A Framework for practical teaching of IoT concepts in the Higher Education Institutions using custom Zigbee devices and the Zigbee2MQTT platform

With the constant technological advancements in the area of the Information and Communication Technologies and with the introduction of the Industry 4.0 paradigm, the Internet of Things (IoT) evolved from a purely theoretical concept into an actual and widely used technology of the present. The IoT has enabled the creation of solutions for automation, monitoring and remote control of various systems – from the simple smart home devices to entire factories and even industrial complexes. The general endorsement of the various IoT solutions has led not only to increased efficiency, improved monitoring capabilities and significant enhancements for many processes in the areas of the modern manufacturing, automotive and agricultural industries, but has also impacted many end-user systems, which we use in our daily activities. The numerous advantages of the IoT solutions have resulted in the higher demands for their integration in all aspects of the human activities. As a result of this, the leading ICT companies have experienced shortages for specialists with knowledge and skills in the IoT domain. In turn, this has put pressure on the universities, which had to develop training courses and educational programs with the aim to answer the constantly increasing industrial demand for IoT engineers.This paper presents a hands-on teaching approach, which provides the students with details about the modern wireless communications in the IoT domain. The approach shows to the learners how they can do protocol analysis and integration of custom devices in the IoT networks, using the Zigbee protocol and the Zigbee2MQTT protocol translation platform. At the core of this approach are custom programming scripts, which are used to decode the data from the used Zigbee radar presence sensor and NDIR CO2 sensor. The discussed scripts serve as practical teaching tools in the "Wireless Technologies for Data Transfer" course, which is part of the "Internet and mobile communications" Bachelor of Science study programme at the University of Ruse "Angel Kanchev". The presented teaching approach and the developed scripts are helping the students dissect the behaviour of the Zigbee protocol, decode the used proprietary data structures and develop their own IoT projects.