Context Aware Computing for The Internet of Things: A Survey

As we are moving towards the Internet of Things (IoT), the number of sensors deployed around the world is growing at a rapid pace. Market research has shown a significant growth of sensor deployments over the past decade and has predicted a significant increment of the growth rate in the future. These sensors continuously generate enormous amounts of data. However, in order to add value to raw sensor data we need to understand it. Collection, modelling, reasoning, and distribution of context in relation to sensor data plays critical role in this challenge. Context-aware computing has proven to be successful in understanding sensor data. In this paper, we survey context awareness from an IoT perspective. We present the necessary background by introducing the IoT paradigm and context-aware fundamentals at the beginning. Then we provide an in-depth analysis of context life cycle. We evaluate a subset of projects (50) which represent the majority of research and commercial solutions proposed in the field of context-aware computing conducted over the last decade (2001-2011) based on our own taxonomy. Finally, based on our evaluation, we highlight the lessons to be learnt from the past and some possible directions for future research. The survey addresses a broad range of techniques, methods, models, functionalities, systems, applications, and middleware solutions related to context awareness and IoT. Our goal is not only to analyse, compare and consolidate past research work but also to appreciate their findings and discuss their applicability towards the IoT.Comment: IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials Journal, 201

A survey of secure middleware for the Internet of Things

The rapid growth of small Internet connected devices, known as the Internet of Things (IoT), is creating a new set of challenges to create secure, private infrastructures. This paper reviews the current literature on the challenges and approaches to security and privacy in the Internet of Things, with a strong focus on how these aspects are handled in IoT middleware. We focus on IoT middleware because many systems are built from existing middleware and these inherit the underlying security properties of the middleware framework. The paper is composed of three main sections. Firstly, we propose a matrix of security and privacy threats for IoT. This matrix is used as the basis of a widespread literature review aimed at identifying requirements on IoT platforms and middleware. Secondly, we present a structured literature review of the available middleware and how security is handled in these middleware approaches. We utilise the requirements from the first phase to evaluate. Finally, we draw a set of conclusions and identify further work in this area

BodyCloud: a SaaS approach for community body sensor networks

Body Sensor Networks (BSNs) have been recently introduced for the remote monitoring of human activities in a broad range of application domains, such as health care, emergency management, fitness and behaviour surveillance. BSNs can be deployed in a community of people and can generate large amounts of contextual data that require a scalable approach for storage, processing and analysis. Cloud computing can provide a flexible storage and processing infrastructure to perform both online and offline analysis of data streams generated in BSNs. This paper proposes BodyCloud, a SaaS approach for community BSNs that supports the development and deployment of Cloud-assisted BSN applications. BodyCloud is a multi-tier application-level architecture that integrates a Cloud computing platform and BSN data streams middleware. BodyCloud provides programming abstractions that allow the rapid development of community BSN applications. This work describes the general architecture of the proposed approach and presents a case study for the real-time monitoring and analysis of cardiac data streams of many individuals

Reuse of pervasive system architectures

Developers are often confronted with incompatible systems and lack a proper system abstraction that allows easy integration of various hardware and software components. To try solve these shortcomings, building blocks are identified at different levels of detail in today’s pervasive/communication systems and used in a conceptual reasoning framework allowing easy comparison and combination. The generality of the conceptual framework is validated by decomposing a selection of pervasive systems into models of these building blocks and integrating these models to create improved ones. Additionally, the required properties of pervasive systems on scalability, efficiency, degree of pervasiveness, and maintainability are analysed for a number of application areas. The pervasive systems are compared on these properties. Observations are made, and weak points in the analysed pervasive systems are identified. Furthermore, we provide a set of recommendations as a guideline towards flexible architectures that make pervasive systems usable in a variety of applications

Ubiquitous Sensor Networks in IMS: an Ambient Intelligence Telco Platform

Ubiquitous Sensor Network (USN) concept describes the integration of heterogeneous and geographically dispersed Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks (WS&AN) into rich information infrastructures for accurate representation and access to different dynamic user’s physical contexts. This relatively new concept envisions future Sensor-Based Services leading to market disruptive innovations in a broad range of application domains, mainly personal (lifestyle assistants), community (professional users) and industrial domains. The support for this broad range of innovative Ambient Intelligence services urgently demands a standardized access to different WS&AN, and Telco Operators have an opportunity to lead this technological challenge as they evolve towards future Next-Generation Networks. Telefónica Research and Development is a leading innovation company that provides communication services for businesses and consumers. Networks and Service Platforms is a major Telefónica I+D innovation area where new Service Architectures and Platforms concepts are essential for the development of services with a high differentiation value. This contribution describes Telefónica I+D activities directed to the design of an Ambient Intelligence Platform integrating USN concepts over NGN architectures. In our view IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) concepts can enable and promote a first generation of Sensor-Based Services where multimedia interactive sessions are enriched with contextual information from WS&ANs. To this end three major design criteria are addressed at three different levels. At the application layer, OMA Service Environment and OGC Sensor Web Enablement are combined to define a specific USN Service Enabler. At the communication, management and control level WS&AN Gateways are defined for integrating WS&ANs infrastructures into all-IP IMS environments. While at the lower level, data and meta-data exchanges with different WS&ANs entities are homogeneously represented using OGC® SensorML standard. Finally this paper concludes by discussing some preliminary business opportunities we foresee for the proposed Platform