Supporting Cyber-Physical Systems with Wireless Sensor Networks: An Outlook of Software and Services

Sensing, communication, computation and control technologies are the essential building blocks of a cyber-physical system (CPS). Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are a way to support CPS as they provide fine-grained spatial-temporal sensing, communication and computation at a low premium of cost and power. In this article, we explore the fundamental concepts guiding the design and implementation of WSNs. We report the latest developments in WSN software and services for meeting existing requirements and newer demands; particularly in the areas of: operating system, simulator and emulator, programming abstraction, virtualization, IP-based communication and security, time and location, and network monitoring and management. We also reflect on the ongoing efforts in providing dependable assurances for WSN-driven CPS. Finally, we report on its applicability with a case-study on smart buildings

Quality assessment technique for ubiquitous software and middleware

The new paradigm of computing or information systems is ubiquitous computing systems. The technology-oriented issues of ubiquitous computing systems have made researchers pay much attention to the feasibility study of the technologies rather than building quality assurance indices or guidelines. In this context, measuring quality is the key to developing high-quality ubiquitous computing products. For this reason, various quality models have been defined, adopted and enhanced over the years, for example, the need for one recognised standard quality model (ISO/IEC 9126) is the result of a consensus for a software quality model on three levels: characteristics, sub-characteristics, and metrics. However, it is very much unlikely that this scheme will be directly applicable to ubiquitous computing environments which are considerably different to conventional software, trailing a big concern which is being given to reformulate existing methods, and especially to elaborate new assessment techniques for ubiquitous computing environments. This paper selects appropriate quality characteristics for the ubiquitous computing environment, which can be used as the quality target for both ubiquitous computing product evaluation processes ad development processes. Further, each of the quality characteristics has been expanded with evaluation questions and metrics, in some cases with measures. In addition, this quality model has been applied to the industrial setting of the ubiquitous computing environment. These have revealed that while the approach was sound, there are some parts to be more developed in the future

Security and Privacy Challenges in the Internet of Things

The future Internet of Things as an intelligent collaboration of miniaturized sensors poses new challenges to security and end-user privacy. The ITU has identified that the protection of data and privacy of users is one of the key challenges in the Internet of Things [Int05]: lack of confidence about privacy will result in decreased adoption among users and therefore is one of the driving factors in the success of the Internet of Things. This paper gives an overview, categorization, and analysis of security and privacy challenges in the Internet of Things

Cooperation in Wireless Ad Hoc and Sensor Networks

Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia TIN2006-15617-C03-03 (AmbientNet)Junta de Andalucía P0-6TIC-2298 (SemiWheelNav)Junta de Andalucía P07-TIC-02476 (ARTICA

Robotic ubiquitous cognitive ecology for smart homes

Robotic ecologies are networks of heterogeneous robotic devices pervasively embedded in everyday environments, where they cooperate to perform complex tasks. While their potential makes them increasingly popular, one fundamental problem is how to make them both autonomous and adaptive, so as to reduce the amount of preparation, pre-programming and human supervision that they require in real world applications. The project RUBICON develops learning solutions which yield cheaper, adaptive and efficient coordination of robotic ecologies. The approach we pursue builds upon a unique combination of methods from cognitive robotics, machine learning, planning and agent- based control, and wireless sensor networks. This paper illustrates the innovations advanced by RUBICON in each of these fronts before describing how the resulting techniques have been integrated and applied to a smart home scenario. The resulting system is able to provide useful services and pro-actively assist the users in their activities. RUBICON learns through an incremental and progressive approach driven by the feed- back received from its own activities and from the user, while also self-organizing the manner in which it uses available sensors, actuators and other functional components in the process. This paper summarises some of the lessons learned by adopting such an approach and outlines promising directions for future work

An Expert-Driven Approach for Collaborative Knowledge Acquisition

Knowledge management is key for any organization. Huge amount of data is made available to organizations by pervasive technologies such as smart mobile devices. However, the knowledge to use such data is still missing, and organizations typically fail to exploit it. This paper proposes an architectural design that aims at addressing such problem. It focuses on knowledge management for collaborative systems in which complex and multicausal situations are presented to interacting actors on a large geographical area with possible low connectivity.VIII Workshop Innovación en Sistemas de Software (WISS).Red de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI