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

The Dark Side(-Channel) of Mobile Devices: A Survey on Network Traffic Analysis

In recent years, mobile devices (e.g., smartphones and tablets) have met an increasing commercial success and have become a fundamental element of the everyday life for billions of people all around the world. Mobile devices are used not only for traditional communication activities (e.g., voice calls and messages) but also for more advanced tasks made possible by an enormous amount of multi-purpose applications (e.g., finance, gaming, and shopping). As a result, those devices generate a significant network traffic (a consistent part of the overall Internet traffic). For this reason, the research community has been investigating security and privacy issues that are related to the network traffic generated by mobile devices, which could be analyzed to obtain information useful for a variety of goals (ranging from device security and network optimization, to fine-grained user profiling). In this paper, we review the works that contributed to the state of the art of network traffic analysis targeting mobile devices. In particular, we present a systematic classification of the works in the literature according to three criteria: (i) the goal of the analysis; (ii) the point where the network traffic is captured; and (iii) the targeted mobile platforms. In this survey, we consider points of capturing such as Wi-Fi Access Points, software simulation, and inside real mobile devices or emulators. For the surveyed works, we review and compare analysis techniques, validation methods, and achieved results. We also discuss possible countermeasures, challenges and possible directions for future research on mobile traffic analysis and other emerging domains (e.g., Internet of Things). We believe our survey will be a reference work for researchers and practitioners in this research field.Comment: 55 page

The broadcast marketplace : Designing a more efficient local marketplace for goods and services

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2012.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 71-74).Today's online marketplaces for goods and services are imperfect. Participants make an initial post expressing their intention to buy or sell an object, but all offers on this post are private. These offers can be seen as expressions of other participants' intentions to buy or sell the same item. What if these offers were as public as the initial post? Would this decrease market friction and enable participants to close transactions more efficiently? What if every post and offer were tagged with a location enabling a real-time proximal picture of supply and demand? In this thesis, we explore a different kind of marketplace, a broadcast marketplace, where a combination of public post, proximal awareness and mobility decrease the friction of information flow and facilitate efficiency. This thesis explores the design, implementation and deployment of a system which enables users to efficiently view, understand and act upon this proximal picture of supply and demand. To test the viability of the broadcast marketplace we deployed Peddl, an implementation of the idea, in the MIT and Cambridge, MA community. Over the course of the trial we collected data on 5,839 unique visitors and 805 registered users, who made 726 posts totaling $234,913 in value. From this data we show that the additional transparency of supply and demand afforded by our design results in increased marketplace activity.Matthew Blackshaw.S.M

Systems for Challenged Network Environments.

Developing regions face significant challenges in network access, making even simple network tasks unpleasant and rich media prohibitively difficult to access. Even as cellular network coverage is approaching a near-universal reach, good network connectivity remains scarce and expensive in many emerging markets. The underlying theme in this dissertation is designing network systems that better accommodate users in emerging markets. To do so, this dissertation begins with a nuanced analysis of content access behavior for web users in developing regions. This analysis finds the personalization of content access---and the fragmentation that results from it---to be significant factors in undermining many existing web acceleration mechanisms. The dissertation explores content access behavior from logs collected at shared internet access sites, as well as user activity information obtained from a commercial social networking service with over a hundred million members worldwide. Based on these observations, the dissertation then discusses two systems designed for improving end-user experience in accessing and using content in constrained networks. First, it deals with the challenge of distributing private content in these networks. By leveraging the wide availability of cellular telephones, the dissertation describes a system for personal content distribution based on user access behavior. The system enables users to request future data accesses, and it schedules content transfers according to current and expected capacity. Second, the dissertation looks at routing bulk data in challenged networks, and describes an experimentation platform for building systems for challenged networks. This platform enables researchers to quickly prototype systems for challenged networks, and iteratively evaluate these systems using mobility and network emulation. The dissertation describes a few data routing systems that were built atop this experimentation platform. Finally, the dissertation discusses the marketplace and service discovery considerations that are important in making these systems viable for developing-region use. In particular, it presents an extensible, auction-based market platform that relies on widely available communication tools for conveniently discovering and trading digital services and goods in developing regions. Collectively, this dissertation brings together several projects that aim to understand and improve end-user experience in challenged networks endemic to developing regions.Ph.D.Computer Science & EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/91401/1/azarias_1.pd

Project Venezia-Gondola (A Framework for P-Commerce)

A novel project named Venezia-Gondola (Project V-G) was presented, which describes an application platform that enables the activities of Peer-to-Peer commerce (P-Commerce). A new pattern called the Inverted Model-View-Controller (IMVC) pattern was claimed that is suitable for P-Commerce. The author also explains the principles of the Project V-G and possible architecture for future development

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse

Development of Android Mobile Application for Cloud Server

The number of Smartphone users and mobile applications are growing rapidly. Though smart phones are expected to have PC-like functionality, hardware resources such as CPUs, memory and batteries are still limited. To solve this resource problem, many researchers have proposed architectures to use server resources in the cloud for mobile devices. The system proposed conceptual architecture of development of android cloud for efficient implementation of platform as a service, which enables multiple user Android applications on cloud server via network. Though Android is mainly designed for physical Smartphone, Android’s too the features are useful to construct a server platform. Android is open-source product and run sonanx86 CPU. Android is an open-source mobile OS initiated by Google. The main reason to use Android as a server platform is that it is able to run not only for smart honesbutalso for the x86 platform including servers.We show three types of multi-tenant architecture for an Android server platform and discuss the direction to take to it reality