Vehicle as a Service (VaaS): Leverage Vehicles to Build Service Networks and Capabilities for Smart Cities

Smart cities demand resources for rich immersive sensing, ubiquitous communications, powerful computing, large storage, and high intelligence (SCCSI) to support various kinds of applications, such as public safety, connected and autonomous driving, smart and connected health, and smart living. At the same time, it is widely recognized that vehicles such as autonomous cars, equipped with significantly powerful SCCSI capabilities, will become ubiquitous in future smart cities. By observing the convergence of these two trends, this article advocates the use of vehicles to build a cost-effective service network, called the Vehicle as a Service (VaaS) paradigm, where vehicles empowered with SCCSI capability form a web of mobile servers and communicators to provide SCCSI services in smart cities. Towards this direction, we first examine the potential use cases in smart cities and possible upgrades required for the transition from traditional vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) to VaaS. Then, we will introduce the system architecture of the VaaS paradigm and discuss how it can provide SCCSI services in future smart cities, respectively. At last, we identify the open problems of this paradigm and future research directions, including architectural design, service provisioning, incentive design, and security & privacy. We expect that this paper paves the way towards developing a cost-effective and sustainable approach for building smart cities.Comment: 32 pages, 11 figure

Situation-aware Edge Computing

Future wireless networks must cope with an increasing amount of data that needs to be transmitted to or from mobile devices. Furthermore, novel applications, e.g., augmented reality games or autonomous driving, require low latency and high bandwidth at the same time. To address these challenges, the paradigm of edge computing has been proposed. It brings computing closer to the users and takes advantage of the capabilities of telecommunication infrastructures, e.g., cellular base stations or wireless access points, but also of end user devices such as smartphones, wearables, and embedded systems. However, edge computing introduces its own challenges, e.g., economic and business-related questions or device mobility. Being aware of the current situation, i.e., the domain-specific interpretation of environmental information, makes it possible to develop approaches targeting these challenges. In this thesis, the novel concept of situation-aware edge computing is presented. It is divided into three areas: situation-aware infrastructure edge computing, situation-aware device edge computing, and situation-aware embedded edge computing. Therefore, the concepts of situation and situation-awareness are introduced. Furthermore, challenges are identified for each area, and corresponding solutions are presented. In the area of situation-aware infrastructure edge computing, economic and business-related challenges are addressed, since companies offering services and infrastructure edge computing facilities have to find agreements regarding the prices for allowing others to use them. In the area of situation-aware device edge computing, the main challenge is to find suitable nodes that can execute a service and to predict a node’s connection in the near future. Finally, to enable situation-aware embedded edge computing, two novel programming and data analysis approaches are presented that allow programmers to develop situation-aware applications. To show the feasibility, applicability, and importance of situation-aware edge computing, two case studies are presented. The first case study shows how situation-aware edge computing can provide services for emergency response applications, while the second case study presents an approach where network transitions can be implemented in a situation-aware manner

A manifesto for future generation cloud computing: research directions for the next decade

The Cloud computing paradigm has revolutionised the computer science horizon during the past decade and has enabled the emergence of computing as the fifth utility. It has captured significant attention of academia, industries, and government bodies. Now, it has emerged as the backbone of modern economy by offering subscription-based services anytime, anywhere following a pay-as-you-go model. This has instigated (1) shorter establishment times for start-ups, (2) creation of scalable global enterprise applications, (3) better cost-to-value associativity for scientific and high performance computing applications, and (4) different invocation/execution models for pervasive and ubiquitous applications. The recent technological developments and paradigms such as serverless computing, software-defined networking, Internet of Things, and processing at network edge are creating new opportunities for Cloud computing. However, they are also posing several new challenges and creating the need for new approaches and research strategies, as well as the re-evaluation of the models that were developed to address issues such as scalability, elasticity, reliability, security, sustainability, and application models. The proposed manifesto addresses them by identifying the major open challenges in Cloud computing, emerging trends, and impact areas. It then offers research directions for the next decade, thus helping in the realisation of Future Generation Cloud Computing

Engineering Self-Adaptive Collective Processes for Cyber-Physical Ecosystems

The pervasiveness of computing and networking is creating significant opportunities for building valuable socio-technical systems. However, the scale, density, heterogeneity, interdependence, and QoS constraints of many target systems pose severe operational and engineering challenges. Beyond individual smart devices, cyber-physical collectives can provide services or solve complex problems by leveraging a “system effect” while coordinating and adapting to context or environment change. Understanding and building systems exhibiting collective intelligence and autonomic capabilities represent a prominent research goal, partly covered, e.g., by the field of collective adaptive systems. Therefore, drawing inspiration from and building on the long-time research activity on coordination, multi-agent systems, autonomic/self-* systems, spatial computing, and especially on the recent aggregate computing paradigm, this thesis investigates concepts, methods, and tools for the engineering of possibly large-scale, heterogeneous ensembles of situated components that should be able to operate, adapt and self-organise in a decentralised fashion. The primary contribution of this thesis consists of four main parts. First, we define and implement an aggregate programming language (ScaFi), internal to the mainstream Scala programming language, for describing collective adaptive behaviour, based on field calculi. Second, we conceive of a “dynamic collective computation” abstraction, also called aggregate process, formalised by an extension to the field calculus, and implemented in ScaFi. Third, we characterise and provide a proof-of-concept implementation of a middleware for aggregate computing that enables the development of aggregate systems according to multiple architectural styles. Fourth, we apply and evaluate aggregate computing techniques to edge computing scenarios, and characterise a design pattern, called Self-organising Coordination Regions (SCR), that supports adjustable, decentralised decision-making and activity in dynamic environments.Con lo sviluppo di informatica e intelligenza artificiale, la diffusione pervasiva di device computazionali e la crescente interconnessione tra elementi fisici e digitali, emergono innumerevoli opportunità per la costruzione di sistemi socio-tecnici di nuova generazione. Tuttavia, l'ingegneria di tali sistemi presenta notevoli sfide, data la loro complessità—si pensi ai livelli, scale, eterogeneità, e interdipendenze coinvolti. Oltre a dispositivi smart individuali, collettivi cyber-fisici possono fornire servizi o risolvere problemi complessi con un “effetto sistema” che emerge dalla coordinazione e l'adattamento di componenti fra loro, l'ambiente e il contesto. Comprendere e costruire sistemi in grado di esibire intelligenza collettiva e capacità autonomiche è un importante problema di ricerca studiato, ad esempio, nel campo dei sistemi collettivi adattativi. Perciò, traendo ispirazione e partendo dall'attività di ricerca su coordinazione, sistemi multiagente e self-*, modelli di computazione spazio-temporali e, specialmente, sul recente paradigma di programmazione aggregata, questa tesi tratta concetti, metodi, e strumenti per l'ingegneria di ensemble di elementi situati eterogenei che devono essere in grado di lavorare, adattarsi, e auto-organizzarsi in modo decentralizzato. Il contributo di questa tesi consiste in quattro parti principali. In primo luogo, viene definito e implementato un linguaggio di programmazione aggregata (ScaFi), interno al linguaggio Scala, per descrivere comportamenti collettivi e adattativi secondo l'approccio dei campi computazionali. In secondo luogo, si propone e caratterizza l'astrazione di processo aggregato per rappresentare computazioni collettive dinamiche concorrenti, formalizzata come estensione al field calculus e implementata in ScaFi. Inoltre, si analizza e implementa un prototipo di middleware per sistemi aggregati, in grado di supportare più stili architetturali. Infine, si applicano e valutano tecniche di programmazione aggregata in scenari di edge computing, e si propone un pattern, Self-Organising Coordination Regions, per supportare, in modo decentralizzato, attività decisionali e di regolazione in ambienti dinamici

Combining Cloud and sensors in a smart city environment

International audienceIn the current worldwide ICT scenario, a constantly growing number of ever more powerful devices (smartphones, sensors, household appliances, RFID devices, etc.) join the Internet, significantly impacting the global traffic volume (data sharing, voice, multimedia, etc.) and foreshadowing a world of (more or less) smart devices, or "things" in the Internet of Things (IoT) perspective. Heterogeneous resources can be aggregated and abstracted according to tailored thing-like semantics, thus enabling Things as a Service paradigm, or better a "Cloud of Things". In the Future Internet initiatives, sensor networks will assume even more of a crucial role, especially for making smarter cities. Smarter sensors will be the peripheral elements of a complex future ICT world. However, due to differences in the "appliances" being sensed, smart sensors are very heterogeneous in terms of communication technologies, sensing features and elaboration capabilities. This article intends to contribute to the design of a pervasive infrastructure where new generation services interact with the surrounding environment, thus creating new opportunities for contextualization and geo-awareness. The architecture proposal is based on Sensor Web Enablement standard specifications and makes use of the Contiki Operating System for accomplishing the IoT. Smart cities are assumed as the reference scenario

Building the Future Internet through FIRE

The Internet as we know it today is the result of a continuous activity for improving network communications, end user services, computational processes and also information technology infrastructures. The Internet has become a critical infrastructure for the human-being by offering complex networking services and end-user applications that all together have transformed all aspects, mainly economical, of our lives. Recently, with the advent of new paradigms and the progress in wireless technology, sensor networks and information systems and also the inexorable shift towards everything connected paradigm, first as known as the Internet of Things and lately envisioning into the Internet of Everything, a data-driven society has been created. In a data-driven society, productivity, knowledge, and experience are dependent on increasingly open, dynamic, interdependent and complex Internet services. The challenge for the Internet of the Future design is to build robust enabling technologies, implement and deploy adaptive systems, to create business opportunities considering increasing uncertainties and emergent systemic behaviors where humans and machines seamlessly cooperate

Building the Future Internet through FIRE

The Internet as we know it today is the result of a continuous activity for improving network communications, end user services, computational processes and also information technology infrastructures. The Internet has become a critical infrastructure for the human-being by offering complex networking services and end-user applications that all together have transformed all aspects, mainly economical, of our lives. Recently, with the advent of new paradigms and the progress in wireless technology, sensor networks and information systems and also the inexorable shift towards everything connected paradigm, first as known as the Internet of Things and lately envisioning into the Internet of Everything, a data-driven society has been created. In a data-driven society, productivity, knowledge, and experience are dependent on increasingly open, dynamic, interdependent and complex Internet services. The challenge for the Internet of the Future design is to build robust enabling technologies, implement and deploy adaptive systems, to create business opportunities considering increasing uncertainties and emergent systemic behaviors where humans and machines seamlessly cooperate

Social, Private, and Trusted Wearable Technology under Cloud-Aided Intermittent Wireless Connectivity

There has been an unprecedented increase in the use of smart devices globally, together with novel forms of communication, computing, and control technologies that have paved the way for a new category of devices, known as high-end wearables. While massive deployments of these objects may improve the lives of people, unauthorized access to the said private equipment and its connectivity is potentially dangerous. Hence, communication enablers together with highly-secure human authentication mechanisms have to be designed.In addition, it is important to understand how human beings, as the primary users, interact with wearable devices on a day-to-day basis; usage should be comfortable, seamless, user-friendly, and mindful of urban dynamics. Usually the connectivity between wearables and the cloud is executed through the user’s more power independent gateway: this will usually be a smartphone, which may have potentially unreliable infrastructure connectivity. In response to these unique challenges, this thesis advocates for the adoption of direct, secure, proximity-based communication enablers enhanced with multi-factor authentication (hereafter refereed to MFA) that can integrate/interact with wearable technology. Their intelligent combination together with the connection establishment automation relying on the device/user social relations would allow to reliably grant or deny access in cases of both stable and intermittent connectivity to the trusted authority running in the cloud.The introduction will list the main communication paradigms, applications, conventional network architectures, and any relevant wearable-specific challenges. Next, the work examines the improved architecture and security enablers for clusterization between wearable gateways with a proximity-based communication as a baseline. Relying on this architecture, the author then elaborates on the social ties potentially overlaying the direct connectivity management in cases of both reliable and unreliable connection to the trusted cloud. The author discusses that social-aware cooperation and trust relations between users and/or the devices themselves are beneficial for the architecture under proposal. Next, the author introduces a protocol suite that enables temporary delegation of personal device use dependent on different connectivity conditions to the cloud.After these discussions, the wearable technology is analyzed as a biometric and behavior data provider for enabling MFA. The conventional approaches of the authentication factor combination strategies are compared with the ‘intelligent’ method proposed further. The assessment finds significant advantages to the developed solution over existing ones.On the practical side, the performance evaluation of existing cryptographic primitives, as part of the experimental work, shows the possibility of developing the experimental methods further on modern wearable devices.In summary, the set of enablers developed here for wearable technology connectivity is aimed at enriching people’s everyday lives in a secure and usable way, in cases when communication to the cloud is not consistently available

Advancing IoT Platforms Interoperability

The IoT European Platforms Initiative (IoT-EPI) projects are addressing the topic of Internet of Things and Platforms for Connected Smart Objects and aim to deliver an IoT extended into a web of platforms for connected devices and objects that supports smart environments, businesses, services and persons with dynamic and adaptive configuration capabilities. The specific areas of focus of the research activities are architectures and semantic interoperability, which reliably cover multiple use cases. The goal is to deliver dynamically-configured infrastructure and integration platforms for connected smart objects covering multiple technologies and multiple intelligent artefacts. The IoT-EPI ecosystem has been created with the objective of increasing the impact of the IoT-related European research and innovation, including seven European promising projects on IoT platforms: AGILE, BIG IoT, INTER-IoT, VICINITY, SymbIoTe, bIoTope, and TagItSmart.This white paper provides an insight regarding interoperability in the IoT platforms and ecosystems created and used by IoT-EPI. The scope of this document covers the interoperability aspects, challenges and approaches that cope with interoperability in the current existing IoT platforms and presents some insights regarding the future of interoperability in this context. It presents possible solutions, and a possible IoT interoperability platform architecture