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

Software Platforms for Smart Cities: Concepts, Requirements, Challenges, and a Unified Reference Architecture

Making cities smarter help improve city services and increase citizens' quality of life. Information and communication technologies (ICT) are fundamental for progressing towards smarter city environments. Smart City software platforms potentially support the development and integration of Smart City applications. However, the ICT community must overcome current significant technological and scientific challenges before these platforms can be widely used. This paper surveys the state-of-the-art in software platforms for Smart Cities. We analyzed 23 projects with respect to the most used enabling technologies, as well as functional and non-functional requirements, classifying them into four categories: Cyber-Physical Systems, Internet of Things, Big Data, and Cloud Computing. Based on these results, we derived a reference architecture to guide the development of next-generation software platforms for Smart Cities. Finally, we enumerated the most frequently cited open research challenges, and discussed future opportunities. This survey gives important references for helping application developers, city managers, system operators, end-users, and Smart City researchers to make project, investment, and research decisions.Comment: Accepted for publication in ACM Computing Survey

On the Impact of Clustering for IoT Analytics and Message Broker Placement across Cloud and Edge

With edge computing emerging as a promising solution to cope with the challenges of Internet of Things (IoT) systems, there is an increasing need to automate the deployment of large-scale applications along with the publish/subscribe brokers they communicate over. Such a placement must adjust to the resource requirements of both applications and brokers in the heterogeneous environment of edge, fog, and cloud. In contrast to prior work focusing only on the placement of applications, this paper addresses the problem of jointly placing IoT applications and the pub/sub brokers on a set of network nodes, considering an application provider who aims at minimizing total end-to-end delays of all its subscribers. More specifically, we devise two heuristics for joint deployment of brokers and applications and analyze their performance in comparison to the current cloud-based IoT solutions wherein both the IoT applications and the brokers are located solely in the cloud. As an application provider should consider not only the location of the application users but also how they are distributed across different network components, we use von Mises distributions to model the degree of clustering of the users of an IoT application. Our simulations show that superior performance of our heuristics in comparison to cloud-based IoT operation is most pronounced under a high degree of clustering. When users of an IoT application are in close network proximity of the IoT sensors, cloud-based IoT unnecessarily introduces latency to move the data from the edge to the cloud and vice versa while processing could be performed at the edge or the fog layers.</p

Internet of Things Security Case Studies and Internet of Things Core Service Comparions

This culminating project conducted an analysis of IoT security breach case studies. The analysis identified numerous vulnerable points: software failure, node tampering attack, eavesdropping, code injection, unauthorized access, social engineering attack, hardware exploitation, and node insertion. It therefor seems that even with the proper tests conducted on vulnerabilities to discover solutions, regular end users are unable to apply patches or other technical solutions to protect themselves. This project solely focuses on analyzing of comprehensive IoT security services that come with devices connected to home network. The devices are those provided by the big three: Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, on the communication between platform and devices, how they are protected, and how costs vary depending on different situations. Also, performance differences were analyzed among different solutions based on three different scenarios with different number of settings to give a deeper insight to users. There are comparisons throughout the paper, but it is to help normal users make better choices depending on their different situations and purpose of usage

Towards a Modular Architecture for eXtended Reality Systems

For full-fledged social acceptance of eXtended Reality (XR) systems, emphasis should be on design prototypes to allow frictionless, context-aware, and secure interaction with non-specialized users. This necessitates a modular architecture to ensure that the system is versatile and applicable across applications, and is open to the integration of interaction modalities. We discuss our proposal for (and prototypical implementation of) a modular architecture for XR systems that relies on cloud infrastructure resources and edge computing frameworks with shared communication protocols for scalability. The modules are abstracted from both functional and non-functional requirements, including security