5,323 research outputs found
Enabling a lightweight Edge Gateway-as-a-Service for the Internet of Things
International audienceSince its introduction, the Internet of Things (IoT) has changed several aspects of our lives, leading to the commercialization of different heterogeneous devices. In order to bridge the gap among these heterogeneous devices, in some of the most common IoT use cases -e.g., smart home, smart buildings, etc.-the presence of a gateway as an enabler of interoperability is required. In this paper, we introduce the concept of a Gateway-as- a-Service (GaaS), a lightweight device that can be shared between different users thanks to the use of virtualization techniques.Performance has been evaluated on real hardware and results demonstrate the lightweight characteristics of the proposal
A gap analysis of Internet-of-Things platforms
We are experiencing an abundance of Internet-of-Things (IoT) middleware
solutions that provide connectivity for sensors and actuators to the Internet.
To gain a widespread adoption, these middleware solutions, referred to as
platforms, have to meet the expectations of different players in the IoT
ecosystem, including device providers, application developers, and end-users,
among others. In this article, we evaluate a representative sample of these
platforms, both proprietary and open-source, on the basis of their ability to
meet the expectations of different IoT users. The evaluation is thus more
focused on how ready and usable these platforms are for IoT ecosystem players,
rather than on the peculiarities of the underlying technological layers. The
evaluation is carried out as a gap analysis of the current IoT landscape with
respect to (i) the support for heterogeneous sensing and actuating
technologies, (ii) the data ownership and its implications for security and
privacy, (iii) data processing and data sharing capabilities, (iv) the support
offered to application developers, (v) the completeness of an IoT ecosystem,
and (vi) the availability of dedicated IoT marketplaces. The gap analysis aims
to highlight the deficiencies of today's solutions to improve their integration
to tomorrow's ecosystems. In order to strengthen the finding of our analysis,
we conducted a survey among the partners of the Finnish IoT program, counting
over 350 experts, to evaluate the most critical issues for the development of
future IoT platforms. Based on the results of our analysis and our survey, we
conclude this article with a list of recommendations for extending these IoT
platforms in order to fill in the gaps.Comment: 15 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables, Accepted for publication in Computer
Communications, special issue on the Internet of Things: Research challenges
and solution
EC-CENTRIC: An Energy- and Context-Centric Perspective on IoT Systems and Protocol Design
The radio transceiver of an IoT device is often where most of the energy is consumed. For this reason, most research so far has focused on low power circuit and energy efficient physical layer designs, with the goal of reducing the average energy per information bit required for communication. While these efforts are valuable per se, their actual effectiveness can be partially neutralized by ill-designed network, processing and resource management solutions, which can become a primary factor of performance degradation, in terms of throughput, responsiveness and energy efficiency. The objective of this paper is to describe an energy-centric and context-aware optimization framework that accounts for the energy impact of the fundamental functionalities of an IoT system and that proceeds along three main technical thrusts: 1) balancing signal-dependent processing techniques (compression and feature extraction) and communication tasks; 2) jointly designing channel access and routing protocols to maximize the network lifetime; 3) providing self-adaptability to different operating conditions through the adoption of suitable learning architectures and of flexible/reconfigurable algorithms and protocols. After discussing this framework, we present some preliminary results that validate the effectiveness of our proposed line of action, and show how the use of adaptive signal processing and channel access techniques allows an IoT network to dynamically tune lifetime for signal distortion, according to the requirements dictated by the application
Container network functions: bringing NFV to the network edge
In order to cope with the increasing network utilization driven by new mobile clients, and to satisfy demand for new network services and performance guarantees, telecommunication service providers are exploiting virtualization over their network by implementing network services in virtual machines, decoupled from legacy hardware accelerated appliances. This effort, known as NFV, reduces OPEX and provides new business opportunities. At the same time, next generation mobile, enterprise, and IoT networks are introducing the concept of computing capabilities being pushed at the network edge, in close proximity of the users. However, the heavy footprint of today's NFV platforms prevents them from operating at the network edge. In this article, we identify the opportunities of virtualization at the network edge and present Glasgow Network Functions (GNF), a container-based NFV platform that runs and orchestrates lightweight container VNFs, saving core network utilization and providing lower latency. Finally, we demonstrate three useful examples of the platform: IoT DDoS remediation, on-demand troubleshooting for telco networks, and supporting roaming of network functions
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