Internet of Things. IoT Infrastructures

This paper provides an initial architecture specification of a management framework to address the challenges associated with the robustness and reliability of large scale IoT systems, specifically through mechanisms for orchestration of resources for reliability and dependability supported by IoT functional virtualization.

Internet-of-Things (IoT) services offer a great potential in many different enterprise application areas for improving efficiency gains to completely new business processes (BPs). However, due to diversified nature of the devices involved and uncertainty of business objectives associated when structuring BP aware IoT services, significant concerns of standardizations still have to be overcome. In this paper, we identified and integrated contexts of BPs to IoT services by means of role-centric view in order to define BP aware IoT services’ reference architecture. Configurable role based approach and model enables a systematic credentials and reuse of standardized IoT services in layers, while allowing participants of IoT services’ reference architecture to understand and imply possible variations. It is proposing a configurable role based concrete architecture layers incorporating topographies for capturing resources, data, and physical objects involved to IoT services. The methodology is validated with a case study of commercial surveillance camera and security alarm systems.

Popular test automation frameworks target the enterprise application testing but there is scarcity of test automation framework for device applications, especially for IoT domain. IoT testing paradigm throws a new set of challenges involving device integration, protocol adapters, task actuation, data integrity, security and non functional requirements. In this paper, we propose a scalable, lightweight device task actuation framework for IoT testing based on TCS Connected Universe Platform Device Management enabler. This framework can execute test suite on multiple remote devices spread across geographies and then show the results on the IoT tester’s screen. Moreover it has the ability to gather runtime device statistics during test execution, thus can do dynamic health check for IoT devices deployed on field.

The satisfaction of security and data quality requirements plays a fundamental role in the Internet of Things (IoT) scenario. Such a dynamic environment requires the adoption of heterogeneous technologies to provide customized services in various application domains and both security threats and data quality issues need to be addresses in order to guarantee an effective and efficient data management. In this paper, a lightweight and cross-domain prototype of distributed architecture for IoT is presented and evaluated by means of open data provided by different sources. We show how users can access different types of data by changing security and quality requirements.

The rapid deployment of sensors across the world in various sectors has fuelled a growing demand of smart applications and services that can leverage this boom of Internet of Things (IoT). However, developing analytical applications for IoT is a difficult process as applications tend to be cross-domain and there are close relationships with the physical world. It is unreasonable to imagine that the application developers will possess all relevant skills and knowledge related to the domain, physical world, signal processing and deployment infrastructure. This paper presents an method that assists the IoT application developer by (i) providing an annotated repository of algorithms, (ii) recommending algorithms depending on the signal type to reduce the effort required from a signal processing expert, and (iii) providing a framework to execute the IoT application thereby reducing the development cost and time by capturing the knowledge of experts in models. We have evaluated our method by comparing the accuracy for a typical IoT application obtained by using the algorithms used by signal processing experts against the algorithms recommended by our method.

This paper presents a unified locating service, KULOCS, which horizontally integrates the existing heterogeneous locating services. Focusing on technology-independent elements [when], [where] and [who] in querying locations of objects, KULOCS integrates data and operations of the existing services. In the data integration, we propose a method where the time representation, the locations, the namespace of user are consolidated by Unix time, the location labels and the alias table, respectively. We then propose KULOCS-API that integrates operations by all possible combinations of [when], [where] and [who]. Since KULOCS works as a seamless façade to the underlying locating services, clients can consume location information easily and efficiently, without knowing concrete services actually locating target objects. Also, we examine feasibility of two practical value-added services with KULOCS.

Recently major emphasis is exerted on development of effective tools and techniques for enriching IoT development environment. Typically an IoT application, for example a health monitoring application, not only requires domain knowledge of a programmer, but also similar knowledge from a medical practitioner, a sensor manufacturer, an infrastructure manager, etc. Such involvement of several experts makes the development process complex, resulting in escalation of time and cost of the effort. Model Driven Development (MDD) has been proposed as a development technique where such problem can be mitigated. This paper presents a system based on the MDD paradigm. As a part of the system, we present a work-flow designer framework, a visual drag and drop interface, where a developer can stitch various functional models recommended from a well-organized, annotated and crowd-sourced semantic repository of algorithms (from various domains), named as Algopedia, to quickly build a semantic workflow and in turn an end to end IoT application.

Patients suffering from heart problems such as arrhythmia, failure and prone to heart attacks, need regularly monitoring of their vital signs. It is described in this article an inexpensive, free software based, easy-to use prototype of a telemetry system, applied for monitoring biomedical signals using a wifi module, a photoplethysmograph and an infrared temperature sensor; the measurements obtained by this sensors are transmitted on real time to an Android application and to an online platform that can be accessed anytime. The prototype also includes an alarm system that sends a message to the phone application, and by using social networks such as Twitter, timely notifies the treating doctor and respective relatives whenever a critical level on the patient’s body signals is detected.

“Internet of Things” (IoT) is the network or associations between those Internets connected objects (smart Devices) that are able to exchange information by using an agreed method and data schema. The enormous amount of things, the communication protocols the combination between hardware and software, the Big Data impact, a verity of protocols, lack of standards and the high level of the required SLA by the end users set up new and challenging bars regarding QA in general and testing in particular in the IoT scene. This article will highlight the challenges as well as address potential strategies and solutions.

This work presents a paradigm shift and introduces a data-centric security architecture for the COMPOSE framework; a platform as a service and marketplace for the IoT. We distinguish our approach from classical device-centric approaches and outline architectural as well as infrastructural specifics of our platform. In particular, we describe how fine-granular and data-centric security requirements can be combined with static and dynamic enforcement to regain governance on devices and data without sacrificing the intrinsic openness of IoT platforms. We also highlight the power of our architecture, converting concepts such as data provenance and reputation into efficient, highly useful, and practically applicable complements.

Edge processing in IoT networks offers the ability to enforce privacy at the point of data collection. However, such enforcement requires extra processing in terms of data filtering and the ability to configure the device with knowledge of policy. Supporting this processing with Cloud resources can reduce the burden this extra processing places on edge processing nodes and provide a route to enable user defined policy. Research from the PaaSage project [12] on Cloud modelling language is applied to IoT networks to support IoT and Cloud integration linking the worlds of Cloud and IoT in a privacy protecting way.

This keynote paper creates the framework for the 2nd EAI International Conference on Mobility in the Internet of Things (IoT). The IoT offers advanced connectivity of devices, systems, and services that goes beyond machine-to-machine communications and covers a variety of domains and applications. The interconnection of embedded devices is expected in many fields including Mobility and Intelligent Transport. In the light of the latest knowledge and scientific projects findings the authors present actual R&D trends in the given field. New ideas, cutting-edge innovations and technologies for mobility agenda are needed together with a multidisciplinary perspective approach. The paper indicates most common recent aspects for future development of the IoT applications for support of Mobility and Intelligent Transport. Research and innovations projects including ERA Chair project in ITS at the University of Žilina are presented as examples of solutions for IoT applications for benefits of citizens (motorized and non-motorized public).

The way we are experiencing and interacting with our everyday living environment define and anticipate our future behavior and actions. Today new digital technologies vastly diminish boundaries between virtual and physical world. Cross-reality design supported with recent mobile and context aware computing, gradually changed the concept of user interaction and moved it more toward usage of heterogeneous contexts, pervasive computing technologies, and multimodal spatial perception and transformed our living surroundings into smart environments, traditional living object into smart living objects. Ubiquitous computing vision implies more than ever to our lives. In order to make all these changes more human-centered in this paper we are investigated the cognitive and metaphorical aspects of future interface design strategies which could enhance user experience and ideas acceptance, communicated through multimodal interactions. In this paper we are presenting three tangible interfaces that we have developed for design and research purposes and results we collected during their public exposure. Hopefully, the results will give us sufficient insights for further investigations in the field of smart living environments and smart objects development. We believe that to fulfill these goals application and exploration of tangible interfaces frameworks and cognitive methods could be one of the crucial elements for the future research success.

Evolution of information society, which arises mainly from the development of technology and information technology, causes that older people may be marginalized and their activity in society may be limited. One can avoid such a phenomenon by all initiatives of stimulating seniors towards intellectual and physical activity. The most popular initiatives are Universities of the Third Age. The first university in Poland was founded over thirty years ago. Universities of the Third Age are one of the most common forms of education for older people. Their main task is to increase the intellectual activity of older people and to meet the needs arising mainly from psychosocial changes. The aim of this paper is to characterize the education of retirement age people with particular regard to their expectations in the age of computerization and digitization of society.

Prešov, located in the east of Slovakia, is famous for religious, cultural and historical monuments, most of which are used by denominations for religious purposes and are of great importance to communities’ religious life. Their promotion to target audiences in both domestic and global tourism market via modern promotional tools is of topical significance. This paper aims at examining the use of e-communication tools in promoting selected monuments with emphasis on social networks when addressing target audiences that include tourists (believers and unbelievers) from Slovakia and abroad.

The international new ventures literature focuses on the phenomenon of rapid internationalization of firms. Unlike the traditional theories focusing on MNCs, the new international ventures literature emphasizes the growing occurrence of firms becoming internationally active already from their inception. The fundamental focus of this concept lies within the firm’s age, not the size when examining its ability to internationalize. Special attention is also paid to the aspect of entrepreneurial behavior and constantly changing international environment, including recent technological advances, increasing mobility of human capital, higher availability of financing options, and a growing number of internationally experienced staff. There is not enough literature on the internationalization of the start-ups from Central and Eastern Europe and therefore we try to test the applicability of this theory on the case of selected Slovak IT firms.

After the fall of former political regime in Slovakia in 1989, Bratislava has undergone many dynamic developing changes that were not too positively influenced the appearance and functions of the city. Spontaneous and unsystematic development in this period seems to continue even after 25 years. Conversely, a significant decline is becoming increasingly marked in the urban infrastructure, of which insufficient attention is paid. This is because infrastructure for developers is often only enforced expenditure and the city does not have sufficient financial resources to meet requirements on its renewal. Moreover, the infrastructure requirements from before 30 years are now heavily modified and it is currently inadequate and capacity insufficient. Here we can mention for example a significant parking problems in many parts of Bratislava mainly caused by the substantial increase in the level of motorization to the period when the present transportation infrastructure was planned. Of course, in Bratislava there are also some positive examples, to which the authors of this paper focuses, that are currently considered significant by the fact that towards the Bratislava closer to the concept of Smart City. In these selected examples it is also important the implementation of existing ICT technologies that form an integral part of the modern Smart Cities. The Aim of the paper is also propose improvements to the current solutions.

The long-term problem in Slovakia is the seizure of agricultural land for the purpose of implementation of development projects. Factors contributing to land grabbing and occupancy of land were and are mainly due to the need for new residential, industrial and commercial sites as well as transport infrastructure. The Slovak Republic is one of the transition countries, which since 1990 has transferred to a market economy. Subsequent positive legislative changes and the development of new economic instruments in Slovakia has increased interest of foreign companies in business development activities. The consequences of uncontrolled construction boom is reflected in seizure of quality agricultural land for the construction of development projects and the subsequent formation of negative externalities.

This paper will showcase the iCore Project approach for instantiating an Internet of Things (IoT) Service Enabling Architecture to support the Connected Vehicles (Transportation in the Smart City).

When many companies recently introduced BYOD (Bring Your Own Device), i.e. allowing employees to use personal mobile devices at work, they also adopted the NAC and MDM system for prevention of confidential information leakage, access control and efficient user management. As the access control policy of the NAC and MDM system is uniformly applied to users, however, they cannot be aggressive in implementing BYOD since there are security threats due to the frequent loss and theft of devices and low security. Accordingly, it is necessary to be able to flexibly set up policies and detect and control abnormal users by collecting personalized context information. This paper proposes a behavior-based abnormality detection method that detects abnormal behavior by classifying vulnerabilities occurring in the BYOD environment and patterning various users’ information use contexts.

The fast progress of smart devices and applications in the mobility sector open up a huge potential for mobility services that allow for an individualization of mobility patterns. In combination with an increasing infrastructure of public transport and diverse means of transportation, novel mobility concepts represent a promising solution to societal changes and mobility needs. However, the increasing functionality and multitude of options add to the complexity of using those services. The research is embedded into an interdisciplinary project – Mobility Broker – in which the central platform for planning and booking a journey using different public means of transport is developed. Different from other approaches, users are integrated in all stages of technical development. The paper reports on an empirical study in which the usability of the first prototype of the smart phone application was tested. Findings show that interface design and visual ergonomics are quite mature at this stage. Implications of findings are discussed and future research lines are explicated.

This article describes the design and development of an open data platform that was implemented as part of the Smart Health framework and aimed at supporting the development of Recreational Bike Path applications. Recreational Bike Path programs follow the guidelines of the World Health Organization and seek to reduce the appearance of Chronic Noncommunicable Diseases; these programs, although having great potential, do not have a source of data to investigate their impact or motivate public investment. This paper presents the design of a platform for integrating data through a service REST API by considering Smart Cities architectures as a reference. The final product features an extensible platform that supports basic functionalities, has the capability to integrate other APIs and has the ability to generate open data datasets while following the “Guidelines for the implementation of open data in Colombia”.

Travel information brokers are complex systems, dealing with a large amount of heterogeneous data from various sources. The exchange and integration of such data is therefore demanding, particularly for small mobility service providers with few IT resources. To face this problem, this work illustrates a key tool to support information and service integration. On a conceptual level, we present a travel information broker system architecture and respective information flows. Additionally, we describe data exchange related to system components, e.g., intermodal routing, pricing and accounting. On this basis, we developed and tested a communication adapter that enables and eases communication between the core system and second party service providers. Furthermore we outline the method of extending public transportation routing with information about sharing services. This enables travelers to query combined information about public transport, bikesharing as well as carsharing services using a single application.

Strain calibration measurements are performed for acrylate coated, substrate-free fiber Bragg grating (FBG) sensors at room temperature of 298 K and cryogenic temperature of 77 K. A 1550 nm Bragg wavelength (λ_B) FBG sensor, with its sensing part not being bonded to any surface, is subjected to axial strain using MTS25 tensile machine available at Cryogenic Material tests Karlsruhe (CryoMaK), KIT. The Bragg wavelength shift (Δλ_B) versus induced strain (ε) is regressed with a linear polynomial function and the strain sensitivity obtained is found to be 0.9 pm/µε at both the temperatures, verifying that the FBG strain sensitivity is independent of temperature.

The paper describes the development of flexible lightweight highly sensitive film-based sensors capable of monitoring pressure, deformation, temperature and humidity. In particular, we present a family of the developed simple devices that successfully adopted polycarbonate films covered with organic molecular conductors as conductive sensing components. Proof-of-concept experiments with these prototypes demonstrate that such bi layer films are promising as sensing devices for the environment and biomedical monitoring. Besides, we present the interfacing of the flexible film-based sensor with a wireless sensor node and evaluate the sensing capability of this system in a real monitoring scenario.

The electron irradiation effect on characteristics of the hydrogen sensors based on metal-insulator-semiconductor transistor structures has been investigated by experiment. The models of hydrogen and radiation sensitivity were developed. Using these models the forecast of functional performance of the hydrogen sensors under ionizing radiation and the estimation of critical doses has been done.

In this paper, we describe an approach to fabricating conductive textiles with temperature sensing capability. The key point of our approach is in combining electronic properties of a molecular organic semiconductor with clothing. A polycarbonate film covered with organic molecular semiconductor was used as the temperature measurement element. To minimize the electrical response of the developed bi layer thermistor to deformations, the thermistor was attached to a rigid film-like platform specifically fabricated in the textile by its local melting. Our study shows that the developed platform enables engineering of the conductive fabric the electrical resistance of which exclusively responded to temperature changes. Such e-textiles may be easily prepared using a simple fabrication procedure and, therefore, they are compatible with conductive sensing fabrics prepared by printing techniques. The developed organic thermistor, being cheap, lightweight and biocompatible, is highly attractive for applications in wearable biomedical technology.

Wearable technology for physical activity recognition has emerged as one of the fastest growing research fields in recent years. A great variety of body-worn motion capture and tracking systems have been designed for a wide range of applications including medicine, health care, well-being, and gaming. In this paper we present an experimental inertial measurement system for physical impact analysis in sport-science applications. The presented system is a small cordless wearable device intended to track athletes physical activity during intensive workout sessions. The main distinctive feature of the system is its capability to detect and measure a wide range of shock intensities typical for many active sports, including martial arts, baseball, football, hockey, etc. Tracking of the sport specific irregular and fast movements is another important aspect addressed in the presented experimental system. In this paper we present the hardware-software architecture of the system and discuss preliminary in-field experimental results.

The focus of this work is made on standardization and unification process during the design and production of a commercially available system for gas analytical instruments industry. The implementation of Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) platform for hazardous gases detection includes the development of software which relies on the digital data exchange protocol using National Standard of Russian Federation. The goal of software is to support hardware electronics for smart gas sensitive modules and Wi-Fi wireless digital platform. This idea allows the user to work with the web application available on most mobile device (tablet PC, smart phone, etc.) using widely available free internet browsers (Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, etc.) without necessity of downloading any additional service software.

It is developed igniting electrical circuit for pulsed corona discharge ionization to operate a source as part of an ion mobility spectrometer. The simulation circuit for forming a corona discharge allowed optimizing the parameters. The possibility of electronic switching of the primary winding and reverse polarity diodes in the high voltage part of the circuit provide operation of the corona discharge ion source for detection both positive and negative ions.

The Internet-of-Things paradigm shifts the focus of sensor networks from simple monitoring to more dynamic networking scenarios where the nodes need to adapt to changing requirements and conditions. For this purpose many configuration options are added to the network protocols. Today, however, they can only be modified at compile-time, which seriously limits the ability to adapt the behaviour of the network.To overcome this, a solution is proposed that allows reconfiguring the entire network stack remotely using CoAP. The Contiki implementation shows that for a small memory overhead (1.2 kB) up to 57 configuration parameters can be reconfigured dynamically. The average latency for reconfiguring one parameter in a twenty node network is only three seconds. A simple case-study illustrates how the energy consumption of an application can be reduced with (50 %) by dynamically fine-tuning the MAC duty-cycle.

The Internet of Things is expected to expand several magnitudes in the coming decade surpassing over 50 billion devices. In the Internet of Things there is a need to support complex queries on the massive amount of information that will be made available. The scalability of the indexes used to support the queries is therefore critical. This paper therefore investigate what type of index that could scale to the size required by the Internet of Things. We find that range query is an approach that support continuously changing information and fast updates with the lowest increase in signaling per participating device. We find that a Chord-based distributed hash table hosting a NUBL range query indexing scheme will scale to the required size while supporting multidimensional range queries.

This paper introduces the problem of high precision control in constrained wireless cyber-physical systems. We argue that balancing conflicting performance objectives, namely energy efficiency, high reliability and low latency, whilst concurrently enabling data collection and targeted message dissemination, are critical to the success of future applications of constrained wireless cyber-physical systems. We describe the contemporary art in practical collection and dissemination techniques, and select the most appropriate for evaluation. A comprehensive simulation study is presented and experimentally validated, the results of which show that the current art falls significantly short of desirable performance when inter-packet intervals decrease to those required for precision control. It follows that there is a significant need for further study and new solutions to solve this emerging problem.

The Dynamic Embedded Sensor-Actuator Language (DESAL) [2] is a rule-based programming language, without events, interrupts, or hidden control. Nodes have built-in access to their neighbors’ state, with automatic node discovery and health monitoring. Applications communicate via shared variables, rather than explicit message passing. Shared variables naturally represent the state of self-stabilizing algorithms. DESAL simplifies the construction of self-stabilizing embedded applications by eliminating network programming, while offering significant reliability improvements.

In model-driven development of embedded systems, one would ideally automate both the code generation from the model and the analysis of the model for functional correctness, liveness, timing guarantees, and quantitative properties. Characteristically for embedded systems, analyzing quantitative properties like resource consumption and performance requires a model of the environment as well. We use pState to analyze the power consumption of motes intended for water quality monitoring of recreational beaches in Lake Ontario. We show how system properties can be analyzed by model checking rather than by classical approach based on a functional breakdown and spreadsheet calculation. From the same model, it is possible to generate a framework of executable code to be run on the sensor’s microcontroller. The goal of model checking approach is an improvement of engineering efficiency.

In this paper, we present alpha-radiation monitoring system software. Detector works in accounting mode that adds some extra features. Possible detector applications such as pedestrian radiation portal monitor or portable alpha contamination dosimeter are presented. Detector is based on air ion method. In view of detector works in accounting mode, it shows high selectivity to alpha particles registration. Alpha selection principle is also shown. Control system and software system are considered in detail.

Microprocessors operate most serial devices in the same way, issuing commands and parsing corresponding responses. Writing the device drivers for these peripherals is a repetitive task. Moreover, measuring the response time of each command can be time-consuming and error prone. In this paper, we present DriverGen, a configuration-based tool developed to provide accurate response time measurement and automated serial device driver generation. DriverGen (i) simulates the command execution sequence of a microprocessor using a Java program running on a desktop, (ii) measures the response time of the target device to each command, and (iii) generates a device driver based on the received responses and measured response times. To evaluate DriverGen, three case studies are considered.

Today sensors and wearable technologies are gaining popularity, with people increasingly surrounded by “smart” objects. Machine learning is used with great success in wearable devices and sensors in several real-world applications. In this paper we address the challenges of context recognition on low energy and self-sustainable wearable devices. We present an energy efficient multi-sensor context recognition system based on decision tree to classify 3 different indoor or outdoor contexts. An ultra-low power smart watch provided with a micro-power camera, microphone, accelerometer, and temperature sensors has been used to real field tests. Experimental results demonstrate both high mean accuracy of 81.5 % (up to 89 % peak) and low energy consumption (only 2.2 mJ for single classification) of the solution, and the possibility to achieve a self-sustainable system in combination with body worn energy harvesters.

In this paper we discuss our work to manage heterogeneity of devices, protocols and software in smart spaces by using adaptive methods to combat incompatibility issues. We present our experimental prototype which combines a telehealth system with the assisted living functionalities of a smart home, which we have developed to test our concepts. The result of this adaptivity study is a service repository which enables systems to match collections of sensors and actuators to loosely coupled services which are downloaded and activated in runtime without human interference.

Link estimators are extremely important in dynamic wireless sensor networks for obtaining a good network performance because they drive the decisions made by the routing protocol. Many estimators exist but the quality of their estimation depends on the scenario at hand. In this paper, the impact of the estimator on the network performance is investigated in different networking scenarios. Also the influence of the underlying MAC protocol was evaluated. The evaluation was performed both in simulation and on a real-life testbed.The results clearly show that there is no link estimator that is best in all scenario’s. Another major finding indicates that the results obtained in simulator differ heavily from the testbed results. This illustrates that research findings cannot be solely based on simulation results but also requires real-world experiments. The influence off the underlying MAC protocol is limited on the choice of estimator.

In order to support navigation, gesture detection, and augmented reality, modern smartphones contain inertial measurement units (IMU) consisting of accelerometers and gyroscopes. Although the accuracy of these sensors directly affects the soundness of mobile applications, no standardized tests exist to verify the correctness of the retrieved sensor data. For this purpose, we present a novel benchmark, which utilizes the camera of the phone as a reference to estimate the quality of its sensor data fusion. Our experiments do not require special equipment and reveal significant discrepancies between different phone models.

Today continuous wave (CW) radar systems have been established as a standard method to interrogate surface acoustic wave (SAW) delay line sensors. They provide an ideal solution with high accuracy and reasonable reading distances for low dynamic measured quantities, which do not change fast in time. But their relatively long reading cycles [1] makes them unsuitable for high dynamic measurements. This paper illustrates a concept of an interrogation principle based on a pulse radar system which allows decreasing the reading cycle of a SAW delay line to a minimum of about 3 µs given by the physical dimension of the SAW delay line tag itself [2, 3].

The Internet of Things (IoT) represents a vision in which the Internet extends into the real world embracing everyday objects [9]. Billions of objects are already connected to the Internet. These objects would intercommunicate without any human intervention and they would have different operating systems. Enterprises and developers should produce different versions of each application (same functionality) for each operating systems. For testing and evaluating all these versions, developers and testers should develop/redevelop the same scenario for all versions of this application. Cross-Platform Scenario Module is designed to solve this problem by separating the testing scenario (events and actions) from the application that will execute these events and actions on the object. Same scenario might be written using data serialization formats (such as, Extensible Markup Language (XML), JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) or Concise Binary Object Representation (CBOR)) for all versions of the application. As an example, the format used in this research is the XML.

Interoperability within the Internet of Things is mired in entrenched incompatible specifications, backed by industry giants and consortiums seemingly hoping to “win the stack”. There is little hope that a common set of standards will be universally adopted that will allow all our Things to work together. However, by applying some of the core lessons of the Internet - use URIs for IDs, manipulate documents using the REST Model, and that documents should be “JSON-like” dictionary - we can create near seamless interoperability between Things independent of their standards stack.

This article presents an initial set of results from the IoT Lab European research project on crowdsourcing and Internet of Things (IoT). It presents the interoperability challenges faced by the project and how it solved them, in order to provide a fully integrated experimental platform for multidisciplinary research combining the potential of the Internet of Things deployment together with richer end-user interactions. It gives an overview of its multiple integrations model, including with heterogeneous IoT, heterogeneous testbeds, crowdsourcing, virtual nodes, and other testbeds federations. It highlights the use of IPv6 as a global and strategic integration enabler.

The principal barrier to massive IoT technology adoption is the lack of interoperability and the resulting segmented nature of the IoT market. To cope with that the European Research Cluster on the Internet of Things (IERC), the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and the European Telecommunication Standards Institute (ETSI) promote the development of interoperability events to enforce real standard compliance and interoperability between vendors. In this paper, we summarize the lessons learned during the first ETSI Plugtests event on the technology developed by the IETF 6TiSCH working group. 6TiSCH technology is cornerstone to the Industrial Internet of Things, enabling operational technologies to converge to the Internet by providing seamless IP connectivity and standardized management. The event clearly demonstrated the importance of such interoperability testing early on in the standards development. Interoperability was tested between implementations of 6TiSCH technology from multiple vendors. A total of 221 tests were performed, with a 93.7 % success rate.

As the Internet of Things is gaining momentum, low-power communication technologies proliferate. In this paper, we focus on Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) and IEEE 802.15.4 (CSMA, Low-power listening, and TSCH), and advocate low-power IPv6 for interoperability between the two. We perform a thorough experimental comparison of their link-layer performance, both in idle radio environment and when facing heavy (controlled) external interference. Our results suggest that both technologies can achieve interesting and complementary latency-energy trade-offs. Based on our results, we discuss possible interoperability between BLE and IEEE 802.15.4 and present related open issues.

This paper presents an IoT architecture for the semantic interoperability of diverse IoT systems and applications in smart cities. The architecture virtualizes diverse IoT systems and ensures their modelling and representation according to common standards-based IoT ontologies. Furthermore, based on this architecture, the paper introduces a first-of-a-kind visual development environment which eases the development of semantically interoperable applications in smart citites. The development environment comes with a range of visual tools, which enable the assembly of non-trivial data-driven applications in smart cities, including applications that leverage data streams from diverse IoT systems. Moreover, these tools allow developers to leverage the functionalities and building blocks of the presented architecture. Overall, the introduced visual environment advances the state of the art in IoT developments for smart cities towards the direction of semantic interoperability for data driven applications.

With the evolution of the Internet of Things, devices of many different technologies and manufacturers are being developed (e.g. for use cases ranging from home automation to smart cities). This creates challenges regarding interoperability between these heterogeneous devices, as well as integrating them to enable innovative applications. Currently, several integration platforms already exist to integrate technologies in a local gateway (e.g. OpenHAB, Zodianet, etc.). Yet, the local set-up and configuration still is overly complex, especially for non-technical users. In this paper, we present a remote management platform that focuses on ease of configuration and installation. It allows monitoring, configuration, diagnostics and service provisioning without manual intervention of a technical person. The platform reacts on local changes such as the installation of a new device or state changes of discovered services. This information can then be used to install required plugins, generate alarms or take problem-solving actions.

In order to present and communicate the condition of monitored environments to supervising experts, a dashboard is needed to present the status of all sensors. The heterogeneity and vast amount of sensors, as well as the difficulty of creating interesting sensor data combinations, hinder the deployment of fixed structure dashboards as they are unable to cope with the accordingly vast amount of required mappings. Therefore, in this paper, the development of a dynamic dashboard is presented, able to visualize any particular and user defined data and sensor composition. By implementing the heterogeneous sensors as semantically annotated Web apis, a dynamic sensor composition and visualization is enabled. The resulting condition monitoring dashboard provides a clear overview of the system kpis in acceptable timing and provides helpful tools to detect anomalies in system behaviour.

Over the latest years many commercial Real-Time Tracking management systems (RTMS) were introduced into the market. The solutions started to be designed for single tracking purposes, but vendors soon realized that valuable tracking benefits would result by the appropriate design of a service layer. From the many RTMS solutions currently on market, it was not found a specific or suitable solution for general Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs). A list of requirements was gathered from one of the Portuguese LEAs, GNR (Guarda Nacional Republicana) to fully understand the generic daily challenges. Main requirements raised by GNR strive with that address issues like cost, data exchange security, bi-directional communication services, performance, network fault tolerance and user-friendly interfaces. This paper presents a RTMS solution and a service layer specifically conceived for LEAs. It will be shown that learning over risk assessment mappings may bring additional benefits to LEAs. Experimental tests were performed to quantitatively measure the solution behavior.

Nowadays deep neural networks are widely used to accurately classify input data. An interesting application area is the Internet of Things (IoT), where a massive amount of sensor data has to be classified. The processing power of the cloud is attractive, however the variable latency imposes a major drawback in situations where near real-time classification is required. In order to exploit the apparent trade-off between utilizing the stable but limited embedded computing power of IoT devices and the seemingly unlimited computing power of Cloud computing at the cost of higher and variable latency, we propose a Big-Little architecture for deep neural networks. A small neural network trained to a subset of prioritized output classes is running on the embedded device, while a more specific classification is calculated when required by a large neural network in the cloud. We show the applicability of this concept in the IoT domain by evaluating our approach for state of the art neural network classification problems on popular embedded devices such as the Raspberry Pi and Intel Edison.

Things are increasingly getting connected. Emerging with the Internet of Things, new applications are requiring more intelligence on these things, for them to be able to learn about their environment or other connected objects. One such domain of application is for livestock monitoring, in which farmers need to learn about animals, such as percentage of time they spend feeding, the occurrence of diseases, or the percentage of fat on their milk. Furthermore, it is also important to learn about group patterns, such as flocking behaviors, and individual deviations to group dynamics. This paper addresses this problem, by collection and processing each animal location and selecting appropriate metrics on the data, so that behaviors can be learned afterwards using machine learning techniques running on the cloud.

Internet of Things (IoT), smart objects, are today part of our life and used in almost every industry and human activity: from e-health to e-learning not forgetting home automation and wearable technology. IoT promises to change our lives to make them easier, more efficient and “smart”, however, we are now facing major challenges: security, data protection and privacy.

Spontaneous wireless networks enabled by mobile end-user devices (e.g. smartphones) are receiving considerable interest due the possibility to offer a wide range of novel, highly pervasive and user-centric network services and applications. Novel and extremely flexible network deployment strategies are required in order to cope with the user mobility, the limited communication capabilities of wireless devices, and the intrinsic dynamism of traffic loads and QoS requirements. In this paper, we want to trace the path, and related challenges, that lead toward a Community Owned Wireless Access Network (COWAN) to provide Internet and Cloud-based services through the sharing of resources owned by the end-user devices. In such way, Software-Defined Networking (SDN) solutions could play a central role in order to make easier the network creation and management and to deliver performance guarantees to end users. However, the extension of the SDN paradigm to mobile devices requires facing the challenge of moving some network control on end-user devices to support network interaction capabilities and services.

The flexibility of future wireless network architectures is aimed at allowing more innovation, reducing complexity and improving service offerings. Software Defined Networking (SDN) has been identified as an enabler for this adoption. From an implementation perspective, we provide a description of use cases and a framework overview for its implementation. This framework and the future work identified serve as pointers for further research projects in Software Defined Wireless Network (SDWN).

This paper introduces USD, a novel User-centric Software Defined platform for 5G mobile devices, which supports a wide range of users with the diversity of technical experience. Respecting user preferences, USD is able to exploit multiple wireless networks, as well as, to differentiate application traffic. The advantages of USD are realized by using a set of network virtualization (NW) and Software Defined Networking (SDN) technologies. Similar to the state-of-the-art works, USD leverages SDN in the exploitation of multiple networks. However, USD uniquely uses network namespace to isolate an application traffic at a granularity as fine as a process (i.e., each process’s traffic belong to one networking stack). Moreover, USD relaxes the dependence on radio hardware by using wireless virtualization. The relaxation aims not only to efficiently utilize 5G networking resources but also to add an user-centric interface. As a proof of concept, we implement a prototype of USD using the Wi-Fi, Open vSwitch, and the network virtualization technologies. We evaluate the performance of USD in a comparison with a legacy platform in an assuming 5G scenario. The evaluation results show that the USD prototype achieves comparable performances to the legacy platform while it introduces the advanced user-centric features.

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is an emerging new norm for networks which deals heavily on dynamic nature of higher bandwidth network applications to address the service velocity. SDN’s features such as dynamic configuration of network elements, allowing appropriate open standards and centrally controllable tasks will make it suitable to introduce new applications for communication networks. In particular, by considering the voluminous telecom subscriber’s transactions and supporting high performing applications in the event of network element failure, a manual Intervention is required for tuning of network elements. Even the recently introduced network resources for tuning could also fail due to unexpected flow of traffic without considering the exact load features dynamically. Any sudden failure in network functioning could bring huge revenue loss and also reduces considerable Quality of Experience of the service provider. In this paper, we have presented use cases relevant to Online Charging System (OCS) that highlight the integration of SDN with communication networks for managing optimized network utilization. Moreover, SDN with the use of machine learning techniques will take the proactive measure before the network node goes down. To support this feature of SDN, we have proposed Autonomous Resource Monitoring and Deployer application that monitors the continuous traffic flow in OCS, intelligently reroutes the traffic with the use of SDN controller by introducing new resources. Our approach handles specific network key performance indicators dynamically, which reduces maintenance and Operational Expenditure costs.