IoT Hub as a Service (HaaS): Data-Oriented Environment for Interactive Smart Spaces

Smart devices around us produce a considerable volume of data and interact in a wide range of scenarios that guide the evolution of the Internet of Things (IoT). IoT adds informative and interactive aspects to our living spaces, converting them into smart spaces. However, the development of applications is challenged by the fragmented nature due to the vast number of different IoT things, the format of reported information, communication standards, and the techniques used to design applications. This paper introduces IoT Hub as a Service (HaaS), a data-oriented framework to enable communication interoperability between the ecosystem's entities. The framework abstracts things' information, reported data items, and developers' applications into programmable objects referred to as Cards. Cards represent specific entities and interactions of focus with meta-data. The framework then indexes cards' meta-data to enable interoperability, data management, and application development. The framework allows users to create virtual smart spaces (VSS) to define cards' accessibility and visibility. Within VSS, users can identify accessible data items, things to communicate, and authorized applications. The framework, in this paper, defines four types of Cards to represent: participating IoT things, data items, VSS, and applications. The proposed framework enables the development of synchronous and asynchronous applications. The framework dynamically creates, updates, and links the cards throughout the life-cycle of the different entities. We present the details of the proposed framework and show how our framework is advantageous and applicable

Space Cubes: Satellite On-Board Processing of Datacube Queries

Datacubes form an accepted cornerstone for analysis- and visualization-ready spatio-temporal data offerings. The increase in user friendliness is achieved by abstracting away from the zillions of files in provider-specific organization. Datacube query languages additionally establish actionable datacubes, enabling users to ask "any query, any time" with zero coding. However, typically datacube deployments are aiming at large scale, data center environments accommodating Big Data and massive parallel processing capabilities for achieving decent performance. In this contribution, we conversely report about a downscaling experiment. In the ORBiDANSE project a datacube engine, rasdaman, has been ported to a cubesat, ESA OPS-SAT, and is operational in space. Effectively, the satellite thereby becomes a datacube service offering the standards-based query capabilities of the OGC Web Coverage Processing (WCPS) geo datacube analytics language. We believe this will pave the way for on-board ad-hoc processing and filtering on Big EO Data, thereby unleashing them to a larger audience and in substantially shorter time

Development and Evaluation of a Publish/Subscribe IoT Data Sharing Model with LoRaWAN

Publish/subscribe architectures are becoming very common for many IoT environments such as power grid, manufacturing and factory automation. In these architectures, many different communication standards and middleware can be supported to ensure interoperability. One of the widely used publish/subscribe protocol is MQTT where a broker acts among publishers and subscribers to relay data on certain topics. While MQTT can be easily setup on cloud environments to perform research experiments, its large-scale and quick deployment for IoT environments with a widely used wireless MAC layer protocol such as LoRaWAN has not been thoroughly tested. Therefore, in this paper we develop and present a simulation framework in NS-3 to offer MQTT-based on publish/subscribe architecture that can also support LoRaWAN communication standard. To this end, we utilize NS-3's LoRaWAN library and integrate it with a broker that connects to other types of publishers/subscribers. We enable unicast capability from the broker to LoRaWAN end-devices while supporting multiple topics at the broker. We tested several scenarios under this IoT architecture to demonstrate its feasibility while assessing the performance at scale

Massive Wireless Energy Transfer with Multiple Power Beacons for Very Large Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) comprises an increasing number of low-power and low-cost devices that autonomously interact with the surrounding environment. As a consequence of their popularity, future IoT deployments will be massive, which demands energy-efficient systems to extend their lifetime and improve the user experience. Radio frequency wireless energy transfer has the potential of powering massive IoT networks, thus eliminating the need for frequent battery replacement by using the so-called power beacons (PBs). In this paper, we provide a framework for minimizing the sum transmit power of the PBs using devices' positions information and their current battery state. Our strategy aims to reduce the PBs' power consumption and to mitigate the possible impact of the electromagnetic radiation on human health. We also present analytical insights for the case of very distant clusters and evaluate their applicability. Numerical results show that our proposed framework reduces the outage probability as the number of PBs and/or the energy demands increase

Realizing the Digital Twin Transition for Smart Cities

The digital twin transition for cities is expected to improve, among others, living quality, carbon footprint and generate new business opportunities across different organizations. However, as cities consist of many separate entities that are in close and frequent interaction with each other, it is not possible to simply apply digital twin concepts from the engineering and manufacturing domains in a silo-ed fashion for each entity. In this paper, we distill the requirements and challenges to develop digital twins for smart cities based on a typical smart city use case. We follow with a first systematic approach to address them in a data-driven fashion to realize the digital twin transition for cities

Video Source Forensics for IoT Devices Based on Convolutional Neural Networks

With the wide application of Internet of things devices and the rapid development of multimedia technology, digital video has become one of the important information dissemination carriers among Internet of things devices, and it has been widely used in many fields such as news media, digital forensics and so on. However, the current video editing technology is constantly developing and improving, which seriously threatens the integrity and authenticity of digital video. Therefore, the research on digital video forensics has a great significance. In this paper, a new video source passive forensics algorithm based on Convolutional Neural Networks(CNN) is proposed. CNN is used to classify the maximum information block of specified size in video I frame, and then the classification results are fused to determine the camera to which the video belongs. Experimental results show that the recognition algorithm proposed in this paper has a better performance than other methods in trems of accuracy and ROC curve. And our method still can have a good recognition effect even if a small number of I frames are used for recognition

Generating Sound from the Processing in Semantic Web Databases

Databases process a lot of intermediate steps generating many intermediate results during data processing for answering queries. It is not easy to understand these complex tasks and algorithms for students, developers and all those interested in databases. For this purpose, an additional medium is sonification, which maps data to auditory dimensions and offers a new audible experience to their listeners. Hence, we propose a sonification of query processing paired with a corresponding visualization both integrated in a web application. In a demonstration of our approach and in an extensive user evaluation we show that listeners increase their understanding of the operators' functionality and sonification supports easy remembering of requirements like merge joins work on sorted input. Furthermore, new ways of analyzing query processing are possible with our proposed sonification approach

A Mobile and Web Platform for Crowdsourcing OBD-II Vehicle Data

On-Board Diagnostics 2 (OBD-II) protocol allows monitoring vehicle status parameters. Analyzing them is highly useful for Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) research, applications and services. Unfortunately, large-scale OBD datasets are not publicly available due to the effort of producing them as well as due to competitiveness in the automotive sector. This paper proposes a framework to enable a worldwide crowdsourcing approach to the generation of OBD-II data, similarly to OpenStreetMap (OSM) for cartography. The proposal comprises: (i) an extension of the GPX data format for route logging, augmented with OBD-II parameters; (ii) a fork of an open source Android OBD-II data logger to store and upload route traces, and (iii) a Web platform extending the OSM codebase to support storage, search and editing of traces with embedded OBD data. A full platform prototype has been developed and early scalability tests have been carried out in various workloads to assess the sustainability of the proposal

Streaming Data through the IoT via Actor-Based Semantic Routing Trees

The Internet of Things (IoT) enables the usage of resources at the edge of the network for various data management tasks that are traditionally executed in the cloud. However, the heterogeneity of devices and communication methods in a multi-tiered IoT environment (cloud/fog/edge) exacerbates the problem of deciding which nodes to use for processing and how to route data. In addition, both decisions cannot be made only statically for the entire lifetime of an application, as an IoT environment is highly dynamic and nodes in the same topology can be both stationary and mobile as well as reliable and volatile. As a result of these different characteristics, an IoT data management system that spans across all tiers of an IoT network cannot meet the same availability assumptions for all its nodes. To address the problem of choosing ad-hoc which nodes to use and include in a processing workload, we propose a networking component that uses a-priori as well as ad-hoc routing information from the network. Our approach, called Rime, relies on keeping track of nodes at the gateway level and exchanging routing information with other nodes in the network. By tracking nodes while the topology evolves in a geo-distributed manner, we enable efficient communication even in the case of frequent node failures. Our evaluation shows that Rime keeps in check communication costs and message transmissions by reducing unnecessary message exchange by up to 82:65%

Data-Centric Edge Federation: A Multi-Edge Architecture for Data Stream Processing of IoT Applications

Emerging Internet of Things (IoT) applications demand data stream processing with low latency and high processing power. Although the cloud naturally provides huge processing capacity, high latency to move data to the datacenter is prohibitive. Edge computing is a recent paradigm where part of computing and storage resources are pushed from the cloud to the edge of the network. In edge computing, edge providers manage their resources near to IoT devices to meet low latency application requirements and reduce the network core bandwidth. To reach the maximum potential of edge computing, a big challenge is to promote the cooperation between edge providers. Currently, edge computing architectures are severely limited for providing cooperation mechanisms between distinct edge providers. In this paper, we propose a edge federation to leverage the cooperation between different edge providers. The edge federation uses interest information propagated in data streams that travel between edge providers to allow an stakeholder to react to inefficient resource allocation and service provision. The main objective of the federation is to create a consortium of edge providers to provide cooperation mechanisms and define and standardize the application interests. The proposed edge federation is (i) data-centric, since edge providers can share common interests and data and, thus, establish cooperation to increase the capacity to provide services for applications; (ii) distributed, since no assumption is made concerning the geo-location of the edge providers and their logical connections; (iii) opportunistic, because an edge provider can react dynamically to the environment change ; (iv) scalable, since the edge provider has the ability to analyze a data flow passing by its infrastructure and make decisions to increase network performance locally, which impacts the global performanc