Middleware for the Internet of Things, Design Goals and Challenges

As the number of wireless devices increases and their size becomes smaller, there can be more interaction between everyday objects of our life. With advances in RFID chips and the introduction of new generations of these devices that are smaller and cheaper, it is possible to put a wireless interface on almost all everyday objects: vehicles, clothes, foodstuffs, etc. This concept is called the \textit{Internet of Things}. Interaction with thousands of wireless devices leads to a continuous and massive flow of events which are generated spontaneously. The question of how to deal with this enormous number of events is challenging and introduces new design goals for a communication mechanism. In this paper we argue that a middleware together with suitable linguistic abstractions is a proper solution. We also point out the challenges in developing this middleware. Moreover, we give an overview of recent related work and describe why they fail to address these challenges

Lightweight IoT middleware for rapid application development

Sensors connected to the cloud services equipped with data analytics has created a plethora of new type of applications ranging from personal to an industrial level forming to what is known today as Internet of Things (IoT). IoT-based system follows a pattern of data collection, data analytics, automation, and system improvement recommendations. However, most applications would have its own unique requirements in terms of the type of the smart devices, communication technologies as well as its application provisioning service. In order to enable an IoT-based system, various services are commercially available that provide services such as backend-as-a-service (BaaS) and software-as-a-service (SaaS) hosted in the cloud. This, in turn, raises the issues of security and privacy. However there is no plug-and-play IoT middleware framework that could be deployed out of the box for on-premise server. This paper aims at providing a lightweight IoT middleware that can be used to enable IoT applications owned by the individuals or organizations that effectively securing the data on-premise or in remote server. Specifically, the middleware with a standardized application programming interface (API) that could adapt to the application requirements through high level abstraction and interacts with the application service provider is proposed. Each API endpoint would be secured using Access Control List (ACL) and easily integratable with any other modules to ensure the scalability of the system as well as easing system deployment. In addition, this middleware could be deployed in a distributed manner and coordinate among themselves to fulfil the application requirements. A middleware is presented in this paper with GET and POST requests that are lightweight in size with a footprint of less than 1 KB and a round trip time of less than 1 second to facilitate rapid application development by individuals or organizations for securing IoT resources

CHOReOS: Scaling Choreographies for the Internet of the Future

Poster presented at Middleware '10 11th International Middleware Conference Bangalore, India -- November 29 - December 03, 2010 ACM New York, NY, USAThe Internet has been growing at a impressive rate in many aspects such as size, heterogeneity, and usage. This growth forces the continuous improvement of Internet infrastructure technologies. The Future Internet concept magnifies the required shift for Internet technologies, which shall allow supporting the continuously growing scale of the converging networking world together with new generations of services made available to and brought by the broad mass of end users. The CHOReOS project positions itself in this vision of the Future Internet, whilst focusing on the Future Internet of Services. This research project aims at assisting the engineering of software service compositions in this novel networking environment by devising a dynamic development process, and associated methods, tools and middleware, to sustain the composition of services in the form of large-scale choreographies for the Internet of the future

A global generic architecture for the future Internet of Things

The envisioned 6A Connectivity of the future IoT aims to allow people and objects to be connected anytime, anyplace, with anything and anyone, using any path/network and any service. Because of heterogeneous resources, incompatible standards and communication patterns, the current IoT is constrained to specific devices, platforms, networks and domains. As the standards have been accepted worldwide, most existing IoT platforms use Web Services to integrate heterogeneous devices. Human-readable protocols of Web Services cause non-negligible overhead for object-to-object communication. Other issues, such as: lack of applications and modularized services, high cost of devices and software development also hinder the common use of the IoT. In this paper, a global generic architecture for the future IoT (GGIoT) is proposed to meet the envisioned 6A Connectivity of the future IoT. GGIoT is independent of particular devices, platforms, networks, domains and applications, and it minimizes transmission message size to fit devices with minimal capabilities, such as passive RFID tags. Thus, lower physical size and cost are possible, and network overhead can be reduced. The proposed GGIoT is evaluated via performance analysis and proof-of-concept case studies

Ubiquitous and context-aware computing modelling : study of devices integration in their environment

Dissertation presented as the partial requirement for obtaining a Master's degree in Information Management, specialization in Information Systems and Technologies ManagementIn an almost imperceptible way, ubiquitous and context-aware computing make part of our everyday lives, as the world has developed in an interconnected way between humans and technological devices. This interconnectedness raises the need to integrate humans’ interaction with the different devices they use in different social contexts and environments. In the proposed research, it is suggested the development of new scenario building based on a current ubiquitous computing model dedicated to the environment context-awareness. We will also follow previous research made on the formal structure computation model based on social paradigm theory, dedicated to embed devices into different context environments with social roles developed by Santos (2012/2015). Furthermore, several socially relevant context scenarios are to be identified and studied. Once identified, we gather and document the requirements that devices should have, according to the model, in order to achieve a correct integration in their contextual environment

Prototipação Rápida de Aplicações Orientadas à Contexto em Cidades Inteligentes - O caso BuzApp

CAPES - Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível SuperiorTrabalho de Conclusão de Curso (Graduação)Este estudo objetivou em explorar o uso de técnicas de prototipação rápida para a criação de aplicações sensíveis ao contexto. Para isso, pesquisou-se, de acordo com os teóricos e documentos oficiais, sobre meios de prototipação rápida, middlewares, context-aware applications e ferramentas de desenvolvimento de aplicações móveis. Para realizar as avaliações neste estudo, utilizou-se de comparações entre middlewares e o estudo de ferramentas e técnicas de desenvolvimento de prototipação rápida. Desta forma, os objetivos foram alcançados e, como resultado, uma aplicação foi desenvolvida e publicada online para que qualquer pessoa com acesso à internet possa acessá-la e testá-la. Por fim, as técnicas aqui estudadas e usadas, assim como as formas de aplicação, foi uma grande contribuição para o desenvolvimento web de protótipos e do uso de aplicações context-aware

Information Collection Platform for Smart Nudging. A Microservice-Based Approach.

This thesis aims to explore the problem of integrating heterogeneous data sources into the Smart Nudge system. The Smart Nudge system is a system that produces personalised nudges that are contextually relevant to each user. The system relies on access to live data that could be constructed and presented in specific ways to influence users behaviour towards an agreed-upon goal. The goal is to ascertain the suitability of a microservice-based approach to designing the component that is responsible for integrating various data sources. A small prototype of two microservices provided a practical look at integrating real-world sources, namely a Norwegian weather service and a bus tracking service in Chicago. The proposed architecture is analysed using a set of requirements derived from a theoretical examination of the Smart Nudge system and a general theoretical look at decomposition techniques used to evaluate microservice architectures. Evaluating the prototype revealed that the Smart Nudge system is highly dependant on augmenting data sources with additional meta-data to produce personalised nudges. The analysis indicates that a data-driven microservice-based architecture seems well suited to resolving some of the problems and requirements that are somewhat unique to the Smart Nudge system setting

Implementation of Middleware for Internet of Things in Asset Tracking Applications: In-lining Approach

ThesisInternet of Things (IoT) is a concept that involves giving objects a digital identity and limited artificial intelligence, which helps the objects to be interactive, process data, make decisions, communicate and react to events virtually with minimum human intervention. IoT is intensified by advancements in hardware and software engineering and promises to close the gap that exists between the physical and digital worlds. IoT is paving ways to address complex phenomena, through designing and implementation of intelligent systems that can monitor phenomena, perform real-time data interpretation, react to events, and swiftly communicate observations. The primary goal of IoT is ubiquitous computing using wireless sensors and communication protocols such as Bluetooth, Wireless Fidelity (Wi-Fi), ZigBee and General Packet Radio Service (GPRS). Insecurity, of assets and lives, is a problem around the world. One application area of IoT is tracking and monitoring; it could therefore be used to solve asset insecurity. A preliminary investigation revealed that security systems in place at Central University of Technology, Free State (CUT) are disjointed; they do not instantaneously and intelligently conscientize security personnel about security breaches using real time messages. As a result, many assets have been stolen, particularly laptops. The main objective of this research was to prove that a real-life application built over a generic IoT architecture that innovatively and intelligently integrates: (1) wireless sensors; (2) radio frequency identification (RFID) tags and readers; (3) fingerprint readers; and (4) mobile phones, can be used to dispel laptop theft. To achieve this, the researcher developed a system, using the heterogeneous devices mentioned above and a middleware that harnessed their unique capabilities to bring out the full potential of IoT in intelligently curbing laptop theft. The resulting system has the ability to: (1) monitor the presence of a laptop using RFID reader that pro-actively interrogates a passive tag attached to the laptop; (2) detect unauthorized removal of a laptop under monitoring; (3) instantly communicate security violations via cell phones; and (4) use Windows location sensors to track the position of a laptop using Googlemaps. The system also manages administrative tasks such as laptop registration, assignment and withdrawal which used to be handled manually. Experiments conducted using the resulting system prototype proved the hypothesis outlined for this research

Extending BPMN for integration of internet of things devices with process-driven applications

Internet of Things (IoT) is a rising technology, which is becoming an important building block of information systems in many different areas, including enterprise environments. For IoT to become a part of process-driven enterprise applications, process modelling notations have to be extended. This thesis focuses on introducing a modelling notation for modelling of properties of real-world entities. It also improves the modelling of IoT devices and different communication types used by them. To solve stated problems, we propose six solutions in form of modelling approaches with corresponding extensions to BPMN. Proposed solutions are based upon and evaluated against four sets of identified requirements. Solution, which satisfies the highest number of requirements, is our final solution and is an adequate answer to our research questions