Internet of Robotic Things Intelligent Connectivity and Platforms

The Internet of Things (IoT) and Industrial IoT (IIoT) have developed rapidly in the past few years, as both the Internet and “things” have evolved significantly. “Things” now range from simple Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) devices to smart wireless sensors, intelligent wireless sensors and actuators, robotic things, and autonomous vehicles operating in consumer, business, and industrial environments. The emergence of “intelligent things” (static or mobile) in collaborative autonomous fleets requires new architectures, connectivity paradigms, trustworthiness frameworks, and platforms for the integration of applications across different business and industrial domains. These new applications accelerate the development of autonomous system design paradigms and the proliferation of the Internet of Robotic Things (IoRT). In IoRT, collaborative robotic things can communicate with other things, learn autonomously, interact safely with the environment, humans and other things, and gain qualities like self-maintenance, self-awareness, self-healing, and fail-operational behavior. IoRT applications can make use of the individual, collaborative, and collective intelligence of robotic things, as well as information from the infrastructure and operating context to plan, implement and accomplish tasks under different environmental conditions and uncertainties. The continuous, real-time interaction with the environment makes perception, location, communication, cognition, computation, connectivity, propulsion, and integration of federated IoRT and digital platforms important components of new-generation IoRT applications. This paper reviews the taxonomy of the IoRT, emphasizing the IoRT intelligent connectivity, architectures, interoperability, and trustworthiness framework, and surveys the technologies that enable the application of the IoRT across different domains to perform missions more efficiently, productively, and completely. The aim is to provide a novel perspective on the IoRT that involves communication among robotic things and humans and highlights the convergence of several technologies and interactions between different taxonomies used in the literature.publishedVersio

Secure microservice communication between heterogeneous service meshes

Microservice architecture is an emerging paradigm that has been unceasingly adopted by large organizations to develop flexible, agile, and distributed applications. This architecture involves breaking a large monolithic application into multiple services that can be deployed and scaled autonomously. Moreover, it helps to improve the resiliency and fault tolerance of a large-scale distributed application. However, this architecture is not without challenges. It increases the number of services communicating with each other, leading to an increased surface of attack. To overcome the security vulnerabilities, it is important that the communication between the services must be secured. Service Mesh is increasingly embraced to resolve the security challenges of microservices and facilitate secure and reliable communication. It is a dedicated infrastructure layer on top of microservices responsible for their networking logic. It uses sidecar proxies to ensure secure and encrypted communication between the services. This thesis studies different deployment models of service meshes, identifies the reasons for federating heterogeneous service meshes, investigates the existing problems faced during the federation process, and proposes a solution to achieve a secure federation between heterogeneous service meshes, i.e., Istio and Consul. The security of the proposed solution was evaluated against the basic security requirements, such as Authenticity, Confidentiality, and Integrity. The evaluation results proved the solution to be secure and feasible for implementation

Opportunities and Challenges of Joint Edge and Fog Orchestration

Pushing contents, applications, and network functions closer to end users is necessary to cope with the huge data volume and low latency required in future 5G networks. Edge and fog frameworks have emerged recently to address this challenge. Whilst the edge framework was more infrastructure focused and more mobile operator-oriented, the fog was more pervasive and included any node (stationary or mobile), including terminal devices. This article analyzes the opportunities and challenges to integrate, federate, and jointly orchestrate the edge and fog resources into a unified framework.This work has been partially funded by the H2020 collaborative Europe/Taiwan research project 5G-CORAL (grant num. 761586

File System Support for Privacy-Preserving Analysis and Forensics in Low-Bandwidth Edge Environments

In this paper, we present initial results from our distributed edge systems research in the domain of sustainable harvesting of common good resources in the Arctic Ocean. Specifically, we are developing a digital platform for real-time privacy-preserving sustainability management in the domain of commercial fishery surveillance operations. This is in response to potentially privacy-infringing mandates from some governments to combat overfishing and other sustainability challenges. Our approach is to deploy sensory devices and distributed artificial intelligence algorithms on mobile, offshore fishing vessels and at mainland central control centers. To facilitate this, we need a novel data plane supporting efficient, available, secure, tamper-proof, and compliant data management in this weakly connected offshore environment. We have built our first prototype of Dorvu, a novel distributed file system in this context. Our devised architecture, the design trade-offs among conflicting properties, and our initial experiences are further detailed in this paper

Experimentation as a service over semantically interoperable Internet of Things testbeds

Infrastructures enabling experimental assessment of Internet of Things (IoT) solutions are scarce. Moreover, such infrastructures are typically bound to a specific application domain, thus, not facilitating the testing of solutions with a horizontal approach. This paper presents a platform that supports Experimentation as s Service (EaaS) over a federation of IoT testbeds. This platform brings two major advances. Firstly, it leverages semantic web technologies to enable interoperability so that testbed agnostic access to the underlying facilities is allowed. Secondly, a set of tools ease both the experimentation workflow and the federation of other IoT deployments, independently of their domain of interest. Apart from the platform specification, the paper presents how this design has been actually instantiated into a cloud-based EaaS platform that has been used for supporting a wide variety of novel experiments targeting different research and innovation challenges. In this respect, the paper summarizes some of the experiences from these experiments and the key performance metrics that this instance of the platform has exhibited during the experimentation

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

Iot-enabled smart cities: evolution and outlook

For the last decade the Smart City concept has been under development, fostered by the growing urbanization of the world’s population and the need to handle the challenges that such a scenario raises. During this time many Smart City projects have been executed–some as proof-of-concept, but a growing number resulting in permanent, production-level deployments, improving the operation of the city and the quality of life of its citizens. Thus, Smart Cities are still a highly relevant paradigm which needs further development before it reaches its full potential and provides robust and resilient solutions. In this paper, the focus is set on the Internet of Things (IoT) as an enabling technology for the Smart City. In this sense, the paper reviews the current landscape of IoT-enabled Smart Cities, surveying relevant experiences and city initiatives that have embedded IoT within their city services and how they have generated an impact. The paper discusses the key technologies that have been developed and how they are contributing to the realization of the Smart City. Moreover, it presents some challenges that remain open ahead of us and which are the initiatives and technologies that are under development to tackle them.This research was partially funded by Spain State Research Agency (AEI) by means of the project FIERCE: Future Internet Enabled Resilient CitiEs (RTI2018-093475-A-I00). Prof. Song was supported by Smart City R&D project of the Korea Agency for Infrastructure Technology Advancement (KAIA) grant funded by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport (MOLIT), Ministry of Science and ICT (MSIT) (Grant 18NSPS-B149386-01)

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