An Easy Network Onboarding Scheme for Internet of Things Networks

The network onboarding of the Internet of Things (IoT) devices is a practically important issue to realize the IoT networks. The lack of appropriate and easy network onboarding schemes hinders the spread of the IoT networks and their related cloud services. To try and address this problem, various IoT network onboarding schemes have been developed, such as near-field communication, quick response code, ultrasound, and soft access point. In addition to these schemes, a network onboarding scheme based on Wi-Fi neighbor awareness networking (NAN), a recently developed low-power Wi-Fi technology, has received a lot of attention due to its low cost and ease-of-use characteristics. However, the radio frequency characteristics of the NAN-based scheme can cause various problems, including the unintended connection from neighboring devices. The development of the supporting technologies for the NAN-based network onboarding scheme is critically important. In this paper, we propose a convergence configurator detection scheme based on the time difference of arrival, received signal strength indicator, and data rate to reduce the neighboring issue of the NAN-based setup. Rather than using one parameter criterion, we use a weighted sum of various parameters to increase the reliability of the NAN-based onboarding. The numerical results validate the effectiveness of the proposed technique.