Sensor function virtualization to support distributed intelligence in the internet of things

It is estimated that-by 2020-billion devices will be connected to the Internet. This number not only includes TVs, PCs, tablets and smartphones, but also billions of embedded sensors that will make up the "Internet of Things" and enable a whole new range of intelligent services in domains such as manufacturing, health, smart homes, logistics, etc. To some extent, intelligence such as data processing or access control can be placed on the devices themselves. Alternatively, functionalities can be outsourced to the cloud. In reality, there is no single solution that fits all needs. Cooperation between devices, intermediate infrastructures (local networks, access networks, global networks) and/or cloud systems is needed in order to optimally support IoT communication and IoT applications. Through distributed intelligence the right communication and processing functionality will be available at the right place. The first part of this paper motivates the need for such distributed intelligence based on shortcomings in typical IoT systems. The second part focuses on the concept of sensor function virtualization, a potential enabler for distributed intelligence, and presents solutions on how to realize it

Integration of heterogeneous devices and communication models via the cloud in the constrained internet of things

As the Internet of Things continues to expand in the coming years, the need for services that span multiple IoT application domains will continue to increase in order to realize the efficiency gains promised by the IoT. Today, however, service developers looking to add value on top of existing IoT systems are faced with very heterogeneous devices and systems. These systems implement a wide variety of network connectivity options, protocols (proprietary or standards-based), and communication methods all of which are unknown to a service developer that is new to the IoT. Even within one IoT standard, a device typically has multiple options for communicating with others. In order to alleviate service developers from these concerns, this paper presents a cloud-based platform for integrating heterogeneous constrained IoT devices and communication models into services. Our evaluation shows that the impact of our approach on the operation of constrained devices is minimal while providing a tangible benefit in service integration of low-resource IoT devices. A proof of concept demonstrates the latter by means of a control and management dashboard for constrained devices that was implemented on top of the presented platform. The results of our work enable service developers to more easily implement and deploy services that span a wide variety of IoT application domains

Secure service proxy : a CoAP(s) intermediary for a securer and smarter web of things

As the IoT continues to grow over the coming years, resource-constrained devices and networks will see an increase in traffic as everything is connected in an open Web of Things. The performance- and function-enhancing features are difficult to provide in resource-constrained environments, but will gain importance if the WoT is to be scaled up successfully. For example, scalable open standards-based authentication and authorization will be important to manage access to the limited resources of constrained devices and networks. Additionally, features such as caching and virtualization may help further reduce the load on these constrained systems. This work presents the Secure Service Proxy (SSP): a constrained-network edge proxy with the goal of improving the performance and functionality of constrained RESTful environments. Our evaluations show that the proposed design reaches its goal by reducing the load on constrained devices while implementing a wide range of features as different adapters. Specifically, the results show that the SSP leads to significant savings in processing, network traffic, network delay and packet loss rates for constrained devices. As a result, the SSP helps to guarantee the proper operation of constrained networks as these networks form an ever-expanding Web of Things

Managing Constrained Devices into the Cloud: a RESTful web service

We present a RESTful web application capable to provide high level, easy-to-reach interfaces for the interaction with CoAP sensor networks. We describe how virtual instances of physical devices are created in order to become a smart entry point for querying network objects. We explain how to exploit virtualization to lighten the workload of a physical network. We focus on the implementation of the application taking into consideration aspects such as scalability, responsiveness and availabilit

The "Object-as-a-Service" paradigm

International audienceThe increasing interest about the Internet of Things (IoT) is almost as remarkable than its practical absence in our everyday lives. Announced as the new breakthrough in IT industry, the domain is characterized by a large number of architecture propositions that are in charge of providing a structure for applications creation. These architectures are needed because of the heterogeneity of stakeholders involved in IoT Applications. Programming languages, operating systems, hardware specificities, processing power, memory, network organization, characteristics, constraints, the world of IoT is so diverse. Furthermore, these architectures should provide an easy access to users that are not aware of IT technologies involved. The Services Oriented Computing (SOC) has shown in the past its relevance to the decoupling constraints interoperability among stakeholders. The composition of loosely coupled services facilitates the integration of very varied elements and provides agility in the creation of new applications. But unlike the approach inherited from the SOC in pre-existing services are composed to obtain a specific application, we propose a more dynamic notion of service. Our "Object-as-a-Service" point of view is based on the notion of building dynamically the service needed on each Object and then integrate it in the whole composition. This paper focus on the gain of this approach for the IoT by promoting the "Object-as-a-Service" paradigm as a basis for the creation of dynamic and agile user-made applications

Design and performance evaluation of advanced QoS-enabled service-oriented architectures for the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) is rapidly becoming reality, the cut off prices as well as the advancement in the consumer electronic field are the two main training factor. For this reason, new application scenarios are designed every days and then new challenges that must be addressed. In the future we will be surrounded by many smart devices, which will sense and act on the physical environment. Such number of smart devices will be the building block for a plethora of new smart applications which will provide to end user new enhanced service. In this context, the Quality of Service (QoS) has been recognized as a non functional key requirement for the success of the IoT. In fact, in the future IoT, we will have different applications each one with different QoS requirements, which will need to interact with a finite set of smart device each one with its QoS capabilities. Such mapping between requested and offered QoS must be managed in order to satisfy the end users. The work of this thesis focus on how to provide QoS for IoT in a cross-layer manner. In other words, our main goal is to provide QoS support that, on one hand, helps the back-end architecture to manage a wide set of IoT applications, each one with its QoS requirements, while, on the other hand, enhances the access network by adding QoS capabilities on top of smart devices. We analyzed existing QoS framework and, based on the status of the art, we derive a novel model specifically tailored for IoT systems. Then we define the procedures needed to negotiate the desired QoS level and to enforce the negotiated QoS. In particular we take care of the Thing selection problem which is raised whenever more than one thing can be exploited to obtain a certain service. Finally we considered the access network by providing different solutions to handle QoS with different grain scale. We proposed a totally transparent solution which exploits virtualization and proxying techniques to differentiate between different class of client and provide a class based prioritization schema. Then we went further by designing a QoS framework directly on top of a standard IoT protocol called Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP). We designed the QoS support to enhance the Observing paradigm which is of paramount importance especially if we consider industrial applications which might benefit from a certain level of QoS assurances

IoT DEVICE MANAGEMENT AND CONFIGURATION

As the number of IoT devices grows, the management and configuration of IoT devices becomes crucial in resource constraint networks. It is hard to manage and configure a large amount of heterogeneous resource constraint IoT devices because people need to know how they connect to each other, what internet-enabled services are available to provide, and how people interact with things through the internet. The thing-centric approach focuses on user experience when engaging things, but the cloud- centric approach switch the focus to IoT services that can process data streams collected from things and applications that help get people joined in the IoT world. To manage IoT populations effectively in a centralized manner, not only does it mean that moving computational power closer to the edge is a way to reduce bandwidth and latency, but it also implies that it is necessary to build an architecture which can scale and manage tons of connected devices by a uniform interface. In particular, RESTful Web services can provide a uniform interface that operates resources by HTTP methods. For example, users can read and write data by a uniform interface, and a flowerpot can write data and be triggered to water plants by a uniform interface. Thus, in the scope of IoT, embedded middleware can implement uniform interface by REST model. Virtualizing physical things has emerged as a design pattern to build IoT systems. Resource less constraint devices are capable of being virtualized with enough CPU power, memory, networking, but they are more expensive and power consuming. However, resource highly constraint devices take advantage of low energy consumption and cheaper price, but they cannot be virtualized because they do not have ability to even run a single multi-threaded program. Therefore, it is very important to select the right platforms for the right roles. In our case, we use Raspberry Pi 3 as a middleware and Nordic nRF52832 as a BLE endpoint. In this thesis, a REST-based IoT management system based on Service-Oriented Architecture is built, and the performance of the system has been tested, including the response time of HTTP GET and POST requests of the centralized server in a Fog domain and a script engine onto a BLE-enabled endpoint

The integration of LwM2M and OPC UA : an interoperability approach for industrial IoT

Over the past years, Internet of Things (IoT) has been emerging with connected and smart things that can communicate with each other and exchange information. Similarly, with the emergence of Industry 4.0, the industrial world is also undergoing a strong evolution by connecting devices, sensors and machines to the Internet. In this paper, we investigate the integration of these two domains and examine the interconnection of two of the promising interoperability standards in these domains, namely OPC Unified Architecture and Lightweight Machine-to-Machine (LwM2M) protocol. For this purpose, we introduce an efficient and scalable approach, based on Docker Containers, for the cross-domain integration and interoperation. Besides, we also demonstrate and validate our interoperability approach by means of real world implementations and also theoretical and practical analysis