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

Internet of robotic things : converging sensing/actuating, hypoconnectivity, artificial intelligence and IoT Platforms

The Internet of Things (IoT) concept is evolving rapidly and influencing newdevelopments in various application domains, such as the Internet of MobileThings (IoMT), Autonomous Internet of Things (A-IoT), Autonomous Systemof Things (ASoT), Internet of Autonomous Things (IoAT), Internetof Things Clouds (IoT-C) and the Internet of Robotic Things (IoRT) etc.that are progressing/advancing by using IoT technology. The IoT influencerepresents new development and deployment challenges in different areassuch as seamless platform integration, context based cognitive network integration,new mobile sensor/actuator network paradigms, things identification(addressing, naming in IoT) and dynamic things discoverability and manyothers. The IoRT represents new convergence challenges and their need to be addressed, in one side the programmability and the communication ofmultiple heterogeneous mobile/autonomous/robotic things for cooperating,their coordination, configuration, exchange of information, security, safetyand protection. Developments in IoT heterogeneous parallel processing/communication and dynamic systems based on parallelism and concurrencyrequire new ideas for integrating the intelligent “devices”, collaborativerobots (COBOTS), into IoT applications. Dynamic maintainability, selfhealing,self-repair of resources, changing resource state, (re-) configurationand context based IoT systems for service implementation and integrationwith IoT network service composition are of paramount importance whennew “cognitive devices” are becoming active participants in IoT applications.This chapter aims to be an overview of the IoRT concept, technologies,architectures and applications and to provide a comprehensive coverage offuture challenges, developments and applications

hpDJ: An automated DJ with floorshow feedback

Many radio stations and nightclubs employ Disk-Jockeys (DJs) to provide a continuous uninterrupted stream or “mix” of dance music, built from a sequence of individual song-tracks. In the last decade, commercial pre-recorded compilation CDs of DJ mixes have become a growth market. DJs exercise skill in deciding an appropriate sequence of tracks and in mixing 'seamlessly' from one track to the next. Online access to large-scale archives of digitized music via automated music information retrieval systems offers users the possibility of discovering many songs they like, but the majority of consumers are unlikely to want to learn the DJ skills of sequencing and mixing. This paper describes hpDJ, an automatic method by which compilations of dance-music can be sequenced and seamlessly mixed by computer, with minimal user involvement. The user may specify a selection of tracks, and may give a qualitative indication of the type of mix required. The resultant mix can be presented as a continuous single digital audio file, whether for burning to CD, or for play-out from a personal playback device such as an iPod, or for play-out to rooms full of dancers in a nightclub. Results from an early version of this system have been tested on an audience of patrons in a London nightclub, with very favourable results. Subsequent to that experiment, we designed technologies which allow the hpDJ system to monitor the responses of crowds of dancers/listeners, so that hpDJ can dynamically react to those responses from the crowd. The initial intention was that hpDJ would monitor the crowd’s reaction to the song-track currently being played, and use that response to guide its selection of subsequent song-tracks tracks in the mix. In that version, it’s assumed that all the song-tracks existed in some archive or library of pre-recorded files. However, once reliable crowd-monitoring technology is available, it becomes possible to use the crowd-response data to dynamically “remix” existing song-tracks (i.e, alter the track in some way, tailoring it to the response of the crowd) and even to dynamically “compose” new song-tracks suited to that crowd. Thus, the music played by hpDJ to any particular crowd of listeners on any particular night becomes a direct function of that particular crowd’s particular responses on that particular night. On a different night, the same crowd of people might react in a different way, leading hpDJ to create different music. Thus, the music composed and played by hpDJ could be viewed as an “emergent” property of the dynamic interaction between the computer system and the crowd, and the crowd could then be viewed as having collectively collaborated on composing the music that was played on that night. This en masse collective composition raises some interesting legal issues regarding the ownership of the composition (i.e.: who, exactly, is the author of the work?), but revenue-generating businesses can nevertheless plausibly be built from such technologies