Interoperating Context Discovery Mechanisms

Context-Aware applications adapt their behaviour to the current situation of the user. This information, for instance user location and user availability, is called context information. Context is delivered by distributed context sources that need to be discovered before they can be used to retrieve context. Currently, multiple context discovery mechanisms exist, exhibiting heterogeneous capabilities (e.g. communication mechanisms, and data formats), which can be available to context-aware applications at arbitrary moments during the ap-plication’s lifespan. In this paper, we discuss a middleware mechanism that en-ables a (mobile) context-aware application to interoperate transparently with different context discovery mechanisms available at run-time. The goal of the proposed mechanism is to hide the heterogeneity and availability of context discovery mechanisms for context-aware applications, thereby facilitating their development

In Things We Trust? Towards trustability in the Internet of Things

This essay discusses the main privacy, security and trustability issues with the Internet of Things

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

Modeling location for pervasive environments

The representation of spaces, locations and the entities they contain is of great importance to location aware systems and pervasive computing scenarios. There has been an active research community in developing many diverse models of location, resulting in significant progress in the area. Various types of location model have evolved through experiment and experience however there still remains many challenges to be met by the research community. This paper aims to highlight previous trends in location modeling, discuss the research challenges ahead and to outline the initial design of a location model for the Strathclyde Context Infrastructure [?]

spChains: A Declarative Framework for Data Stream Processing in Pervasive Applications

Pervasive applications rely on increasingly complex streams of sensor data continuously captured from the physical world. Such data is crucial to enable applications to ``understand'' the current context and to infer the right actions to perform, be they fully automatic or involving some user decisions. However, the continuous nature of such streams, the relatively high throughput at which data is generated and the number of sensors usually deployed in the environment, make direct data handling practically unfeasible. Data not only needs to be cleaned, but it must also be filtered and aggregated to relieve higher level algorithms from near real-time handling of such massive data flows. We propose here a stream-processing framework (spChains), based upon state-of-the-art stream processing engines, which enables declarative and modular composition of stream processing chains built atop of a set of extensible stream processing blocks. While stream processing blocks are delivered as a standard, yet extensible, library of application-independent processing elements, chains can be defined by the pervasive application engineering team. We demonstrate the flexibility and effectiveness of the spChains framework on two real-world applications in the energy management and in the industrial plant management domains, by evaluating them on a prototype implementation based on the Esper stream processo