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

Service Virtualisation of Internet-of-Things Devices: Techniques and Challenges

Service virtualization is an approach that uses virtualized environments to automatically test enterprise services in production-like conditions. Many techniques have been proposed to provide such a realistic environment for enterprise services. The Internet-of-Things (IoT) is an emerging field which connects a diverse set of devices over different transport layers, using a variety of protocols. Provisioning a virtual testbed of IoT devices can accelerate IoT application development by enabling automated testing without requiring a continuous connection to the physical devices. One solution is to expand existing enterprise service virtualization to IoT environments. There are various structural differences between the two environments that should be considered to implement appropriate service virtualization for IoT. This paper examines the structural differences between various IoT protocols and enterprise protocols and identifies key technical challenges that need to be addressed to implement service virtualization in IoT environments.Comment: 4 page

Hierarchical video surveillance architecture: a chassis for video big data analytics and exploration

There is increasing reliance on video surveillance systems for systematic derivation, analysis and interpretation of the data needed for predicting, planning, evaluating and implementing public safety. This is evident from the massive number of surveillance cameras deployed across public locations. For example, in July 2013, the British Security Industry Association (BSIA) reported that over 4 million CCTV cameras had been installed in Britain alone. The BSIA also reveal that only 1.5% of these are state owned. In this paper, we propose a framework that allows access to data from privately owned cameras, with the aim of increasing the efficiency and accuracy of public safety planning, security activities, and decision support systems that are based on video integrated surveillance systems. The accuracy of results obtained from government-owned public safety infrastructure would improve greatly if privately owned surveillance systems ‘expose’ relevant video-generated metadata events, such as triggered alerts and also permit query of a metadata repository. Subsequently, a police officer, for example, with an appropriate level of system permission can query unified video systems across a large geographical area such as a city or a country to predict the location of an interesting entity, such as a pedestrian or a vehicle. This becomes possible with our proposed novel hierarchical architecture, the Fused Video Surveillance Architecture (FVSA). At the high level, FVSA comprises of a hardware framework that is supported by a multi-layer abstraction software interface. It presents video surveillance systems as an adapted computational grid of intelligent services, which is integration-enabled to communicate with other compatible systems in the Internet of Things (IoT)

Reconfigurable Security: Edge Computing-based Framework for IoT

In various scenarios, achieving security between IoT devices is challenging since the devices may have different dedicated communication standards, resource constraints as well as various applications. In this article, we first provide requirements and existing solutions for IoT security. We then introduce a new reconfigurable security framework based on edge computing, which utilizes a near-user edge device, i.e., security agent, to simplify key management and offload the computational costs of security algorithms at IoT devices. This framework is designed to overcome the challenges including high computation costs, low flexibility in key management, and low compatibility in deploying new security algorithms in IoT, especially when adopting advanced cryptographic primitives. We also provide the design principles of the reconfigurable security framework, the exemplary security protocols for anonymous authentication and secure data access control, and the performance analysis in terms of feasibility and usability. The reconfigurable security framework paves a new way to strength IoT security by edge computing.Comment: under submission to possible journal publication

Leveraging upon standards to build the Internet of things

Smart embedded objects will become an important part of what is called the Internet of Things. However, the integration of embedded devices into the Internet introduces several challenges, since many of the existing Internet technologies and protocols were not designed for this class of devices. In the past few years, there were many efforts to enable the extension of Internet technologies to constrained devices. Initially, this resulted in proprietary protocols and architectures. Later, the integration of constrained devices into the Internet was embraced by IETF, moving towards standardized IP-based protocols. Long time, most efforts were focusing on the networking layer. More recently, the IETF CoRE working group started working on an embedded counterpart of HTTP, allowing the integration of constrained devices into existing service networks. In this paper, we will briefly review the history of integrating constrained devices into the Internet, with a prime focus on the IETF standardization work in the ROLL and CoRE working groups. This is further complemented with some research results that illustrate how these novel technologies can be extended or used to tackle other problems.The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2 007-2013) under grant agreement n°258885 (SPITFIRE project), from the iMinds ICON projects GreenWeCan and O’CareCloudS, and a VLI R PhD scholarship to Isam Ishaq

A role-based software architecture to support mobile service computing in IoT scenarios

The interaction among components of an IoT-based system usually requires using low latency or real time for message delivery, depending on the application needs and the quality of the communication links among the components. Moreover, in some cases, this interaction should consider the use of communication links with poor or uncertain Quality of Service (QoS). Research efforts in communication support for IoT scenarios have overlooked the challenge of providing real-time interaction support in unstable links, making these systems use dedicated networks that are expensive and usually limited in terms of physical coverage and robustness. This paper presents an alternative to address such a communication challenge, through the use of a model that allows soft real-time interaction among components of an IoT-based system. The behavior of the proposed model was validated using state machine theory, opening an opportunity to explore a whole new branch of smart distributed solutions and to extend the state-of-the-art and the-state-of-the-practice in this particular IoT study scenario.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Mobile Edge Computing Empowers Internet of Things

In this paper, we propose a Mobile Edge Internet of Things (MEIoT) architecture by leveraging the fiber-wireless access technology, the cloudlet concept, and the software defined networking framework. The MEIoT architecture brings computing and storage resources close to Internet of Things (IoT) devices in order to speed up IoT data sharing and analytics. Specifically, the IoT devices (belonging to the same user) are associated to a specific proxy Virtual Machine (VM) in the nearby cloudlet. The proxy VM stores and analyzes the IoT data (generated by its IoT devices) in real-time. Moreover, we introduce the semantic and social IoT technology in the context of MEIoT to solve the interoperability and inefficient access control problem in the IoT system. In addition, we propose two dynamic proxy VM migration methods to minimize the end-to-end delay between proxy VMs and their IoT devices and to minimize the total on-grid energy consumption of the cloudlets, respectively. Performance of the proposed methods are validated via extensive simulations