Internet of Things Platform for Assessment and Research on Cybersecurity of Smart Rural Environments

Daniel Sernández-Iglesias (), Llanos Tobarra, Rafael Pastor-Vargas (), Antonio Robles-Gómez, Pedro Vidal-Balboa and João Sarraipa
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Daniel Sernández-Iglesias: Escuela Internacional de Doctorado UNED (EIDUNED), Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED), 28015 Madrid, Spain
Llanos Tobarra: Departamento de Sistemas de Comunicación y Control, ETSI Informática, Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED), 28040 Madrid, Spain
Rafael Pastor-Vargas: Departamento de Sistemas de Comunicación y Control, ETSI Informática, Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED), 28040 Madrid, Spain
Antonio Robles-Gómez: Departamento de Sistemas de Comunicación y Control, ETSI Informática, Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED), 28040 Madrid, Spain
Pedro Vidal-Balboa: Consorcio CA UNED en Ponferrada (INTECCA), 24401 Ponferrada, Spain
João Sarraipa: Instituto de Desenvolvimento de Novas Tecnologias (UNINOVA), 2829-516 Caparica, Portugal

Future Internet, 2025, vol. 17, issue 8, 1-26

Abstract: Rural regions face significant barriers to adopting IoT technologies, due to limited connectivity, energy constraints, and poor technical infrastructure. While urban environments benefit from advanced digital systems and cloud services, rural areas often lack the necessary conditions to deploy and evaluate secure and autonomous IoT solutions. To help overcome this gap, this paper presents the Smart Rural IoT Lab, a modular and reproducible testbed designed to replicate the deployment conditions in rural areas using open-source tools and affordable hardware. The laboratory integrates long-range and short-range communication technologies in six experimental scenarios, implementing protocols such as MQTT, HTTP, UDP, and CoAP. These scenarios simulate realistic rural use cases, including environmental monitoring, livestock tracking, infrastructure access control, and heritage site protection. Local data processing is achieved through containerized services like Node-RED, InfluxDB, MongoDB, and Grafana, ensuring complete autonomy, without dependence on cloud services. A key contribution of the laboratory is the generation of structured datasets from real network traffic captured with Tcpdump and preprocessed using Zeek. Unlike simulated datasets, the collected data reflect communication patterns generated from real devices. Although the current dataset only includes benign traffic, the platform is prepared for future incorporation of adversarial scenarios (spoofing, DoS) to support AI-based cybersecurity research. While experiments were conducted in an indoor controlled environment, the testbed architecture is portable and suitable for future outdoor deployment. The Smart Rural IoT Lab addresses a critical gap in current research infrastructure, providing a realistic and flexible foundation for developing secure, cloud-independent IoT solutions, contributing to the digital transformation of rural regions.

Keywords: internet of things; IoT; smart rural; IoT laboratory; sensor networks; dataset generation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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