Immersive interconnected virtual and augmented reality : a 5G and IoT perspective

Despite remarkable advances, current augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) applications are a largely individual and local experience. Interconnected AR/VR, where participants can virtually interact across vast distances, remains a distant dream. The great barrier that stands between current technology and such applications is the stringent end-to-end latency requirement, which should not exceed 20 ms in order to avoid motion sickness and other discomforts. Bringing AR/VR to the next level to enable immersive interconnected AR/VR will require significant advances towards 5G ultra-reliable low-latency communication (URLLC) and a Tactile Internet of Things (IoT). In this article, we articulate the technical challenges to enable a future AR/VR end-to-end architecture, that combines 5G URLLC and Tactile IoT technology to support this next generation of interconnected AR/VR applications. Through the use of IoT sensors and actuators, AR/VR applications will be aware of the environmental and user context, supporting human-centric adaptations of the application logic, and lifelike interactions with the virtual environment. We present potential use cases and the required technological building blocks. For each of them, we delve into the current state of the art and challenges that need to be addressed before the dream of remote AR/VR interaction can become reality

Security architecture for Fog-To-Cloud continuum system

Nowadays, by increasing the number of connected devices to Internet rapidly, cloud computing cannot handle the real-time processing. Therefore, fog computing was emerged for providing data processing, filtering, aggregating, storing, network, and computing closer to the users. Fog computing provides real-time processing with lower latency than cloud. However, fog computing did not come to compete with cloud, it comes to complete the cloud. Therefore, a hierarchical Fog-to-Cloud (F2C) continuum system was introduced. The F2C system brings the collaboration between distributed fogs and centralized cloud. In F2C systems, one of the main challenges is security. Traditional cloud as security provider is not suitable for the F2C system due to be a single-point-of-failure; and even the increasing number of devices at the edge of the network brings scalability issues. Furthermore, traditional cloud security cannot be applied to the fog devices due to their lower computational power than cloud. On the other hand, considering fog nodes as security providers for the edge of the network brings Quality of Service (QoS) issues due to huge fog device’s computational power consumption by security algorithms. There are some security solutions for fog computing but they are not considering the hierarchical fog to cloud characteristics that can cause a no-secure collaboration between fog and cloud. In this thesis, the security considerations, attacks, challenges, requirements, and existing solutions are deeply analyzed and reviewed. And finally, a decoupled security architecture is proposed to provide the demanded security in hierarchical and distributed fashion with less impact on the QoS.Hoy en día, al aumentar rápidamente el número de dispositivos conectados a Internet, el cloud computing no puede gestionar el procesamiento en tiempo real. Por lo tanto, la informática de niebla surgió para proporcionar procesamiento de datos, filtrado, agregación, almacenamiento, red y computación más cercana a los usuarios. La computación nebulizada proporciona procesamiento en tiempo real con menor latencia que la nube. Sin embargo, la informática de niebla no llegó a competir con la nube, sino que viene a completar la nube. Por lo tanto, se introdujo un sistema continuo jerárquico de niebla a nube (F2C). El sistema F2C aporta la colaboración entre las nieblas distribuidas y la nube centralizada. En los sistemas F2C, uno de los principales retos es la seguridad. La nube tradicional como proveedor de seguridad no es adecuada para el sistema F2C debido a que se trata de un único punto de fallo; e incluso el creciente número de dispositivos en el borde de la red trae consigo problemas de escalabilidad. Además, la seguridad tradicional de la nube no se puede aplicar a los dispositivos de niebla debido a su menor poder computacional que la nube. Por otro lado, considerar los nodos de niebla como proveedores de seguridad para el borde de la red trae problemas de Calidad de Servicio (QoS) debido al enorme consumo de energía computacional del dispositivo de niebla por parte de los algoritmos de seguridad. Existen algunas soluciones de seguridad para la informática de niebla, pero no están considerando las características de niebla a nube jerárquica que pueden causar una colaboración insegura entre niebla y nube. En esta tesis, las consideraciones de seguridad, los ataques, los desafíos, los requisitos y las soluciones existentes se analizan y revisan en profundidad. Y finalmente, se propone una arquitectura de seguridad desacoplada para proporcionar la seguridad exigida de forma jerárquica y distribuida con menor impacto en la QoS.Postprint (published version

Advancing IoT Platforms Interoperability

The IoT European Platforms Initiative (IoT-EPI) projects are addressing the topic of Internet of Things and Platforms for Connected Smart Objects and aim to deliver an IoT extended into a web of platforms for connected devices and objects that supports smart environments, businesses, services and persons with dynamic and adaptive configuration capabilities. The specific areas of focus of the research activities are architectures and semantic interoperability, which reliably cover multiple use cases. The goal is to deliver dynamically-configured infrastructure and integration platforms for connected smart objects covering multiple technologies and multiple intelligent artefacts. The IoT-EPI ecosystem has been created with the objective of increasing the impact of the IoT-related European research and innovation, including seven European promising projects on IoT platforms: AGILE, BIG IoT, INTER-IoT, VICINITY, SymbIoTe, bIoTope, and TagItSmart.This white paper provides an insight regarding interoperability in the IoT platforms and ecosystems created and used by IoT-EPI. The scope of this document covers the interoperability aspects, challenges and approaches that cope with interoperability in the current existing IoT platforms and presents some insights regarding the future of interoperability in this context. It presents possible solutions, and a possible IoT interoperability platform architecture

A System Architecture for Software-Defined Industrial Internet of Things

Wireless sensor networks have been a driving force of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) advancement in the process control and manufacturing industry. The emergence of IIoT opens great potential for the ubiquitous field device connectivity and manageability with an integrated and standardized architecture from low-level device operations to high-level data-centric application interactions. This technological development requires software definability in the key architectural elements of IIoT, including wireless field devices, IIoT gateways, network infrastructure, and IIoT sensor cloud services. In this paper, a novel software-defined IIoT (SD-IIoT) is proposed in order to solve essential challenges in a holistic IIoT system, such as reliability, security, timeliness scalability, and quality of service (QoS). A new IIoT system architecture is proposed based on the latest networking technologies such as WirelessHART, WebSocket, IETF constrained application protocol (CoAP) and software-defined networking (SDN). A new scheme based on CoAP and SDN is proposed to solve the QoS issues. Computer experiments in a case study are implemented to show the effectiveness of the proposed system architecture.Comment: To be published by IEEE ICUWB-201