MONICA in Hamburg: Towards Large-Scale IoT Deployments in a Smart City

Modern cities and metropolitan areas all over the world face new management challenges in the 21st century primarily due to increasing demands on living standards by the urban population. These challenges range from climate change, pollution, transportation, and citizen engagement, to urban planning, and security threats. The primary goal of a Smart City is to counteract these problems and mitigate their effects by means of modern ICT to improve urban administration and infrastructure. Key ideas are to utilise network communication to inter-connect public authorities; but also to deploy and integrate numerous sensors and actuators throughout the city infrastructure - which is also widely known as the Internet of Things (IoT). Thus, IoT technologies will be an integral part and key enabler to achieve many objectives of the Smart City vision. The contributions of this paper are as follows. We first examine a number of IoT platforms, technologies and network standards that can help to foster a Smart City environment. Second, we introduce the EU project MONICA which aims for demonstration of large-scale IoT deployments at public, inner-city events and give an overview on its IoT platform architecture. And third, we provide a case-study report on SmartCity activities by the City of Hamburg and provide insights on recent (on-going) field tests of a vertically integrated, end-to-end IoT sensor application.Comment: 6 page

Using semantics for automating the authentication of Web APIs

Recent technology developments in the area of services on the Web are marked by the proliferation of Web applications and APIs. The implementation and evolution of applications based on Web APIs is, however, hampered by the lack of automation that can be achieved with current technologies. Research on semantic Web services is there fore trying to adapt the principles and technologies that were devised for traditional Web services, to deal with this new kind of services. In this paper we show that currently more than 80% of the Web APIs require some form of authentication. Therefore authentication plays a major role for Web API invocation and should not be neglected in the context of mashups and composite data applications. We present a thorough analysis carried out over a body of publicly available APIs that determines the most commonly used authentication approaches. In the light of these results, we propose an ontology for the semantic annotation of Web API authentication information and demonstrate how it can be used to create semantic Web API descriptions. We evaluate the applicability of our approach by providing a prototypical implementation, which uses authentication annotations as the basis for automated service invocation

On the Automated Synthesis of Enterprise Integration Patterns to Adapt Choreography-based Distributed Systems

The Future Internet is becoming a reality, providing a large-scale computing environments where a virtually infinite number of available services can be composed so to fit users' needs. Modern service-oriented applications will be more and more often built by reusing and assembling distributed services. A key enabler for this vision is then the ability to automatically compose and dynamically coordinate software services. Service choreographies are an emergent Service Engineering (SE) approach to compose together and coordinate services in a distributed way. When mismatching third-party services are to be composed, obtaining the distributed coordination and adaptation logic required to suitably realize a choreography is a non-trivial and error prone task. Automatic support is then needed. In this direction, this paper leverages previous work on the automatic synthesis of choreography-based systems, and describes our preliminary steps towards exploiting Enterprise Integration Patterns to deal with a form of choreography adaptation.Comment: In Proceedings FOCLASA 2015, arXiv:1512.0694

A survey of communication protocols for internet of things and related challenges of fog and cloud computing integration

The fast increment in the number of IoT (Internet of Things) devices is accelerating the research on new solutions to make cloud services scalable. In this context, the novel concept of fog computing as well as the combined fog-to-cloud computing paradigm is becoming essential to decentralize the cloud, while bringing the services closer to the end-system. This article surveys e application layer communication protocols to fulfill the IoT communication requirements, and their potential for implementation in fog- and cloud-based IoT systems. To this end, the article first briefly presents potential protocol candidates, including request-reply and publish-subscribe protocols. After that, the article surveys these protocols based on their main characteristics, as well as the main performance issues, including latency, energy consumption, and network throughput. These findings are thereafter used to place the protocols in each segment of the system (IoT, fog, cloud), and thus opens up the discussion on their choice, interoperability, and wider system integration. The survey is expected to be useful to system architects and protocol designers when choosing the communication protocols in an integrated IoT-to-fog-to-cloud system architecture.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

IETF standardization in the field of the Internet of Things (IoT): a survey

Smart embedded objects will become an important part of what is called the Internet of Things. However, the integration of embedded devices into the Internet introduces several challenges, since many of the existing Internet technologies and protocols were not designed for this class of devices. In the past few years, there have been many efforts to enable the extension of Internet technologies to constrained devices. Initially, this resulted in proprietary protocols and architectures. Later, the integration of constrained devices into the Internet was embraced by IETF, moving towards standardized IP-based protocols. In this paper, we will briefly review the history of integrating constrained devices into the Internet, followed by an extensive overview of IETF standardization work in the 6LoWPAN, ROLL and CoRE working groups. This is complemented with a broad overview of related research results that illustrate how this work can be extended or used to tackle other problems and with a discussion on open issues and challenges. As such the aim of this paper is twofold: apart from giving readers solid insights in IETF standardization work on the Internet of Things, it also aims to encourage readers to further explore the world of Internet-connected objects, pointing to future research opportunities

CYCLONE Unified Deployment and Management of Federated, Multi-Cloud Applications

Various Cloud layers have to work in concert in order to manage and deploy complex multi-cloud applications, executing sophisticated workflows for Cloud resource deployment, activation, adjustment, interaction, and monitoring. While there are ample solutions for managing individual Cloud aspects (e.g. network controllers, deployment tools, and application security software), there are no well-integrated suites for managing an entire multi cloud environment with multiple providers and deployment models. This paper presents the CYCLONE architecture that integrates a number of existing solutions to create an open, unified, holistic Cloud management platform for multi-cloud applications, tailored to the needs of research organizations and SMEs. It discusses major challenges in providing a network and security infrastructure for the Intercloud and concludes with the demonstration how the architecture is implemented in a real life bioinformatics use case

Web services approach for ambient assisted living in mobile environments

Web services appeared as a promising technology for Web environments independent of technologies, services, and applications. First, a performance comparison study between the two most used Web service architectures, SOAP and REST, is presented, considering messages exchange between clients and a server. Based on this study, the REST architecture was chosen to deploy the system because it gets better results compared to SOAP architecture. Currently, there are some issues related with this approach that should be studied. For instance, if massive quantities of data are sent to databases it can influence significantly the performance of the whole system. The Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMPQ) appears as a promising solution to address this problem. Then, in order to evaluate the performance of this approach, this work presents a performance evaluation and a comparison study of RESTful Web services and the AMQP Protocol considering exchanging messages between clients and a server. The study is based on the averaged exchanged messages for a certain period of time. It was observed and concluded that, for large quantities of messages exchange, the best results comes from the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol. Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) was addressed in this work because it is a similar protocol to AMQP but it can be used by mobile devices with a processing capacity smallest unlike the AMQP that needs greater processing capacity. These studies are performed in the context of Ambient Assisted Living environments, since the work was applied to this topic in order to experiment the effectiveness and evaluate the performance of these protocols in this scenario

Deploying APIs in the Cloud: A Novel Approach to the MIS Infrastructure Course

Among the most in-demand technology jobs for 2020 include cloud architect and software developer. The typical IT infrastructure position will require programming knowledge, while the typical developer will require infrastructure knowledge. The creation and deployment of APIs is an ideal vehicle to teach both programming and cloud infrastructure in an integrated way. This paper describes the design and structure of a new undergraduate cloud infrastructure course that takes this integrated approach

The Semantic Automated Discovery and Integration (SADI) Web service Design-Pattern, API and Reference Implementation

Background. 
The complexity and inter-related nature of biological data poses a difficult challenge for data and tool integration. There has been a proliferation of interoperability standards and projects over the past decade, none of which has been widely adopted by the bioinformatics community. Recent attempts have focused on the use of semantics to assist integration, and Semantic Web technologies are being welcomed by this community.

Description. 
SADI – Semantic Automated Discovery and Integration – is a lightweight set of fully standards-compliant Semantic Web service design patterns that simplify the publication of services of the type commonly found in bioinformatics and other scientific domains. Using Semantic Web technologies at every level of the Web services “stack”, SADI services consume and produce instances of OWL Classes following a small number of very straightforward best-practices. In addition, we provide codebases that support these best-practices, and plug-in tools to popular developer and client software that dramatically simplify deployment of services by providers, and the discovery and utilization of those services by their consumers.

Conclusions.
SADI Services are fully compliant with, and utilize only foundational Web standards; are simple to create and maintain for service providers; and can be discovered and utilized in a very intuitive way by biologist end-users. In addition, the SADI design patterns significantly improve the ability of software to automatically discover appropriate services based on user-needs, and automatically chain these into complex analytical workflows. We show that, when resources are exposed through SADI, data compliant with a given ontological model can be automatically gathered, or generated, from these distributed, non-coordinating resources - a behavior we have not observed in any other Semantic system. Finally, we show that, using SADI, data dynamically generated from Web services can be explored in a manner very similar to data housed in static triple-stores, thus facilitating the intersection of Web services and Semantic Web technologies