time by 313% compared to expert manual provisioning.

Both ZTP methods significantly outperform manual provisioning in deployment speed.

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) is being widely adopted in today's society, interconnecting smart embedded devices that are being deployed for indoor and outdoor environments, such as homes, factories and hospitals. Along with the growth in the development and implementation of these IoT devices, their simple and rapid deployment, initial configuration and out-of-the-box operational provisioning are becoming prominent challenges to be circumvented. Considering a large number of heterogeneous devices to be deployed within next generation IoT networks, the amount of time needed for manual provisioning of these IoT devices can significantly delay the deployment and manual provisioning may introduce human-induced failures and errors. By incorporating zero-touch provisioning (ZTP), multiple heterogeneous devices can be provisioned with less effort and without human intervention. In this paper, we propose software-enabled access point (Soft-AP)- and Bluetooth-based ZTP solutions relying only on a single mediator device and evaluate their performances using LOG-A-TEC testbed against manual provisioning in terms of the time required for provisioning (time-to-provision, TTP). We demonstrate that on average, Soft-AP- and Bluetooth-based ZTP solutions outperform manual provisioning with about 154% and 313% when compared to the expert provisioning, and with about 434% and 880% when compared to the non-expert provisioning in terms of TTP performances, respectively.