AIDE: Augmented Onboarding of IoT Devices at Ease

In order to use and manage IoT devices, a prerequisite is to onboard them so that they can be initialized and connected to the infrastructure. This requires mapping each physical device with its digital identity. Doing so manually is tedious, error-prone and not scalable. In this paper, we propose AIDE, a mechanism that provides Augmented onboarding of IoT Devices at Ease. AIDE offers a streamlined on-boarding process by automatically associating devices at different locations with their corresponding Received Signal Strength (RSS) profiles, which can be applied to a wide range of wireless technologies such as WiFi, BLE and Zigbee. AIDE does not require additional infrastructure or hardware support, and can work by simply using a COTS smartphone as receiver. The mechanism employs a carefully designed measurement approach and a post-processing algorithm to mitigate multi-path effect and improve measurement accuracy. Preliminary experiments in different indoor environments show that AIDE achieves about 90% on-boarding accuracy when devices are 6 feet away from the measurement point, and 100% accuracy when devices are directly approachable.