Towards NFC payments using a lightweight architecture for the Web of Things

The Web (and Internet) of Things has seen the rapid emergence of new protocols and standards, which provide for innovative models of interaction for applications. One such model fostered by the Web of Things (WoT) ecosystem is that of contactless interaction between devices. Near Field Communication (NFC) technology is one such enabler of contactless interactions. Contactless technology for the WoT requires all parties to agree one common definition and implementation and, in this paper, we propose a new lightweight architecture for the WoT, based on RESTful approaches. We show how the proposed architecture supports the concept of a mobile wallet, enabling users to make secure payments employing NFC technology with their mobile devices. In so doing, we argue that the vision of the WoT is brought a step closer to fruition

A survey of communication protocols for internet of things and related challenges of fog and cloud computing integration

The fast increment in the number of IoT (Internet of Things) devices is accelerating the research on new solutions to make cloud services scalable. In this context, the novel concept of fog computing as well as the combined fog-to-cloud computing paradigm is becoming essential to decentralize the cloud, while bringing the services closer to the end-system. This article surveys e application layer communication protocols to fulfill the IoT communication requirements, and their potential for implementation in fog- and cloud-based IoT systems. To this end, the article first briefly presents potential protocol candidates, including request-reply and publish-subscribe protocols. After that, the article surveys these protocols based on their main characteristics, as well as the main performance issues, including latency, energy consumption, and network throughput. These findings are thereafter used to place the protocols in each segment of the system (IoT, fog, cloud), and thus opens up the discussion on their choice, interoperability, and wider system integration. The survey is expected to be useful to system architects and protocol designers when choosing the communication protocols in an integrated IoT-to-fog-to-cloud system architecture.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

IETF standardization in the field of the Internet of Things (IoT): a survey

Smart embedded objects will become an important part of what is called the Internet of Things. However, the integration of embedded devices into the Internet introduces several challenges, since many of the existing Internet technologies and protocols were not designed for this class of devices. In the past few years, there have been many efforts to enable the extension of Internet technologies to constrained devices. Initially, this resulted in proprietary protocols and architectures. Later, the integration of constrained devices into the Internet was embraced by IETF, moving towards standardized IP-based protocols. In this paper, we will briefly review the history of integrating constrained devices into the Internet, followed by an extensive overview of IETF standardization work in the 6LoWPAN, ROLL and CoRE working groups. This is complemented with a broad overview of related research results that illustrate how this work can be extended or used to tackle other problems and with a discussion on open issues and challenges. As such the aim of this paper is twofold: apart from giving readers solid insights in IETF standardization work on the Internet of Things, it also aims to encourage readers to further explore the world of Internet-connected objects, pointing to future research opportunities

CYCLONE Unified Deployment and Management of Federated, Multi-Cloud Applications

Various Cloud layers have to work in concert in order to manage and deploy complex multi-cloud applications, executing sophisticated workflows for Cloud resource deployment, activation, adjustment, interaction, and monitoring. While there are ample solutions for managing individual Cloud aspects (e.g. network controllers, deployment tools, and application security software), there are no well-integrated suites for managing an entire multi cloud environment with multiple providers and deployment models. This paper presents the CYCLONE architecture that integrates a number of existing solutions to create an open, unified, holistic Cloud management platform for multi-cloud applications, tailored to the needs of research organizations and SMEs. It discusses major challenges in providing a network and security infrastructure for the Intercloud and concludes with the demonstration how the architecture is implemented in a real life bioinformatics use case

Leveraging upon standards to build the Internet of things

Smart embedded objects will become an important part of what is called the Internet of Things. However, the integration of embedded devices into the Internet introduces several challenges, since many of the existing Internet technologies and protocols were not designed for this class of devices. In the past few years, there were many efforts to enable the extension of Internet technologies to constrained devices. Initially, this resulted in proprietary protocols and architectures. Later, the integration of constrained devices into the Internet was embraced by IETF, moving towards standardized IP-based protocols. Long time, most efforts were focusing on the networking layer. More recently, the IETF CoRE working group started working on an embedded counterpart of HTTP, allowing the integration of constrained devices into existing service networks. In this paper, we will briefly review the history of integrating constrained devices into the Internet, with a prime focus on the IETF standardization work in the ROLL and CoRE working groups. This is further complemented with some research results that illustrate how these novel technologies can be extended or used to tackle other problems.The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2 007-2013) under grant agreement n°258885 (SPITFIRE project), from the iMinds ICON projects GreenWeCan and O’CareCloudS, and a VLI R PhD scholarship to Isam Ishaq