A gap analysis of Internet-of-Things platforms

We are experiencing an abundance of Internet-of-Things (IoT) middleware solutions that provide connectivity for sensors and actuators to the Internet. To gain a widespread adoption, these middleware solutions, referred to as platforms, have to meet the expectations of different players in the IoT ecosystem, including device providers, application developers, and end-users, among others. In this article, we evaluate a representative sample of these platforms, both proprietary and open-source, on the basis of their ability to meet the expectations of different IoT users. The evaluation is thus more focused on how ready and usable these platforms are for IoT ecosystem players, rather than on the peculiarities of the underlying technological layers. The evaluation is carried out as a gap analysis of the current IoT landscape with respect to (i) the support for heterogeneous sensing and actuating technologies, (ii) the data ownership and its implications for security and privacy, (iii) data processing and data sharing capabilities, (iv) the support offered to application developers, (v) the completeness of an IoT ecosystem, and (vi) the availability of dedicated IoT marketplaces. The gap analysis aims to highlight the deficiencies of today's solutions to improve their integration to tomorrow's ecosystems. In order to strengthen the finding of our analysis, we conducted a survey among the partners of the Finnish IoT program, counting over 350 experts, to evaluate the most critical issues for the development of future IoT platforms. Based on the results of our analysis and our survey, we conclude this article with a list of recommendations for extending these IoT platforms in order to fill in the gaps.Comment: 15 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables, Accepted for publication in Computer Communications, special issue on the Internet of Things: Research challenges and solution

System Design of Internet-of-Things for Residential Smart Grid

Internet-of-Things (IoTs) envisions to integrate, coordinate, communicate, and collaborate real-world objects in order to perform daily tasks in a more intelligent and efficient manner. To comprehend this vision, this paper studies the design of a large scale IoT system for smart grid application, which constitutes a large number of home users and has the requirement of fast response time. In particular, we focus on the messaging protocol of a universal IoT home gateway, where our cloud enabled system consists of a backend server, unified home gateway (UHG) at the end users, and user interface for mobile devices. We discuss the features of such IoT system to support a large scale deployment with a UHG and real-time residential smart grid applications. Based on the requirements, we design an IoT system using the XMPP protocol, and implemented in a testbed for energy management applications. To show the effectiveness of the designed testbed, we present some results using the proposed IoT architecture.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures, journal pape

RESTful framework for collaborative internet of things based on IEC 61850

El contenido de los capítulos 2 y 3 está sujeto a confidencialidad 161 p.En 1991, Mark Weiser formuló el paradigma de Computación Ubicua definiendo el concepto de Entorno Inteligente como un espacio físico repleto de dispositivos, muy integrados en el entorno, y con capacidades de identificación, sensorización y actuación. Internet de las Cosas (IoT) expande el ámbito de localización de estos dispositivos y servicios ubicuos, representados como cosas, de un entorno local a internet como red global. Para la implementación de estos escenarios de aplicación, la colaboración entre las cosas es uno de los principales retos de investigación. El objetivo de esta colaboración es ser capaces de satisfacer necesidades globales mediante la combinación de servicios individuales. Esta Tesis propone una arquitectura colaborativa entre las cosas desplegadas en internet.Las tecnologías alrededor de los Servicios Web SOAP/XML, adecuadas para IoT, soportan aspectos claves para un sistema colaborativo como la publicación, descubrimiento, control y gestión de eventos de los dispositivos. Como alternativa, REST ha ganado terreno en este ámbito por ser considerada una opción más ligera, sencilla y natural para la comunicación en internet. Sin embargo, no existen protocolos para descubrimiento y gestión de eventos para recursos REST. Esta Tesis aborda dicha carencia proponiendo una especificación de estos protocolos para arquitecturas REST. Otro aspecto importante es la representación, a nivel de aplicación, de las cosas distribuidas. Entre las propuestas para la estandarización de los modelos de información y comunicación en este dominio que podrían aplicarse, de manera similar, a IoT, destaca el estándar IEC 61850. Sin embargo, los protocolos de comunicación definidos por el estándar no son adecuados para IoT. Esta Tesis analiza la idoneidad del IEC 61850 para escenarios IoT y propone un protocolo de comunicación REST para sus servicios.Por último, se trata la problemática asociada a la confiabilidad que debe proporcionar una arquitectura IoT para dominios de aplicación relacionados con la salud o sistemas de seguridad funcional (Safety)

IETF standardization in the field of the Internet of Things (IoT): a survey

Smart embedded objects will become an important part of what is called the Internet of Things. However, the integration of embedded devices into the Internet introduces several challenges, since many of the existing Internet technologies and protocols were not designed for this class of devices. In the past few years, there have been many efforts to enable the extension of Internet technologies to constrained devices. Initially, this resulted in proprietary protocols and architectures. Later, the integration of constrained devices into the Internet was embraced by IETF, moving towards standardized IP-based protocols. In this paper, we will briefly review the history of integrating constrained devices into the Internet, followed by an extensive overview of IETF standardization work in the 6LoWPAN, ROLL and CoRE working groups. This is complemented with a broad overview of related research results that illustrate how this work can be extended or used to tackle other problems and with a discussion on open issues and challenges. As such the aim of this paper is twofold: apart from giving readers solid insights in IETF standardization work on the Internet of Things, it also aims to encourage readers to further explore the world of Internet-connected objects, pointing to future research opportunities

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

Service Composition for IP Smart Object using Realtime Web Protocols: Concept and Research Challenges

The Internet of Things (IoT) refers to a world-wide network of interconnected physical things using standardized communication protocols. Recent development of Internet Protocol (IP) stacks for resource-constrained devices unveils a possibility for the future IoT based on the stable and scalable IP technology much like today's Internet of computers. One important question remains: how can data and events (denoted as services) introduced by a variety of IP networked things be exchanged and aggregated e ciently in various application domains. Because the true value of IoT lies in the interaction of several services from physical things, answers to this question are essential to support a rapid creation of new IoT smart and ubiquitous applications. The problem is known as service composition. This article explains the practicability of the future full-IP IoT with realtime Web protocols to formally state the problem of service composition for IP smart objects, provides literature review, and discusses its research challenges

Interoperability in IoT through the semantic profiling of objects

The emergence of smarter and broader people-oriented IoT applications and services requires interoperability at both data and knowledge levels. However, although some semantic IoT architectures have been proposed, achieving a high degree of interoperability requires dealing with a sea of non-integrated data, scattered across vertical silos. Also, these architectures do not fit into the machine-to-machine requirements, as data annotation has no knowledge on object interactions behind arriving data. This paper presents a vision of how to overcome these issues. More specifically, the semantic profiling of objects, through CoRE related standards, is envisaged as the key for data integration, allowing more powerful data annotation, validation, and reasoning. These are the key blocks for the development of intelligent applications.Portuguese Science and Technology Foundation (FCT) [UID/MULTI/00631/2013