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

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

Service-Oriented Middleware for the Future Internet: State of the Art and Research Directions

International audienceService-oriented computing is now acknowledged as a central paradigm for Internet computing, supported by tremendous research and technology development over the last ten years. However, the evolution of the Internet, and in particular, the latest Future Internet vision, challenges the paradigm. Indeed, service-oriented computing has to face the ultra large scale and heterogeneity of the Future Internet, which are orders of magnitude higher than those of today's service-oriented systems. This article aims at contributing to this objective by identifying the key research directions to be followed in light of the latest state of the art. This article more specifically focuses on research challenges for service-oriented middleware design, therefore investigating service description, discovery, access and composition in the Future Internet of services

Fog computing pour l'intégration d'agents et de services Web dans un middleware réflexif autonome

International audienceService Oriented Architecture (SOA) has emerged as a dominant architecture for interoperability between applications, by using a weak-coupled model based on the flexibility provided by Web Services, which has led to a wide range of applications, what is known as cloud computing. On the other hand, Multi-Agent System (MAS) is widely used in the industry, because it provides an appropriate solution to complex problems, in a proactive and intelligent way. Specifically, Intelligent Environments (Smart City, Smart Classroom, Cyber Physical System, and Smart Factory, among others) obtain great benefits by using both architectures, because MAS endows intelligence to the environment, while SOA enables users to interact with cloud services, which improve the capabilities of the devices deployed in the environment. Additionally, the fog computing paradigm extends the cloud computing paradigm to be closer to the things that produce and act on the intelligent environment, allowing to deal with issues like mobility, real time, low latency, geo-localization, among other aspects. In this sense, in this article we present a middleware, which not only is capable of allowing MAS and SOA to communicate in a bidirectional and transparent way, but also, it uses the fog computing paradigm autonomously, according to the context and to the system load factor. Additionally, we analyze the performance of the incorporation of the fog-computing paradigm in our middleware and compare it with other works

Analysis of Timing Constraints in Heterogeneous Middleware Interactions

International audienceWith the emergence of Future Internet applications that connect web services, sensor-actuator networks and service feeds, scalability and heterogeneity support of interaction paradigms are of critical importance. Heterogeneous interactions can be abstractly represented by client-service, publish-subscribe and tuple space middleware connectors that are interconnected via bridging mechanisms providing interoperability among the services. In this paper, we make use of the eXtensible Service Bus (XSB), proposed in the CHOReOS project as the connector enabling interoperability among heterogeneous choreography participants. XSB models transactions among peers through generic post and get operations that represent peer behavior with varying time/space coupling. Nevertheless, the heterogeneous lease and timeout constraints of these operations severely affect latency and success rates of transactions. By precisely studying the related timing thresholds using timed automata models, we verify conditions for successful transactions with XSB connectors. Furthermore, we statistically analyze through simulations, the effect of varying lease and timeout periods to ensure higher probabilities of successful transactions. Simulation experiments are compared with experiments run on the XSB implementation testbed to evaluate the accuracy of results. This work can provide application developers with precise design time information when setting these timing thresholds in order to ensure accurate runtime behavior

Middleware and communication technologies for structural health monitoring of critical infrastructures: a survey

Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP) has become a priority for every country around the world with the aim of reducing vulnerabilities and improving protection of Critical Infrastructures (CI) against terrorist attacks or natural disasters, among other threats. As part of CIP, Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) is defined as the process of gathering basic information that allows detecting, locating and quantifying vulnerabilities early on (fatigue cracking, degradation of boundary conditions, etc.) thereby improving, the resilience of the CI. Recent advances in electronics, wireless communication and software are expected to open the door to a new era of densely connected devices sharing information worldwide, known as the Internet of Things (IoT), in which Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) play an important role. The combined use of IoT/WSNs together with industrial sensors in SHM provide an ad-hoc, inexpensive and easy way of deploying a monitoring system, where data can be shared among different entities. SHM requirements are challenging and diverse and therefore several different technologies may be used in the same deployment. At the same time the use of a middleware can substantially simplify and speed up the development of applications for SHM. Taking into account the challenges of SHM systems, this paper provides a review of the most novel and relevant wireless technologies and a state-of-the-art middleware for WSNs focusing on SHM specific requirements

Initial Architectural Style for CHOReOS Choreographies (D1.3)

While the development of CHOReOS systems build on well-known paradigms associated with service-oriented architectures (e.g., services, service bus and service choreography), the supporting architectural style re- quires accounting for the challenges posed by the future Internet, i.e., ultra large scale, high heterogeneity, increased mobility, and awareness & adaptability. This deliverable then revisits the traditional definitions of service-oriented component (i.e., service), connector (interaction protocol and related service bus for interop- erability) and configuration (system-wide architecture composing services according to orchestration or more general choreography patterns) to meet the FI challenges. Specifically, CHOReOS components enable lever- aging the diversity of Web-based services that integrate in the FI (i.e., WS∗ and RESTful web-based services, and from business to thing-based services) as well as the ultra large service base envisioned for the FI. As for CHOReOS connectors, they bring together the highly heterogeneous interaction paradigms that are now used in today's increasingly complex distributed systems and further support interoperability across heterogeneous paradigms. Finally, CHOReOS coordination protocols foster choreography-based coordination for the sake of scalability, while preventing undesired behavior (i.e., undesired service interactions that would violate the specified choreography). A key aspect of the proposed CHOReOS architectural style is to introduce novel ab- stractions for all its elements, which enable leveraging the wide diversity of the FI, in all the dimensions of scale, heterogeneity and mobility. The CHOReOS style further sets the base ground for the development (from design to implementation) of the CHOReOS Integrated Development and Runtime Environment, and especially for the specification and design of choreography-based systems (studied in WP2 complemented with WP4 work on Governance and V&V) and the development of the CHOReOS service-oriented middleware (studied in WP3)

Service-oriented Distributed Applications in the Future Internet: The Case for Interaction Paradigm Interoperability

International audienceThe essential issue of interoperability in distributed systems is becoming even more pressing in the Future Internet, where complex applications will be composed from extremely heterogeneous systems. Open system integration paradigms, such as service oriented architecture (SOA) and enterprise service bus (ESB), have provided answers to the interoperability requirement. However, when it comes to integrating systems featuring heterogeneous interaction paradigms, such as client-service, publish-subscribe and tuple space, existing solutions are typically ad hoc and partial, applying to specific interaction protocol technologies. In this paper, we introduce an interoperability solution based on abstraction and merging of the common high-level semantics of interaction paradigms, which is sufficiently general and extensible to accommodate many different protocol technologies. We apply this solution to revisit the SOA- and ESB-based integration of heterogeneous distributed systems