Quality of Information in Mobile Crowdsensing: Survey and Research Challenges

Smartphones have become the most pervasive devices in people's lives, and are clearly transforming the way we live and perceive technology. Today's smartphones benefit from almost ubiquitous Internet connectivity and come equipped with a plethora of inexpensive yet powerful embedded sensors, such as accelerometer, gyroscope, microphone, and camera. This unique combination has enabled revolutionary applications based on the mobile crowdsensing paradigm, such as real-time road traffic monitoring, air and noise pollution, crime control, and wildlife monitoring, just to name a few. Differently from prior sensing paradigms, humans are now the primary actors of the sensing process, since they become fundamental in retrieving reliable and up-to-date information about the event being monitored. As humans may behave unreliably or maliciously, assessing and guaranteeing Quality of Information (QoI) becomes more important than ever. In this paper, we provide a new framework for defining and enforcing the QoI in mobile crowdsensing, and analyze in depth the current state-of-the-art on the topic. We also outline novel research challenges, along with possible directions of future work.Comment: To appear in ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks (TOSN

Middleware Technologies for Cloud of Things - a survey

The next wave of communication and applications rely on the new services provided by Internet of Things which is becoming an important aspect in human and machines future. The IoT services are a key solution for providing smart environments in homes, buildings and cities. In the era of a massive number of connected things and objects with a high grow rate, several challenges have been raised such as management, aggregation and storage for big produced data. In order to tackle some of these issues, cloud computing emerged to IoT as Cloud of Things (CoT) which provides virtually unlimited cloud services to enhance the large scale IoT platforms. There are several factors to be considered in design and implementation of a CoT platform. One of the most important and challenging problems is the heterogeneity of different objects. This problem can be addressed by deploying suitable "Middleware". Middleware sits between things and applications that make a reliable platform for communication among things with different interfaces, operating systems, and architectures. The main aim of this paper is to study the middleware technologies for CoT. Toward this end, we first present the main features and characteristics of middlewares. Next we study different architecture styles and service domains. Then we presents several middlewares that are suitable for CoT based platforms and lastly a list of current challenges and issues in design of CoT based middlewares is discussed.Comment: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352864817301268, Digital Communications and Networks, Elsevier (2017

Middleware Technologies for Cloud of Things - a survey

The next wave of communication and applications rely on the new services provided by Internet of Things which is becoming an important aspect in human and machines future. The IoT services are a key solution for providing smart environments in homes, buildings and cities. In the era of a massive number of connected things and objects with a high grow rate, several challenges have been raised such as management, aggregation and storage for big produced data. In order to tackle some of these issues, cloud computing emerged to IoT as Cloud of Things (CoT) which provides virtually unlimited cloud services to enhance the large scale IoT platforms. There are several factors to be considered in design and implementation of a CoT platform. One of the most important and challenging problems is the heterogeneity of different objects. This problem can be addressed by deploying suitable "Middleware". Middleware sits between things and applications that make a reliable platform for communication among things with different interfaces, operating systems, and architectures. The main aim of this paper is to study the middleware technologies for CoT. Toward this end, we first present the main features and characteristics of middlewares. Next we study different architecture styles and service domains. Then we presents several middlewares that are suitable for CoT based platforms and lastly a list of current challenges and issues in design of CoT based middlewares is discussed.Comment: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352864817301268, Digital Communications and Networks, Elsevier (2017

Service-oriented system engineering

Service-Oriented System Engineering (SOSE) is one of the emerging research areas that involves a number of research challenges in engineering service-oriented systems, the architecture and computing paradigm as well as the development and management of service-oriented systems. Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) exploits services as the fundamental elements for developing computer-based systems. It has been applied to various areas and promotes fundamental changes to system architecture, especially changing the way software systems are being analyzed, architected, designed, implemented, tested, evaluated, delivered, consumed, maintained and evolved. The innovations of SOC also offer many interesting avenues of research for scientific and industrial communities. In this paper, we present the concepts of the SOSE from the related work. The motivation, opportunities and challenges of the SOSE is highlighted thereafter. In addition to this, a brief overview of accepted papers in our Special Issue on SOSE is presented. Finally we highlight and summarize this paper.N/

Enabling discoverable trusted services for highly dynamic decentralized workflows

Fifth generation (5G) mobile networks will revolutionize edge-based computing by providing fast and reliable network capabilities to remote sensors, devices and microservices. This heralds new opportunities for researchers, allowing remote instrumentation and analytic capabilities to be as accessible as local resources. The increased availability of remote data and services presents new opportunities for collaboration, yet introduces challenges for workflow orchestration, which will need to adapt to consider an increased choice of available services, including those from trusted partners and the wider community. In this paper we outline a workflow approach that provides decentralized discovery and orchestration of verifiably trustable services in support of multi-party operations. We base this work on the adoption of standardised data models and protocols emerging from hypermedia research, which has demonstrated success in using combinations of Linked Data, Web of Things (WoT) and semantic technologies to provide mechanisms for autonomous goal-directed agents to discover, execute and reuse new heterogeneous resources and behaviours in large-scale, dynamic environments. We adopt Verifiable Credentials (VCs) to securely share information amongst peers based on prior service usage in a cryptographically secure and tamperproof way, providing a trust-based framework for ratifying service qualities. Collating these new service description channels and integrating with existing decentralized workflow research based on vector symbolic architecture (VSA) provides an enhanced semantic search space for efficient and trusted service discovery that will be necessary for 5G edge-computing environments

Trustworthiness in Social Big Data Incorporating Semantic Analysis, Machine Learning and Distributed Data Processing

This thesis presents several state-of-the-art approaches constructed for the purpose of (i) studying the trustworthiness of users in Online Social Network platforms, (ii) deriving concealed knowledge from their textual content, and (iii) classifying and predicting the domain knowledge of users and their content. The developed approaches are refined through proof-of-concept experiments, several benchmark comparisons, and appropriate and rigorous evaluation metrics to verify and validate their effectiveness and efficiency, and hence, those of the applied frameworks

A trust framework for peer-to-peer interaction in ad hoc networks

PhDAs a wider public is increasingly adopting mobile devices with diverse applications, the idea of who to trust while on the move becomes a crucial one. The need to find dependable partners to interact is further exacerbated in situations where one finds oneself out of the range of backbone structures such as wireless base stations or cellular networks. One solution is to generate self-started networks, a variant of which is the ad hoc network that promotes peer-to-peer networking. The work in this thesis is aimed at defining a framework for such an ad hoc network that provides ways for participants to distinguish and collaborate with their most trustworthy neighbours. In this framework, entities create the ability to generate trust information by directly observing the behaviour of their peers. Such trust information is also shared in order to assist those entities in situations where prior interactions with their target peers may not have existed. The key novelty points of the framework focus on aggregating the trust evaluation process around the most trustworthy nodes thereby creating a hierarchy of nodes that are distinguished by the class, defined by cluster heads, to which they belong. Furthermore, the impact of such a framework in generating additional overheads for the network is minimised through the use of clusters. By design, the framework also houses a rule-based mechanism to thwart misbehaving behaviour or non-cooperation. Key performance indicators are also defined within this work that allow a framework to be quickly analysed through snapshot data, a concept analogous to those used within financial circles when assessing companies. This is also a novel point that may provide the basis for directly comparing models with different underlying technologies. The end result is a trust framework that fully meets the basic requirements for a sustainable model of trust that can be developed onto an ad hoc network and that provides enhancements in efficiency (using clustering) and trust performance

High Quality P2P Service Provisioning via Decentralized Trust Management

Trust management is essential to fostering cooperation and high quality service provisioning in several peer-to-peer (P2P) applications. Among those applications are customer-to-customer (C2C) trading sites and markets of services implemented on top of centralized infrastructures, P2P systems, or online social networks. Under these application contexts, existing work does not adequately address the heterogeneity of the problem settings in practice. This heterogeneity includes the different approaches employed by the participants to evaluate trustworthiness of their partners, the diversity in contextual factors that influence service provisioning quality, as well as the variety of possible behavioral patterns of the participants. This thesis presents the design and usage of appropriate computational trust models to enforce cooperation and ensure high quality P2P service provisioning, considering the above heterogeneity issues. In this thesis, first I will propose a graphical probabilistic framework for peers to model and evaluate trustworthiness of the others in a highly heterogeneous setting. The framework targets many important issues in trust research literature: the multi-dimensionality of trust, the reliability of different rating sources, and the personalized modeling and computation of trust in a participant based on the quality of services it provides. Next, an analysis on the effective usage of computational trust models in environments where participants exhibit various behaviors, e.g., honest, rational, and malicious, will be presented. I provide theoretical results showing the conditions under which cooperation emerges when using trust learning models with a given detecting accuracy and how cooperation can still be sustained while reducing the cost and accuracy of those models. As another contribution, I also design and implement a general prototyping and simulation framework for reputation-based trust systems. The developed simulator can be used for many purposes, such as to discover new trust-related phenomena or to evaluate performance of a trust learning algorithm in complex settings. Two potential applications of computational trust models are then discussed: (1) the selection and ranking of (Web) services based on quality ratings from reputable users, and (2) the use of a trust model to choose reliable delegates in a key recovery scenario in a distributed online social network. Finally, I will identify a number of various issues in building next-generation, open reputation-based trust management systems as well as propose several future research directions starting from the work in this thesis