The Programmable City

AbstractThe worldwide proliferation of mobile connected devices has brought about a revolution in the way we live, and will inevitably guide the way in which we design the cities of the future. However, designing city-wide systems poses a new set of challenges in terms of scale, manageability and citizen involvement. Solving these challenges is crucial to making sure that the vision of a programmable Internet of Things (IoT) becomes reality. In this article we will analyse these issues and present a novel programming approach to designing scalable systems for the Internet of Things, with an emphasis on smart city applications, that addresses these issues

Internet of things

Manual of Digital Earth / Editors: Huadong Guo, Michael F. Goodchild, Alessandro Annoni .- Springer, 2020 .- ISBN: 978-981-32-9915-3Digital Earth was born with the aim of replicating the real world within the digital world. Many efforts have been made to observe and sense the Earth, both from space (remote sensing) and by using in situ sensors. Focusing on the latter, advances in Digital Earth have established vital bridges to exploit these sensors and their networks by taking location as a key element. The current era of connectivity envisions that everything is connected to everything. The concept of the Internet of Things(IoT)emergedasaholisticproposaltoenableanecosystemofvaried,heterogeneous networked objects and devices to speak to and interact with each other. To make the IoT ecosystem a reality, it is necessary to understand the electronic components, communication protocols, real-time analysis techniques, and the location of the objects and devices. The IoT ecosystem and the Digital Earth (DE) jointly form interrelated infrastructures for addressing today’s pressing issues and complex challenges. In this chapter, we explore the synergies and frictions in establishing an efficient and permanent collaboration between the two infrastructures, in order to adequately address multidisciplinary and increasingly complex real-world problems. Although there are still some pending issues, the identified synergies generate optimism for a true collaboration between the Internet of Things and the Digital Earth

Next Generation Cloud Computing: New Trends and Research Directions

The landscape of cloud computing has significantly changed over the last decade. Not only have more providers and service offerings crowded the space, but also cloud infrastructure that was traditionally limited to single provider data centers is now evolving. In this paper, we firstly discuss the changing cloud infrastructure and consider the use of infrastructure from multiple providers and the benefit of decentralising computing away from data centers. These trends have resulted in the need for a variety of new computing architectures that will be offered by future cloud infrastructure. These architectures are anticipated to impact areas, such as connecting people and devices, data-intensive computing, the service space and self-learning systems. Finally, we lay out a roadmap of challenges that will need to be addressed for realising the potential of next generation cloud systems.Comment: Accepted to Future Generation Computer Systems, 07 September 201

Learning and Management for Internet-of-Things: Accounting for Adaptivity and Scalability

Internet-of-Things (IoT) envisions an intelligent infrastructure of networked smart devices offering task-specific monitoring and control services. The unique features of IoT include extreme heterogeneity, massive number of devices, and unpredictable dynamics partially due to human interaction. These call for foundational innovations in network design and management. Ideally, it should allow efficient adaptation to changing environments, and low-cost implementation scalable to massive number of devices, subject to stringent latency constraints. To this end, the overarching goal of this paper is to outline a unified framework for online learning and management policies in IoT through joint advances in communication, networking, learning, and optimization. From the network architecture vantage point, the unified framework leverages a promising fog architecture that enables smart devices to have proximity access to cloud functionalities at the network edge, along the cloud-to-things continuum. From the algorithmic perspective, key innovations target online approaches adaptive to different degrees of nonstationarity in IoT dynamics, and their scalable model-free implementation under limited feedback that motivates blind or bandit approaches. The proposed framework aspires to offer a stepping stone that leads to systematic designs and analysis of task-specific learning and management schemes for IoT, along with a host of new research directions to build on.Comment: Submitted on June 15 to Proceeding of IEEE Special Issue on Adaptive and Scalable Communication Network

An Open Internet of Things System Architecture Based on Software-Defined Device

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.The Internet of Things(IoT) connects more and more devices and supports an ever-growing diversity of applications. The heterogeneity of the cross-industry and cross-platform device resources is one of the main challenges to realize the unified management and information sharing, ultimately the large-scale uptake of the IoT. Inspired by software-defined networking(SDN), we propose the concept of software-defined device(SDD) and further elaborate its definition and operational mechanism from the perspective of cyber-physical mapping. Based on the device-as-a-software concept, we develop an open Internet of Things system architecture which decouples upper-level applications from the underlying physical devices through the SDD mechanism. A logically centralized controller is designed to conveniently manage physical devices and flexibly provide the device discovery service and the device control interfaces for various application requests. We also describe an application use scenario which illustrates that the SDD-based system architecture can implement the unified management, sharing, reusing, recombining and modular customization of device resources in multiple applications, and the ubiquitous IoT applications can be interconnected and intercommunicated on the shared physical devices