uDDS: A Middleware for Real-time Wireless Embedded Systems

[EN] A Real-Time Wireless Distributed Embedded System (RTWDES) is formed by a large quantity of small devices with certain computing power, wireless communication and sensing/actuators capabilities. These types of networks have become popular as they have been developed for applications which can carry out a vast quantity of tasks, including home and building monitoring, object tracking, precision agriculture, military applications, disaster recovery, industry applications, among others. For this type of applications a middleware is used in software systems to bridge the gap between the application and the underlying operating system and networks. As a result, a middleware system can facilitate the development of applications and is designed to provide common services to the applications. The development of a middleware for sensor networks presents several challenges due to the limited computational resources and energy of the different nodes. This work is related with the design, implementation and test of a micro middleware for RTWDES; the proposal incorporates characteristics of a message oriented middleware thus allowing the applications to communicate by employing the publish/subscribe model. Experimental evaluation shows that the proposed middleware provides a stable and timely service to support different Quality of Service (QoS) levels. © 2011 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.This work was developed as a part of the D2ARS Project supported by CYTED. UNESCO code 120325;330417;120314;120305.González, A.; Mata, W.; Villaseñor, L.; Aquino, R.; Simó Ten, JE.; Chávez, M.; Crespo Lorente, A. (2011). uDDS: A Middleware for Real-time Wireless Embedded Systems. Journal of Intelligent and Robotic Systems. 64(3-4):489-503. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-011-9550-zS489503643-4Akyildiz, I.F., Su, W., Sankarasubramaniam, Y., Cayirci, E.: A survey on sensor networks. IEEE Commun. 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Cyber-Physical Systems: a multi-criteria assessment for Internet-of-Things (IoT) systems

This research work was partially supported by funds provided by the European Commission in the scope of FoF/H2020-636909 C2NET, FoF/H2020-723710 vf-OS and ICT/H2020-825631 ZDMP.This article addresses a multi-criteria decision problem regarding the more suitable device (system) to perform a task for cyber-physical systems. New embedded systems provided everyday makes engineers’ decision very difficult. Components are proposed to formally describe solutions, criteria, constraints and priorities, taking into account users’ specific aspects. To materialise all formal descriptions, a model-driven approach is followed, allowing the design of enablers for interoperability with standards. It is enabled the use of different software languages and decision methods. Proposed framework enables a better Internet-of-Things system selection, and therefore stakeholders can perform a more suitable design of their cyber-physical enterprise systems.authorsversioninpres

Middleware-Driven Intelligent Glove for Industrial Applications

It is estimated that by the year 2020, 700 million wearable technology devices will be sold worldwide. One of the reasons is the industries’ need to increase their productivity. Some of the tools welcomed by industries are handheld devices such as tablets, PDAs and mobile phones. However, handheld devices are not ideal for industrial applications because they often subject users to fatigue during their long working hours. A viable solution to this problem is wearable devices. The advantage of wearable devices is that they become part of the user. Hence, they subject the user to less fatigue, thereby increasing their productivity. This chapter presents the development of an intelligent glove, which is designed to control actuators in an industrial environment. This system utilizes RTI connext data distributed service middleware to facilitate communication over WiFi. Our experiments show very promising results with maximum power consumption of 310 mW and latency as low as 23 ms. These results make the proposed system a perfect fit for most industrial applications

Architecting integrated internet of things systems

IoT (Internet of Things) enables anytime and anyplace connectivity for anything by linking the objects of the real world with the virtual world. In the near future, it is predicted that more than 50 billion of things will be connected to the internet. This will lead to many different IoT- based systems that will have a huge impact on the society. Often, these IoT systems will not be standalone but will be composed with other different systems to create additional value. Hence, with the heterogeneity and the integration of IoT-based systems with other IoT-based or non-IoT-based systems has become an important challenge. In this thesis, the main objective is to analyze, design and integrate IoT-based systems and to answer the following research questions: RQ1. What are the characteristic features of IoT systems? RQ2. How to design the architecture for an IoT-based system? RQ3. What are the identified obstacles of the data distribution (DDS) middleware? RQ4. What are the solution directions for the identified obstacles of DDS? RQ5. What are the approaches for integrating multiple IoT-based systems? RQ6. How to design a DDS-based IoT system? RQ7. How to derive feasible deployment alternatives for DDS-based systems? In order to answer these research questions, three different research methodologies were used: Systematic Literature Review, Design Science Research, and Case Study Research. In chapter 2, we have applied a feature driven domain analysis of IoT systems. We have presented the reference architecture for IoT and discussed the corresponding layers. Among these layers, we have focused on the session layer of the IoT. The protocols in this layer are related with the communication sessions of the IoT systems and hence determine the communication characteristics of the IoT systems. We have presented the common and variant features of the most commonly used session layer protocols, namely AMQP, CoAP, DDS, MQTT, and XMPP which are used for communication between M2M (machine-to- machine), M2S (machine-to-server), and S2S (server-to-server). Further, we have provided an evaluation framework to compare session layer communication protocols. Among these protocols, we focused on the DDS that is mainly used for M2M communication in Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). In chapter 3, we have described an architecture design method for architecting IoT systems for the Farm Management Information Systems (FMIS) domain. Hereby, we have also developed a family feature diagram to represent the common and variant features of IoT- based FMIS. In order to illustrate our approach, we have performed a systematic case study approach including the IoT-based wheat and tomato production with IoT-based FMIS. The case study research showed that the approach was both effective and practical. In chapter 4, we have presented the method for designing integrated IoT systems. We showed that integration of IoT-based systems can be at different layers including session layer, cloud layer and application layer. Further we have shown that the integration is typically carried out based on well-defined patterns, that is, generic solutions structures for recurring problems. We have systematically compiled and structured the 15 different integration patterns which can be used in different combinations and likewise supporting the composition of different IoT systems. We have illustrated the use of example patterns in a smart city case study and have shown that the systematic structuring of the integration patterns is useful for integrating IoT systems. A systematic research methodology has been applied in chapter 5 to identify the current obstacles to adopt DDS and their solution directions. We have selected 34 primary studies among the 468 identified papers since the introduction of DDS in 2003. We identified 11 basic categories of problems including complexity of DDS configuration, performance prediction, measurement and optimization, implementing DDS, DDS integration over WAN, DDS using wireless networks and mobile computing, interoperability among DDS vendor implementations, data consistency in DDS, reliability in DDS, scalability in DDS, security, and integration with event-based systems. We have adopted feature diagrams to summarize and provide an overview of the identified problem and their solutions defined in the primary studies. DDS based architecture design for IoT systems is presented in chapter 6. DDS is considered to be a potential middleware for IoT because of its focus on event-driven communication in which quality of service is also explicitly defined. We provide a systematic approach to model the architecture for DDS-based IoT in which we adopted architecture viewpoints for modeling DDS, IoT and DDS-based IoT systems. We have integrated and represented the architecture models that can be used to model DDS-based IoT systems for various application domains. When designing DDS-based systems typically multiple different alternatives can be derived. Chapter 7 presents an approach for deriving feasible DDS configuration alternatives. For this we have provided a systematic approach for extending the DDS UML profile and developed an extensible tool framework Deploy-DDS to derive feasible deployment alternatives given the application model, the physical resources, and the execution configurations. The tool framework Deploy-DDS implements a set of predefined algorithms and can be easily extended with new algorithms to support the system architect. We have evaluated the approach and the tool framework for a relevant IoT case study on smart city engineering. Chapter 8 concludes the thesis by summarizing the contributions.</p

A Multi-Criteria Framework to Assist on the Design of Internet-of-Things Systems

The Internet-of-Things (IoT), considered as Internet first real evolution, has become immensely important to society due to revolutionary business models with the potential to radically improve Human life. Manufacturers are engaged in developing embedded systems (IoT Systems) for different purposes to address this new variety of application domains and services. With the capability to agilely respond to a very dynamic market offer of IoT Systems, the design phase of IoT ecosystems can be enhanced. However, select the more suitable IoT System for a certain task is currently based on stakeholder’s knowledge, normally from lived experience or intuition, although it does not mean that a proper decision is being made. Furthermore, the lack of methods to formally describe IoT Systems characteristics, capable of being automatically used by methods is also an issue, reinforced by the growth of available information directly connected to Internet spread. Contributing to improve IoT Ecosystems design phase, this PhD work proposes a framework capable of fully characterise an IoT System and assist stakeholder’s on the decision of which is the proper IoT System for a specific task. This enables decision-makers to perform a better reasoning and more aware analysis of diverse and very often contradicting criteria. It is also intended to provide methods to integrate energy consumptionsimulation tools and address interoperability with standards, methods or systems within the IoT scope. This is addressed using a model-driven based framework supporting a high openness level to use different software languages and decision methods, but also for interoperability with other systems, tools and methods

Taking Arduino to the Internet of things: the ASIP programming model

Micro-controllers such as Arduino are widely used by all kinds of makers worldwide. Popularity has been driven by Arduino’s simplicity of use and the large number of sensors and libraries available to extend the basic capabilities of these controllers. The last decade has witnessed a surge of software engineering solutions for “the Internet of Things”, but in several cases these solutions require computational resources that are more advanced than simple, resource-limited micro-controllers. Surprisingly, in spite of being the basic ingredients of complex hardware–software systems, there does not seem to be a simple and flexible way to (1) extend the basic capabilities of micro-controllers, and (2) to coordinate inter-connected micro-controllers in “the Internet of Things”. Indeed, new capabilities are added on a per-application basis and interactions are mainly limited to bespoke, point-to-point protocols that target the hardware I/O rather than the services provided by this hardware. In this paper we present the Arduino Service Interface Programming (ASIP) model, a new model that addresses the issues above by (1) providing a “Service” abstraction to easily add new capabilities to micro-controllers, and (2) providing support for networked boards using a range of strategies, including socket connections, bridging devices, MQTT-based publish–subscribe messaging, discovery services, etc. We provide an open-source implementation of the code running on Arduino boards and client libraries in Java, Python, Racket and Erlang. We show how ASIP enables the rapid development of non-trivial applications (coordination of input/output on distributed boards and implementation of a line-following algorithm for a remote robot) and we assess the performance of ASIP in several ways, both quantitative and qualitative

Taking Arduino to the Internet of things: the ASIP programming model

Micro-controllers such as Arduino are widely used by all kinds of makers worldwide. Popularity has been driven by Arduino’s simplicity of use and the large number of sensors and libraries available to extend the basic capabilities of these controllers. The last decade has witnessed a surge of software engineering solutions for “the Internet of Things”, but in several cases these solutions require computational resources that are more advanced than simple, resource-limited micro-controllers. Surprisingly, in spite of being the basic ingredients of complex hardware–software systems, there does not seem to be a simple and flexible way to (1) extend the basic capabilities of micro-controllers, and (2) to coordinate inter-connected micro-controllers in “the Internet of Things”. Indeed, new capabilities are added on a per-application basis and interactions are mainly limited to bespoke, point-to-point protocols that target the hardware I/O rather than the services provided by this hardware. In this paper we present the Arduino Service Interface Programming (ASIP) model, a new model that addresses the issues above by (1) providing a “Service” abstraction to easily add new capabilities to micro-controllers, and (2) providing support for networked boards using a range of strategies, including socket connections, bridging devices, MQTT-based publish–subscribe messaging, discovery services, etc. We provide an open-source implementation of the code running on Arduino boards and client libraries in Java, Python, Racket and Erlang. We show how ASIP enables the rapid development of non-trivial applications (coordination of input/output on distributed boards and implementation of a line-following algorithm for a remote robot) and we assess the performance of ASIP in several ways, both quantitative and qualitative