Editorial of the 2019 Workshop on Very Large Internet of Things (VLIoT)

We are proud of presenting the outcome of this third edition of the "Very Large Internet of Things" (VLIoT) workshop, which was held in Los Angeles (USA) in August 2019, in conjunction with the 45th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB). Following the success path of the two previous workshop editions - in Munich (2017) and in Rio de Janeiro (2018) - VLIoT 2019 kept its tradition to be a vivid and high-quality technical forum for researchers and practitioners working with Internet of Things to share their experiences, visions and latest findings, most of them regarding the design, implementation, deployment and management of IoT systems at very large and scale. This editorial of the special issue introduces and introduces all papers presented at the workshop

Overview of the 2021 Edition of the Workshop on Very Large Internet of Things (VLIoT 2021)

The Very Large Internet of Things (VLIoT) workshop aims at discussing the solutions of problems arising especially for large-scale Internet-of-Things (IoT) configurations. After online conferences and workshops are becoming the normal mode for running scientific events, after continuously monitoring the global COVID-19 pandemic this year with falling incidence rates in the last times due to vaccination successes, the workshop changes the format the first time to a hybrid event. This ensures that still problems are overcome like travel restrictions, but offers face-to-face discussions among those going to the local event. A hybrid format has still chances like an increased number of participants, less travel burdens and saving budget, but offers the possibility for going to the local event already for a large portion of the participants. Hence we received many high-quality submissions, from which we accepted 9 to be introduced in this editorial

Data Lifetime Estimation in a Multicast-Based CoAP Proxy

In this work we consider kernel-based record lifetime estimation in a proactive Internet of Things (IoT) proxy with multicast based cache management. Multicast refreshment requests were based on lifetime expiration for a predefined number of records. To reduce the traffic volume in the IoT domain, we assume that only nodes where the observed physical variable has changed its value will respond to the multicast request. For estimating the data lifetime at the proxy, we use Gaussian kernels, assuming that the intrinsic data lifetime probability distribution was taken from Erlang-k family of sub-exponential distributions. In this setup, we consider that the proxy connects to the IoT domain using an IEEE 802.15.4-compatible wireless network. Results indicate that narrow and symmetrical lifetime probability distributions require more frequent multicasting refreshments compared to wider and asymmetric ones. This increases traffic intensity and energy consumption in IoT domain. We quantify finding with numerical results

Distributed Data-Gathering and -Processing in Smart Cities: An Information-Centric Approach

The technological advancements along with the proliferation of smart and connected devices (things) motivated the exploration of the creation of smart cities aimed at improving the quality of life, economic growth, and efficient resource utilization. Some recent initiatives defined a smart city network as the interconnection of the existing independent and heterogeneous networks and the infrastructure. However, considering the heterogeneity of the devices, communication technologies, network protocols, and platforms the interoperability of these networks is a challenge requiring more attention. In this paper, we propose the design of a novel Information-Centric Smart City architecture (iSmart), focusing on the demand of the future applications, such as efficient machineto-machine communication, low latency computation offloading, large data communication requirements, and advanced security. In designing iSmart, we use the Named-Data Networking (NDN) architecture as the underlying communication substrate to promote semantics-based communication and achieve seamless compute/data sharing

Building Next Generation IoT Infrastructure for Enabling M2M Crypto Economy

As Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are becoming part of our lives, there is a growing interest to enable using them in our daily lives even for micropayments. This interest stems from many factors including privacy, convenience and overhead/fraud that comes with credit cards. In this regard, Internet of Things (IoT) devices can also benefit from this feature for enabling touchless payments for users. However, there is even a bigger opportunity there considering the nature and diversity of very large-scale unattended IoT devices. The integration of any IoT device with blockchain including cryptocurrencies and smart contracts can trigger a machine-to-machine (M2M) economy revolution by streamlining business among IoT devices. Under such a future business model, IoT devices can autonomously request a service and make a payment in return. Such a large-scale ecosystem should rely on various components thus requiring a paradigm shift on the current design and understanding of the IoT systems. In particular, decentralized architecture of blockchain with cryptocurrency and smart contract capability can be a key enabler. In this vision paper, we advocate the need and necessary elements of a M2M crypto economy infrastructure and investigate the role of blockchain in realizing this vision. We specifically focus on the advantages and challenges of blockchain-based systems along with the existing proposed solutions. We then offer several future directions in creating such a M2M economy

Data-Centric Edge Federation: A Multi-Edge Architecture for Data Stream Processing of IoT Applications

Emerging Internet of Things (IoT) applications demand data stream processing with low latency and high processing power. Although the cloud naturally provides huge processing capacity, high latency to move data to the datacenter is prohibitive. Edge computing is a recent paradigm where part of computing and storage resources are pushed from the cloud to the edge of the network. In edge computing, edge providers manage their resources near to IoT devices to meet low latency application requirements and reduce the network core bandwidth. To reach the maximum potential of edge computing, a big challenge is to promote the cooperation between edge providers. Currently, edge computing architectures are severely limited for providing cooperation mechanisms between distinct edge providers. In this paper, we propose a edge federation to leverage the cooperation between different edge providers. The edge federation uses interest information propagated in data streams that travel between edge providers to allow an stakeholder to react to inefficient resource allocation and service provision. The main objective of the federation is to create a consortium of edge providers to provide cooperation mechanisms and define and standardize the application interests. The proposed edge federation is (i) data-centric, since edge providers can share common interests and data and, thus, establish cooperation to increase the capacity to provide services for applications; (ii) distributed, since no assumption is made concerning the geo-location of the edge providers and their logical connections; (iii) opportunistic, because an edge provider can react dynamically to the environment change ; (iv) scalable, since the edge provider has the ability to analyze a data flow passing by its infrastructure and make decisions to increase network performance locally, which impacts the global performanc

A Mobile and Web Platform for Crowdsourcing OBD-II Vehicle Data

On-Board Diagnostics 2 (OBD-II) protocol allows monitoring vehicle status parameters. Analyzing them is highly useful for Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) research, applications and services. Unfortunately, large-scale OBD datasets are not publicly available due to the effort of producing them as well as due to competitiveness in the automotive sector. This paper proposes a framework to enable a worldwide crowdsourcing approach to the generation of OBD-II data, similarly to OpenStreetMap (OSM) for cartography. The proposal comprises: (i) an extension of the GPX data format for route logging, augmented with OBD-II parameters; (ii) a fork of an open source Android OBD-II data logger to store and upload route traces, and (iii) a Web platform extending the OSM codebase to support storage, search and editing of traces with embedded OBD data. A full platform prototype has been developed and early scalability tests have been carried out in various workloads to assess the sustainability of the proposal

An Architecture for Distributed Video Stream Processing in IoMT Systems

In Internet of Multimedia Things (IoMT) systems, Internet cameras installed in buildings and streets are major sources of sensing data. From these large-scale video streams, it is possible to infer various information providing the current status of the monitored environments. Some events of interest that have occurred in these observed locations produce insights that might demand near real-time responses from the system. In this context, the event processing depends on data freshness, and computation time, otherwise, the processing results and activities become less valuable or even worthless. An encouraging plan to support the computational demand for latency-sensitive applications of largely geo-distributed systems is applying Edge Computing resources to perform the video stream processing stages. However, some of these stages use deep learning methods for the detection and identification of objects of interest, which are voracious consumers of computational resources. To address these issues, this work proposes an architecture to distribute the video stream processing stages in multiple tasks running on different edge nodes, reducing network overhead and consequent delays. The Multilevel Information Fusion Edge Architecture (MELINDA) encapsulates the data analytics algorithms provided by machine learning methods in different types of processing tasks organized by multiple data-abstraction levels. This distribution strategy, combined with the new category of Edge AI hardware specifically designed to develop smart systems, is a promising approach to address the resource limitations of edge devices

Development and Evaluation of a Publish/Subscribe IoT Data Sharing Model with LoRaWAN

Publish/subscribe architectures are becoming very common for many IoT environments such as power grid, manufacturing and factory automation. In these architectures, many different communication standards and middleware can be supported to ensure interoperability. One of the widely used publish/subscribe protocol is MQTT where a broker acts among publishers and subscribers to relay data on certain topics. While MQTT can be easily setup on cloud environments to perform research experiments, its large-scale and quick deployment for IoT environments with a widely used wireless MAC layer protocol such as LoRaWAN has not been thoroughly tested. Therefore, in this paper we develop and present a simulation framework in NS-3 to offer MQTT-based on publish/subscribe architecture that can also support LoRaWAN communication standard. To this end, we utilize NS-3's LoRaWAN library and integrate it with a broker that connects to other types of publishers/subscribers. We enable unicast capability from the broker to LoRaWAN end-devices while supporting multiple topics at the broker. We tested several scenarios under this IoT architecture to demonstrate its feasibility while assessing the performance at scale