Hi
I am MSc candidate student in Computer Science (BSc in Electronic Engineering) and I have to decide my Master Thesis. I specified some topics before but I want to work on IoT so I am welcome for suggestions.
I am co-founder of ELL-i cooperative. Our aim is to have a full ecosystem of commercial, academic and hobbyist developers around Riot OS and ELL-i technologies, using the technologies as platform for building commercial products, research, teaching and just plain old having fun.
I am newbie in IoT technologies so my imagination is a bit limited 
Allow me to provide with some food for thought. Recently I started a project on making yet another IoT home automation system. My goal is to have a distributed system, much like KNX but with open source technologies. During my career I have seen that open standards have wider adoption and eventually win. Open source development models accelerate this and I am visioning that IoT systems might be the tripwire industry where open innovation dominates more or less from initial large scale adoption on.
Anyhow, recently I started a hobby project named Just Like Star Trek[1] for the goal is to have a home or office where the technology hides in the background and things like lights, heating, ventilation and everything mostly just works without anybody paying any attention to it. The project was started only recently and is on a slow burner as we are just now approaching the moment when we have most of the technological pieces in hand and can start putting them together as a system. I'm doing this as a hobby project but the application area is the single reason for which I originally founded ELL-i with Dr Nikander. There are still platform pieces to develop but the technology is enough mature that hard core nerds can create prototype devices and make small testbed systems.
In the presentation slide set[2] I show the architectural vision on page 4 with the rest being mostly images for inspiring us and the ELL-i Illuminati Hackathon attendees into thinking all the good and cool stuff our homes should do without us needing to constantly adjust things manually.
Basically IoT is redividing technological components, giving them all their own IP address and then reconnecting them using possibly a different physical topology. A big machine such as a cookie factory cookie oven now has a single centralized control system that is connected into its motors, heaters and sensors using minimum amounts of wire. The system may put on power for the belt motor and not realize if the motor is broken, the cookie belt broken, the speed sensor broken or a transmission belt slipping when the speed sensor registers no movement. Now with IoT, all of these individual elements will be just slightly smarter and can report their own health status to the control system.
Similarly in a home environment, the individual devices could report their health and instant power consumption and a holistic system status summary can be known. The devices can be logically reconnected in different configurations just by sending suitable control messages around and this can happen even multiple times a day.
The elements should not be more expensive than the traditional dumb devices and their reliability should also be similar. This puts heavy burden on the software for being small, maintainable and possibly validatable (which again puts more burden on being small).
- I may work on new features or improvements for RIOT if needed.
- I may develop a commercial project via RIOT.
- I may also work with a group.
Note:I have professional experience over seven years and I am currently working at Cypress Semiconductor as a Senior SW Engineer.
This all depends on if you do the thesis work for a hobby project, academia or for a company and is heavily dependent on who will finance it. The greatest freedom is if you can self-finance the work as you'll only have to convince you and the university supervisors that yours is a Really Good Idea to write a thesis on. That would basically mean that you'd write a thesis on your free time after work hours or decide you can afford to have a long unpaid leave from work to do the thesis. This is very rare in technical fields but could be possible depending on your personal finances.
ELL-i is currently taking part in several academic research projects ranging from Information Centric Networking (a world without IP addressess so we're looking past IPv6 rise and fall) to making a tailored-to-IoT generic control chip to build embedded devices with. We are investigating a spin-off company to be formed to commercialize on a smart shopping assistant system originally developed for a research project.
The Riot OS developer community has recently started to be really interesting with all kinds of companies joining and before the current influx of companies the list already had good representation from several universities and standards defining committees. I think this list an excellent place to ask for ideas for thesis work.
[1]: GitHub - temmihoo/just-like-star-trek
[2]: https://github.com/temmihoo/just-like-star-trek/blob/master/JLST%20Draft.pdf?raw=true
- t
