IoT interoperability:a hub-based approach

Interoperability in the Internet of Things is critical for emerging services and applications. In this paper we advocate the use of IoT ‘hubs’ to aggregate things using web protocols, and suggest a staged approach to interoperability. In the context of a UK government funded project involving 8 IoT projects to address cross-domain IoT interoperability, we introduce the HyperCat IoT catalogue specification. We then describe the tools and techniques we developed to adapt an existing data portal and IoT platform to this specification, and provide an IoT hub focused on the highways industry called ‘Smart Streets’. Based on our experience developing this large scale IoT hub, we outline lessons learned which we hope will contribute to ongoing efforts to create an interoperable global IoT ecosystem

Smart Cities:an IoT-centric approach

A number of recent Smart City testbeds and deployments have focused on the use of the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm and technologies for improving the efficiency of city infrastructures. Building on this work, we have explored the use of IoT hubs as easy-to-use aggregators and focal points for access to emerging data infrastructures of smart cities. A hub can support not only access to infrastructure data, but also participatory sensing and crowd sourced data where city employees and citizens contribute directly to the data infrastructure of a city. In this way, smart cities can realize a variety of new applications created by local entrepreneurs and community groups without the need for ongoing coordination by governments. In this paper, we outline the growing interest in a hub-centric approach to the IoT and discuss our own experiences in building an IoT hub for two Smart City projects, one in the UK and the other in Canada

Toward interoperability in a web of things

In this position paper we explore the challenges and issues around interoperability in the web of things. A key concern is how to increase interoperability while maintaining a high degree of innovation and exploration in the community. To that end we propose a hub- centric approach toward interoperability consisting of four levels or stages. We are working to validate this approach in the context of a large-scale IoT ecosystem project consisting of eight IoT hubs in different domains where a key requirement is hub-to-hub and hub- application interoperability

City Hub:a cloud based IoT platform for Smart Cities

Cloud based Smart City hubs are an attractive approach to addressing some of the complex issues faced when deploying PaaS infrastructure for Smart Cities. In this paper we introduce the general notion of IoT hubs and then discusses our work to generalize our IoT hub as a Smart City PaaS. Two key issues are identified, support for hybrid public/private cloud and interoperability. We briefly describe our approach to these issues and discuss our experiences deploying two cloud-based Smart City hubs, one in the UK and the other in Canada

Smart cities:engaging users and developers to foster innovation ecosystems

Increasingly, city planners and government officials understand that cities are engines of innovation and wealth creation. Equally, there is a growing understanding that the application of technology in support of Smart Cities helps grow the urban economy and deliver better services to citizens. However, often Smart City projects are top- down projects focused on improving city infrastructure using technology. We argue, and our experience over the last decade has shown, that often, citizen driven, or grass-roots based Smart City projects deliver better value and sustainable success. In this paper we report on our work to engage citizens and the technology community in smart city projects and highlight some lessons learnt from our experiences. We show how a modest investment in a Smart City Data Hub (using our IoT platform – WoTKit) plus development tools based on Node-RED helps bootstrap a Smart City innovation cluster

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

Toward a distributed data flow platform for the web of things (distributed node-RED)

Several web-based platforms have emerged to ease the development of interactive or near real-time IoT applications by providing a way to connect things and services together and process the data they emit using a data flow paradigm. While these platforms have been found to be useful on their own, many IoT scenarios require the coordination of computing resources across the network: on servers, gateways and devices themselves. To address this, we explore how to extend existing IoT data flow platforms to create a system suitable for execution on a range of run time environments, toward supporting distributed IoT programs that can be partitioned between servers, gateways and devices. Eventually we aim to automate the distribution of data flows using appropriate distribution mechanism, and optimization heuristics based on participating resource capabilities and constraints imposed by the developer