D2D Communications for Large-Scale Fog Platforms: Enabling Direct M2M Interactions

To many, fog computing is considered the next step beyond the current centralized cloud that will support the forthcoming Internet of Things (IoT) revolution. While IoT devices will still communicate with applications running in the cloud, localized fog clusters will appear with IoT devices communicating with application logic running on a proximate fog node. This will add proximity-based machine-to-machine (M2M) communications to standard cloud-computing traffic, and it calls for efficient mobility management for entire fog clusters and energy-efficient communication within them. In this context, long-term evolution-advanced (LTE-A) technology is expected to play a major role as a communication infrastructure that guarantees low deployment costs, native mobility support, and plug-and-play seamless configuration. We investigate the role of LTE-A in future large-scale IoT systems. In particular, we analyze how the recently standardized device-to-device (D2D) communication mode can be exploited to effectively enable direct M2M interactions within fog clusters, and we assess the expected benefits in terms of network resources and energy consumption. Moreover, we show how the fog-cluster architecture, and its localized-communication paradigm, can be leveraged to devise enhanced mobility management, building on what LTE-A already has to offer

Heterogeneous component interactions: Sensors integration into multimedia applications

Resource-constrained embedded and mobile devices are becoming increasingly common. Since few years, some mobile and ubiquitous devices such as wireless sensor, able to be aware of their physical environment, appeared. Such devices enable proposing applications which adapt to user's need according the context evolution. It implies the collaboration of sensors and software components which differ on their nature and their communication mechanisms. This paper proposes a unified component model in order to easily design applications based on software components and sensors without taking care of their nature. Then it presents a state of the art of communication problems linked to heterogeneous components and proposes an interaction mechanism which ensures information exchanges between wireless sensors and software components

Smart Vehicle to Grid Interface Project: Electromobility Management System Architecture and Field Test Results

This paper presents and discusses the electromobility management system developed in the context of the SMARTV2G project, enabling the automatic control of plug-in electric vehicles' (PEVs') charging processes. The paper describes the architecture and the software/hardware components of the electromobility management system. The focus is put in particular on the implementation of a centralized demand side management control algorithm, which allows remote real time control of the charging stations in the field, according to preferences and constraints expressed by all the actors involved (in particular the distribution system operator and the PEV users). The results of the field tests are reported and discussed, highlighting critical issues raised from the field experience.Comment: To appear in IEEE International Electric Vehicle Conference (IEEE IEVC 2014

Middleware Technologies for Cloud of Things - a survey

The next wave of communication and applications rely on the new services provided by Internet of Things which is becoming an important aspect in human and machines future. The IoT services are a key solution for providing smart environments in homes, buildings and cities. In the era of a massive number of connected things and objects with a high grow rate, several challenges have been raised such as management, aggregation and storage for big produced data. In order to tackle some of these issues, cloud computing emerged to IoT as Cloud of Things (CoT) which provides virtually unlimited cloud services to enhance the large scale IoT platforms. There are several factors to be considered in design and implementation of a CoT platform. One of the most important and challenging problems is the heterogeneity of different objects. This problem can be addressed by deploying suitable "Middleware". Middleware sits between things and applications that make a reliable platform for communication among things with different interfaces, operating systems, and architectures. The main aim of this paper is to study the middleware technologies for CoT. Toward this end, we first present the main features and characteristics of middlewares. Next we study different architecture styles and service domains. Then we presents several middlewares that are suitable for CoT based platforms and lastly a list of current challenges and issues in design of CoT based middlewares is discussed.Comment: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352864817301268, Digital Communications and Networks, Elsevier (2017

Middleware Technologies for Cloud of Things - a survey

The next wave of communication and applications rely on the new services provided by Internet of Things which is becoming an important aspect in human and machines future. The IoT services are a key solution for providing smart environments in homes, buildings and cities. In the era of a massive number of connected things and objects with a high grow rate, several challenges have been raised such as management, aggregation and storage for big produced data. In order to tackle some of these issues, cloud computing emerged to IoT as Cloud of Things (CoT) which provides virtually unlimited cloud services to enhance the large scale IoT platforms. There are several factors to be considered in design and implementation of a CoT platform. One of the most important and challenging problems is the heterogeneity of different objects. This problem can be addressed by deploying suitable "Middleware". Middleware sits between things and applications that make a reliable platform for communication among things with different interfaces, operating systems, and architectures. The main aim of this paper is to study the middleware technologies for CoT. Toward this end, we first present the main features and characteristics of middlewares. Next we study different architecture styles and service domains. Then we presents several middlewares that are suitable for CoT based platforms and lastly a list of current challenges and issues in design of CoT based middlewares is discussed.Comment: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352864817301268, Digital Communications and Networks, Elsevier (2017

Pervasive Gaming: Testing Future Context Aware Applications

More and more technical research projects take place that weave together elements of real and virtual life to provide a new experience defined as pervasive. They bank on the development of mobile services to drive the expansion of pervasive applications and in particular pervasive games. Using geolocalisation, local networks and short range radio frequencies technologies like RFID or other tagging technologies, pervasive games rely on a close relationship to the environment and thus explore the space between fiction and reality. This is their main quality but possibly their main weakness as the development relies on the production of specific contents in relation to the context of use. In this article, we propose to explore what this entirely new paradigm for game design implies in terms of production and how to overcome the limitations due to this dependency of contents and context. Based on our experience of three pervasive games developed within research projects on adhoc wifi (ANR-Safari and ANRTranshumance) and RFID networks (ANR-PLUG), this paper presents different options to reducing the cost of content production relying on either traditional editors or grass root contributions.pervasive games, content production, game design, geolocalised technologies.

Federated Robust Embedded Systems: Concepts and Challenges

The development within the area of embedded systems (ESs) is moving rapidly, not least due to falling costs of computation and communication equipment. It is believed that increased communication opportunities will lead to the future ESs no longer being parts of isolated products, but rather parts of larger communities or federations of ESs, within which information is exchanged for the benefit of all participants. This vision is asserted by a number of interrelated research topics, such as the internet of things, cyber-physical systems, systems of systems, and multi-agent systems. In this work, the focus is primarily on ESs, with their specific real-time and safety requirements. While the vision of interconnected ESs is quite promising, it also brings great challenges to the development of future systems in an efficient, safe, and reliable way. In this work, a pre-study has been carried out in order to gain a better understanding about common concepts and challenges that naturally arise in federations of ESs. The work was organized around a series of workshops, with contributions from both academic participants and industrial partners with a strong experience in ES development. During the workshops, a portfolio of possible ES federation scenarios was collected, and a number of application examples were discussed more thoroughly on different abstraction levels, starting from screening the nature of interactions on the federation level and proceeding down to the implementation details within each ES. These discussions led to a better understanding of what can be expected in the future federated ESs. In this report, the discussed applications are summarized, together with their characteristics, challenges, and necessary solution elements, providing a ground for the future research within the area of communicating ESs

Secure Communication Architecture for Dynamic Energy Management in Smart Grid

open access articleSmart grid takes advantage of communication technologies for efficient energy management and utilization. It entails sacrifice from consumers in terms of reducing load during peak hours by using a dynamic energy pricing model. To enable an active participation of consumers in load management, the concept of home energy gateway (HEG) has recently been proposed in the literature. However, the HEG concept is rather new, and the literature still lacks to address challenges related to data representation, seamless discovery, interoperability, security, and privacy. This paper presents the design of a communication framework that effectively copes with the interoperability and integration challenges between devices from different manufacturers. The proposed communication framework offers seamless auto-discovery and zero- con figuration-based networking between heterogeneous devices at consumer sites. It uses elliptic-curve-based security mechanism for protecting consumers' privacy and providing the best possible shield against different types of cyberattacks. Experiments in real networking environment validated that the proposed communication framework is lightweight, secure, portable with low-bandwidth requirement, and flexible to be adopted for dynamic energy management in smart grid

Adding Policy-based Control to Mobile Hosts Switching between Streaming Proxies

We add a simple policy-based control component to mobile hosts that enables them to control the continuous reception of live multimedia content (e.g. a TV broadcast) while they switch between different distributors of that content. Policy-based control provides a flexible means to automate the switching behavior of mobile hosts. The policies react to changes in the mobile host's environment (e.g. when a hotspot network appears) and determine when and how to invoke an earlier developed application-level protocol to discover the capabilities (e.g. supported encodings) of the content distributors and to execute the switches. The design of the control component is based on the IETF policy model, but extended and applied at the application-level instead of at the network-level. We implemented the system and deployed it in a small-scale test bed

Charging ahead on the transition to electric vehicles with standard 120 v wall outlets

Electrification of transportation is needed soon and at significant scale to meet climate goals, but electric vehicle adoption has been slow and there has been little systematic analysis to show that today's electric vehicles meet the needs of drivers. We apply detailed physics-based models of electric vehicles with data on how drivers use their cars on a daily basis. We show that the energy storage limits of today's electric vehicles are outweighed by their high efficiency and the fact that driving in the United States seldom exceeds 100 km of daily travel. When accounting for these factors, we show that the normal daily travel of 85-89% of drivers in the United States can be satisfied with electric vehicles charging with standard 120 V wall outlets at home only. Further, we show that 77-79% of drivers on their normal daily driving will have over 60 km of buffer range for unexpected trips. We quantify the sensitivities to terrain, high ancillary power draw, and battery degradation and show that an extreme case with all trips on a 3% uphill grade still shows the daily travel of 70% of drivers being satisfied with electric vehicles. These findings show that today's electric vehicles can satisfy the daily driving needs of a significant majority of drivers using only 120 V wall outlets that are already the standard across the United States