A Cloud Architecture for Managing IoT-aware Applications According to Knowledge Processing Rules

The Web of Things paradigm has represented a shift in the conjunction of the Internet of Things (IoT) with people, as it allows treating a smart object as a Web resource. While in a first phase the challenge was the physically management of smart objects, the current demand is to help users in profitably introducing IoT in their own daily life.The paper presents a software architecture for IoT systems able to manage the behaviour of involved IoT entities basing on knowledge processing tools. The main goal is informing the user of the occurrence of events of interest semantically determined starting from actual state of the environment. The architecture exploits the potentialities of the Web of Topics (WoX) approach, a conceptual model that simplifies the designing of IoT applications. Leveraging the WoX approach, the architecture introduces an innovative way to mine knowledge from IoT devices aside from any technological background, so that facing the intrinsic heterogeneity affecting IoT entities. The discussed architecture is composed by different modules integrated into an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), strongly decoupled and provided with RESTful-compliant web interfaces to communicate each other and with the external environment, according to a SOA structure. The paper shows how the system is able to receive data coming from sensors and to semantically interpret them by means of a series of business rules that act as knowledge processor

Continuous maintenance and the future – Foundations and technological challenges

High value and long life products require continuous maintenance throughout their life cycle to achieve required performance with optimum through-life cost. This paper presents foundations and technologies required to offer the maintenance service. Component and system level degradation science, assessment and modelling along with life cycle ‘big data’ analytics are the two most important knowledge and skill base required for the continuous maintenance. Advanced computing and visualisation technologies will improve efficiency of the maintenance and reduce through-life cost of the product. Future of continuous maintenance within the Industry 4.0 context also identifies the role of IoT, standards and cyber security

New Generation Sensor Web Enablement

Many sensor networks have been deployed to monitor Earth’s environment, and more will follow in the future. Environmental sensors have improved continuously by becoming smaller, cheaper, and more intelligent. Due to the large number of sensor manufacturers and differing accompanying protocols, integrating diverse sensors into observation systems is not straightforward. A coherent infrastructure is needed to treat sensors in an interoperable, platform-independent and uniform way. The concept of the Sensor Web reflects such a kind of infrastructure for sharing, finding, and accessing sensors and their data across different applications. It hides the heterogeneous sensor hardware and communication protocols from the applications built on top of it. The Sensor Web Enablement initiative of the Open Geospatial Consortium standardizes web service interfaces and data encodings which can be used as building blocks for a Sensor Web. This article illustrates and analyzes the recent developments of the new generation of the Sensor Web Enablement specification framework. Further, we relate the Sensor Web to other emerging concepts such as the Web of Things and point out challenges and resulting future work topics for research on Sensor Web Enablement

Architecting the IoT Paradigm: A Middleware for Autonomous Distributed Sensor Networks

Actualizing Internet of Things undoubtedly constitutes a major challenge of modern computing and is a promising next step in realizing the unification of all seamlessly interacting entities, either human users or participating machines, under a shared, coherent architecture. While it has now become common belief that the related solutions should be based on compatible network infrastructure employing widely accepted communication schemes, the specifics of the intermediate system that would act as global interface for all involved “things” are yet to be determined. A rising trend to define such machine-based entities is through cyber-physical systems, in terms of collaborating elements with physical input and output. Certainly, sensor networks constitute the most representative realization of such systems. Taking these issues and opportunities under consideration, this work proposes a bioinspired distributed architecture for an Internet of Things that exhibits self-organization properties to enable efficient interaction between entities modeled as cyber-physical systems, mainly focusing on sensor networks. Furthermore, a middleware has been implemented according to the proposed architecture, which serves the role of the backbone of this network as a multiagent and autonomous distributed system. The evaluation results demonstrate the self-optimization properties of the introduced scheme and indicate global network convergence

IoT for Efficient Data Collection from Real World Resources

The Internet of Things is providing new ways of experiencing and reacting to the physical world through the ability of advanced electronic devices that collect data. At the same time, as new application scenarios are envisioned, with the assistance of information generated by sensors, new problems and obstacles will arise. This requires new development to meet business and technical requirements, such as interoperability between heterogeneous devices and confidence (such as validity, security and trust) over smart devices. With the increase of these complex requirements it becomes crucial to develop an infrastructure aimed at tackling such requirements mentioned. IoT middleware – a software layer that bridges the gap between devices and information systems. Thus, this work aims to study the mechanisms and methodology for data collection, devices interoperability and data filtering, closer to the data sources, in order to optimize the collection and pre-analysis of data that can then be used by various applications such as the ones in manufacturing industry

Arquitectura de nodo inteligente para redes de sensores inalámbricas y escalables: aplicaciones en monitorización ambiental

El desarrollo de esta Tesis se orienta al diseño de una plataforma (Framework) que de soporte a las arquitecturas de nodos de sensores inalámbricos, permitiendo su integración en una red inalámbrica.CONACYT – Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnologí

Arquitectura de nodo inteligente para redes de sensores inalámbricas y escalables: aplicaciones en monitorización ambiental

Las redes de sensores son actualmente una de las tecnologías emergentes de mayor progreso e interés, en particular aquellas que emplean sistemas de comunicación inalámbricas. La integración de estas redes a las infraestructuras y a diversos entornos asociados a una red inalámbrica de comunicación ha transformado drásticamente la forma en que los datos del entorno son adquiridos y procesados. Actualmente las redes de sensores son consideradas como uno los pilares principales en una nueva forma de percibir e interactuar con el mundo que nos rodea, proporcionando beneficios a la sociedad y mejorando la productividad de las industrias. El desafío planteado por la integración de nodos heterogéneos y diversas interfaces en una red de sensores, ha conducido al desarrollo de algunos estándares internacionales como el ISO/IEC/IEEE 21451-x. La característica principal que plantean estos estándares es la escalabilidad de la red desde el punto de vista de la heterogeneidad de los nodos y una capacidad ¿plug-and-play¿. Con la estandarización, se pretende abordar el problema de la gran diversidad de interfaces presentes en el mercado, a fin de determinar la mejor forma de interconexión entre redes de sensores heterogéneos. Sin embargo, la implementación del estándar ISO/IEC/IEEE 21451-x es complicada y no contempla las limitaciones en capacidad de los nodos, tales como bajo consumo de energía, capacidad de memoria y capacidad de procesamiento. Además, el estándar no contempla las arquitecturas reconfigurables, las cuales pueden ser muy útiles dada la diversidad de posibles aplicaciones de las redes de sensores inalámbricas. Es necesario, por lo tanto, consolidar el uso de un Framework para las arquitecturas de nodos sensoriales inalámbricas que contemple además de la heterogeneidad de los transductores, la inclusión de arquitecturas reconfigurables en los nodos sensores. El desarrollo de esta Tesis se orienta al diseño de una plataforma (Framework) que de soporte a las arquitecturas de nodos de sensores inalámbricos, facilitando su integración en una red inalámbrica. El trabajo de investigación consta de dos partes primordiales. La primera parte se centra en la definición del Framework basado en el estándar internacional ISO/IEC/IEEE 21451-x y en su utilización en diversas aplicaciones. La segunda parte plantea la utilización de arquitecturas reconfigurables en nodos de sensores inalámbricos, planteándose como aporte la modificación del datasheet electrónico definido en el estándar ISO/IEC/IEEE 214510 como una herramienta novedosa que estandariza el proceso de reconfiguración de cualquier nodo en una red de sensores inalámbricas. Como resultados de esta Tesis podemos indicar que: - Se ha propuesto un Framework para arquitecturas escalables de nodos en redes inalámbricas, basado en el estándar ISO/IEC/IEEE 214510. Este Framework plantea la integración del sensor inteligente, definido por la familia de estándares ISO/IEC/IEEE 21451-x, y sistema operativo para redes de sensores inalámbricas llamado TinyOS. La finalidad del Framework propuesto es incrementar la escalabilidad y la ubiquidad de los nodos, permitiendo el uso de sensores e interfaces heterogéneas en la red. El funcionamiento e interés de este Framework se ha probado en un sistema de monitorización de variables medio-ambientales diseñado para la vigilancia de reservas naturales. - Además, se ha planteado, asimismo, un nuevo método para la estandarización del proceso de reconfiguración de nodos asociados a redes de sensores inalámbricas. Para ello se ha propuesto la definición de un nuevo datasheet electrónico (TEDS) asociado al estándar ISO/IEC/IEEE 21450 con el que es posible reconfigurar el hardware de acondicionamiento de señales del nodo sensor. Este nuevo datasheet ha sido implementado y se ha probado en una red de monitorización de variables medio-ambientales, demostrando su interés y utilidad en aplicaciones reales

Sensor Networks and Their Applications: Investigating the Role of Sensor Web Enablement

The Engineering Doctorate (EngD) was conducted in conjunction with BT Research on state-of-the-art Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) projects. The first area of work is a literature review of WSN project applications, some of which the author worked on as a BT Researcher based at the world renowned Adastral Park Research Labs in Suffolk (2004-09). WSN applications are examined within the context of Machine-to-Machine (M2M); Information Networking (IN); Internet/Web of Things (IoT/WoT); smart home and smart devices; BT’s 21st Century Network (21CN); Cloud Computing; and future trends. In addition, this thesis provides an insight into the capabilities of similar external WSN project applications. Under BT’s Sensor Virtualization project, the second area of work focuses on building a Generic Architecture for WSNs with reusable infrastructure and ‘infostructure’ by identifying and trialling suitable components, in order to realise actual business benefits for BT. The third area of work focuses on the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards and their Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) initiative. The SWE framework was investigated to ascertain its potential as a component of the Generic Architecture. BT’s SAPHE project served as a use case. BT Research’s experiences of taking this traditional (vertical) stove-piped application and creating SWE compliant services are described. The author’s findings were originally presented in a series of publications and have been incorporated into this thesis along with supplementary WSN material from BT Research projects. SWE 2.0 specifications are outlined to highlight key improvements, since work began at BT with SWE 1.0. The fourth area of work focuses on Complex Event Processing (CEP) which was evaluated to ascertain its potential for aggregating and correlating the shared project sensor data (‘infostructure’) harvested and for enabling data fusion for WSNs in diverse domains. Finally, the conclusions and suggestions for further work are provided

Enabling technologies and cyber-physical systems for mission-critical scenarios

Programa Oficial de Doutoramento en Tecnoloxías da Información e Comunicacións en Redes Móbiles . 5029P01[Abstract] Reliable transport systems, defense, public safety and quality assurance in the Industry 4.0 are essential in a modern society. In a mission-critical scenario, a mission failure would jeopardize human lives and put at risk some other assets whose impairment or loss would significantly harm society or business results. Even small degradations of the communications supporting the mission could have large and possibly dire consequences. On the one hand, mission-critical organizations wish to utilize the most modern, disruptive and innovative communication systems and technologies, and yet, on the other hand, need to comply with strict requirements, which are very different to those of non critical scenarios. The aim of this thesis is to assess the feasibility of applying emerging technologies like Internet of Things (IoT), Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) and 4G broadband communications in mission-critical scenarios along three key critical infrastructure sectors: transportation, defense and public safety, and shipbuilding. Regarding the transport sector, this thesis provides an understanding of the progress of communications technologies used for railways since the implantation of Global System for Mobile communications-Railways (GSM-R). The aim of this work is to envision the potential contribution of Long Term Evolution (LTE) to provide additional features that GSM-R would never support. Furthermore, the ability of Industrial IoT for revolutionizing the railway industry and confront today's challenges is presented. Moreover, a detailed review of the most common flaws found in Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) based IoT systems is presented, including the latest attacks described in the literature. As a result, a novel methodology for auditing security and reverse engineering RFID communications in transport applications is introduced. The second sector selected is driven by new operational needs and the challenges that arise from modern military deployments. The strategic advantages of 4G broadband technologies massively deployed in civil scenarios are examined. Furthermore, this thesis analyzes the great potential for applying IoT technologies to revolutionize modern warfare and provide benefits similar to those in industry. It identifies scenarios where defense and public safety could leverage better commercial IoT capabilities to deliver greater survivability to the warfighter or first responders, while reducing costs and increasing operation efficiency and effectiveness. The last part is devoted to the shipbuilding industry. After defining the novel concept of Shipyard 4.0, how a shipyard pipe workshop works and what are the requirements for building a smart pipe system are described in detail. Furthermore, the foundations for enabling an affordable CPS for Shipyards 4.0 are presented. The CPS proposed consists of a network of beacons that continuously collect information about the location of the pipes. Its design allows shipyards to obtain more information on the pipes and to make better use of it. Moreover, it is indicated how to build a positioning system from scratch in an environment as harsh in terms of communications as a shipyard, showing an example of its architecture and implementation.[Resumen] En la sociedad moderna, los sistemas de transporte fiables, la defensa, la seguridad pública y el control de la calidad en la Industria 4.0 son esenciales. En un escenario de misión crítica, el fracaso de una misión pone en peligro vidas humanas y en riesgo otros activos cuyo deterioro o pérdida perjudicaría significativamente a la sociedad o a los resultados de una empresa. Incluso pequeñas degradaciones en las comunicaciones que apoyan la misión podrían tener importantes y posiblemente terribles consecuencias. Por un lado, las organizaciones de misión crítica desean utilizar los sistemas y tecnologías de comunicación más modernos, disruptivos e innovadores y, sin embargo, deben cumplir requisitos estrictos que son muy diferentes a los relativos a escenarios no críticos. El objetivo principal de esta tesis es evaluar la viabilidad de aplicar tecnologías emergentes como Internet of Things (IoT), Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) y comunicaciones de banda ancha 4G en escenarios de misión crítica en tres sectores clave de infraestructura crítica: transporte, defensa y seguridad pública, y construcción naval. Respecto al sector del transporte, esta tesis permite comprender el progreso de las tecnologías de comunicación en el ámbito ferroviario desde la implantación de Global System for Mobile communications-Railway (GSM-R). El objetivo de este trabajo es analizar la contribución potencial de Long Term Evolution (LTE) para proporcionar características adicionales que GSM-R nunca podría soportar. Además, se presenta la capacidad de la IoT industrial para revolucionar la industria ferroviaria y afrontar los retos actuales. Asimismo, se estudian con detalle las vulnerabilidades más comunes de los sistemas IoT basados en Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID), incluyendo los últimos ataques descritos en la literatura. Como resultado, se presenta una metodología innovadora para realizar auditorías de seguridad e ingeniería inversa de las comunicaciones RFID en aplicaciones de transporte. El segundo sector elegido viene impulsado por las nuevas necesidades operacionales y los desafíos que surgen de los despliegues militares modernos. Para afrontarlos, se analizan las ventajas estratégicas de las tecnologías de banda ancha 4G masivamente desplegadas en escenarios civiles. Asimismo, esta tesis analiza el gran potencial de aplicación de las tecnologías IoT para revolucionar la guerra moderna y proporcionar beneficios similares a los alcanzados por la industria. Se identifican escenarios en los que la defensa y la seguridad pública podrían aprovechar mejor las capacidades comerciales de IoT para ofrecer una mayor capacidad de supervivencia al combatiente o a los servicios de emergencias, a la vez que reduce los costes y aumenta la eficiencia y efectividad de las operaciones. La última parte se dedica a la industria de construcción naval. Después de definir el novedoso concepto de Astillero 4.0, se describe en detalle cómo funciona el taller de tubería de astillero y cuáles son los requisitos para construir un sistema de tuberías inteligentes. Además, se presentan los fundamentos para posibilitar un CPS asequible para Astilleros 4.0. El CPS propuesto consiste en una red de balizas que continuamente recogen información sobre la ubicación de las tuberías. Su diseño permite a los astilleros obtener más información sobre las tuberías y hacer un mejor uso de las mismas. Asimismo, se indica cómo construir un sistema de posicionamiento desde cero en un entorno tan hostil en términos de comunicaciones, mostrando un ejemplo de su arquitectura e implementación