Integration of heterogeneous devices and communication models via the cloud in the constrained internet of things

As the Internet of Things continues to expand in the coming years, the need for services that span multiple IoT application domains will continue to increase in order to realize the efficiency gains promised by the IoT. Today, however, service developers looking to add value on top of existing IoT systems are faced with very heterogeneous devices and systems. These systems implement a wide variety of network connectivity options, protocols (proprietary or standards-based), and communication methods all of which are unknown to a service developer that is new to the IoT. Even within one IoT standard, a device typically has multiple options for communicating with others. In order to alleviate service developers from these concerns, this paper presents a cloud-based platform for integrating heterogeneous constrained IoT devices and communication models into services. Our evaluation shows that the impact of our approach on the operation of constrained devices is minimal while providing a tangible benefit in service integration of low-resource IoT devices. A proof of concept demonstrates the latter by means of a control and management dashboard for constrained devices that was implemented on top of the presented platform. The results of our work enable service developers to more easily implement and deploy services that span a wide variety of IoT application domains

Servicing the federation : the case for metadata harvesting

The paper presents a comparative analysis of data harvesting and distributed computing as complementary models of service delivery within large-scale federated digital libraries. Informed by requirements of flexibility and scalability of federated services, the analysis focuses on the identification and assessment of model invariants. In particular, it abstracts over application domains, services, and protocol implementations. The analytical evidence produced shows that the harvesting model offers stronger guarantees of satisfying the identified requirements. In addition, it suggests a first characterisation of services based on their suitability to either model and thus indicates how they could be integrated in the context of a single federated digital library

MPICH-G2: A Grid-Enabled Implementation of the Message Passing Interface

Application development for distributed computing "Grids" can benefit from tools that variously hide or enable application-level management of critical aspects of the heterogeneous environment. As part of an investigation of these issues, we have developed MPICH-G2, a Grid-enabled implementation of the Message Passing Interface (MPI) that allows a user to run MPI programs across multiple computers, at the same or different sites, using the same commands that would be used on a parallel computer. This library extends the Argonne MPICH implementation of MPI to use services provided by the Globus Toolkit for authentication, authorization, resource allocation, executable staging, and I/O, as well as for process creation, monitoring, and control. Various performance-critical operations, including startup and collective operations, are configured to exploit network topology information. The library also exploits MPI constructs for performance management; for example, the MPI communicator construct is used for application-level discovery of, and adaptation to, both network topology and network quality-of-service mechanisms. We describe the MPICH-G2 design and implementation, present performance results, and review application experiences, including record-setting distributed simulations.Comment: 20 pages, 8 figure

Unifying Distributed Processing and Open Hypertext through a Heterogeneous Communication Model

A successful distributed open hypermedia system can be characterised by a scaleable architecture which is inherently distributed. While the architects of distributed hypermedia systems have addressed the issues of providing and retrieving distributed resources, they have often neglected to design systems with the inherent capability to exploit the distributed processing of this information. The research presented in this paper describes the construction and use of an open hypermedia system concerned equally with both of these facets

A Taxonomy of Self-configuring Service Discovery Systems

We analyze the fundamental concepts and issues in service discovery. This analysis places service discovery in the context of distributed systems by describing service discovery as a third generation naming system. We also describe the essential architectures and the functionalities in service discovery. We then proceed to show how service discovery fits into a system, by characterizing operational aspects. Subsequently, we describe how existing state of the art performs service discovery, in relation to the operational aspects and functionalities, and identify areas for improvement

Quality assessment technique for ubiquitous software and middleware

The new paradigm of computing or information systems is ubiquitous computing systems. The technology-oriented issues of ubiquitous computing systems have made researchers pay much attention to the feasibility study of the technologies rather than building quality assurance indices or guidelines. In this context, measuring quality is the key to developing high-quality ubiquitous computing products. For this reason, various quality models have been defined, adopted and enhanced over the years, for example, the need for one recognised standard quality model (ISO/IEC 9126) is the result of a consensus for a software quality model on three levels: characteristics, sub-characteristics, and metrics. However, it is very much unlikely that this scheme will be directly applicable to ubiquitous computing environments which are considerably different to conventional software, trailing a big concern which is being given to reformulate existing methods, and especially to elaborate new assessment techniques for ubiquitous computing environments. This paper selects appropriate quality characteristics for the ubiquitous computing environment, which can be used as the quality target for both ubiquitous computing product evaluation processes ad development processes. Further, each of the quality characteristics has been expanded with evaluation questions and metrics, in some cases with measures. In addition, this quality model has been applied to the industrial setting of the ubiquitous computing environment. These have revealed that while the approach was sound, there are some parts to be more developed in the future

On consistency maintenance in service discovery

Communication and node failures degrade the ability of a service discovery protocol to ensure Users receive the correct service information when the service changes. We propose that service discovery protocols employ a set of recovery techniques to recover from failures and regain consistency. We use simulations to show that the type of recovery technique a protocol uses significantly impacts the performance. We benchmark the performance of our own service discovery protocol, FRODO against the performance of first generation service discovery protocols, Jini and UPnP during increasing communication and node failures. The results show that FRODO has the best overall consistency maintenance performance

Middleware Technologies for Cloud of Things - a survey

The next wave of communication and applications rely on the new services provided by Internet of Things which is becoming an important aspect in human and machines future. The IoT services are a key solution for providing smart environments in homes, buildings and cities. In the era of a massive number of connected things and objects with a high grow rate, several challenges have been raised such as management, aggregation and storage for big produced data. In order to tackle some of these issues, cloud computing emerged to IoT as Cloud of Things (CoT) which provides virtually unlimited cloud services to enhance the large scale IoT platforms. There are several factors to be considered in design and implementation of a CoT platform. One of the most important and challenging problems is the heterogeneity of different objects. This problem can be addressed by deploying suitable "Middleware". Middleware sits between things and applications that make a reliable platform for communication among things with different interfaces, operating systems, and architectures. The main aim of this paper is to study the middleware technologies for CoT. Toward this end, we first present the main features and characteristics of middlewares. Next we study different architecture styles and service domains. Then we presents several middlewares that are suitable for CoT based platforms and lastly a list of current challenges and issues in design of CoT based middlewares is discussed.Comment: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352864817301268, Digital Communications and Networks, Elsevier (2017