Cross-domain interoperability using federated interoperable semantic IoT/Cloud testbeds and applications: The FIESTA-IoT approach

This work is funded by the European Commission under the EU-H2020 Project Grant ”Federated Interoperable Semantic IoT/cloudTestbeds andApplications (FIESTA)” with the Grant Agreement No. CNECT-ICT-643943

A proof-of-concept for semantically interoperable federation of IoT experimentation facilities

The Internet-of-Things (IoT) is unanimously identified as one of the main pillars of future smart scenarios. The potential of IoT technologies and deployments has been already demonstrated in a number of different application areas, including transport, energy, safety and healthcare. However, despite the growing number of IoT deployments, the majority of IoT applications tend to be self-contained, thereby forming application silos. A lightweight data centric integration and combination of these silos presents several challenges that still need to be addressed. Indeed, the ability to combine and synthesize data streams and services from diverse IoT platforms and testbeds, holds the promise to increase the potentiality of smart applications in terms of size, scope and targeted business context. In this article, a proof-of-concept implementation that federates two different IoT experimentation facilities by means of semantic-based technologies will be described. The specification and design of the implemented system and information models will be described together with the practical details of the developments carried out and its integration with the existing IoT platforms supporting the aforementioned testbeds. Overall, the system described in this paper demonstrates that it is possible to open new horizons in the development of IoT applications and experiments at a global scale, that transcend the (silo) boundaries of individual deployments, based on the semantic interconnection and interoperability of diverse IoT platforms and testbeds.This work is partially funded by the European projectzFederated Interoperable Semantic IoT/cloud Testbeds and Applications (FIESTA-IoT) from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Programme with the Grant Agreement No. CNECT-ICT-643943. The authors would also like to thank the FIESTA-IoT consortium for the fruitful discussions

Experimentation as a service over semantically interoperable Internet of Things testbeds

Infrastructures enabling experimental assessment of Internet of Things (IoT) solutions are scarce. Moreover, such infrastructures are typically bound to a specific application domain, thus, not facilitating the testing of solutions with a horizontal approach. This paper presents a platform that supports Experimentation as s Service (EaaS) over a federation of IoT testbeds. This platform brings two major advances. Firstly, it leverages semantic web technologies to enable interoperability so that testbed agnostic access to the underlying facilities is allowed. Secondly, a set of tools ease both the experimentation workflow and the federation of other IoT deployments, independently of their domain of interest. Apart from the platform specification, the paper presents how this design has been actually instantiated into a cloud-based EaaS platform that has been used for supporting a wide variety of novel experiments targeting different research and innovation challenges. In this respect, the paper summarizes some of the experiences from these experiments and the key performance metrics that this instance of the platform has exhibited during the experimentation

On the use of information and infrastructure technologies for the smart city research in Europe: a survey

The Smart City paradigm has become one of the most important research topics around the globe. Particularly in Europe, it is considered as a solution for unstoppable increase of high density urban environments and the European Commission has included the Smart City research as one of the key objectives for the FP7 (Seventh Framework Program) and H2020 (Horizon 2020) research initiatives. As a result, a considerable amount of quality research, with particular emphasis on information and communication technologies, has been produced. In this paper, we review the current efforts dedicated in Europe to this research topic. Particular attention is paid in the review to the platforms and infrastructure technologies adopted to introduce the Internet of Things into the city, taking into account the constraints and harshness of urban environments. Furthermore, this paper also considers the efforts in the experimental perspective, which includes the review of existing Smart City testbeds, part of wider European initiatives such as FIRE (Future Internet Research and Experimentation) and FIWARE. Last but not least, the main efforts in providing interoperability between the different experimental facilities are also presented.This work was funded in part by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Programme of the FESTIVAL project (Federated Interoperable Smart ICT Services Development and Testing Platforms) under grant agreement 643275, and from the Japanese National Institute of Information and Communications Technology

Building the Future Internet through FIRE

The Internet as we know it today is the result of a continuous activity for improving network communications, end user services, computational processes and also information technology infrastructures. The Internet has become a critical infrastructure for the human-being by offering complex networking services and end-user applications that all together have transformed all aspects, mainly economical, of our lives. Recently, with the advent of new paradigms and the progress in wireless technology, sensor networks and information systems and also the inexorable shift towards everything connected paradigm, first as known as the Internet of Things and lately envisioning into the Internet of Everything, a data-driven society has been created. In a data-driven society, productivity, knowledge, and experience are dependent on increasingly open, dynamic, interdependent and complex Internet services. The challenge for the Internet of the Future design is to build robust enabling technologies, implement and deploy adaptive systems, to create business opportunities considering increasing uncertainties and emergent systemic behaviors where humans and machines seamlessly cooperate

A reference architecture for federating IoT infrastructures supporting semantic interoperability

: The Internet-of-Things (IoT) is unanimously identified as one of the main pillars of future smart scenarios. However, despite the growing number of IoT deployments, the majority of IoT applications tend to be self-contained, thereby forming vertical silos. Indeed, the ability to combine and synthesize data streams and services from diverse IoT platforms and testbeds, holds the promise to increase the potential of smart applications in terms of size, scope and targeted business context. This paper describes the system architecture for the FIESTA-IoT platform, whose main aim is to federate a large number of testbeds across the planet, in order to offer experimenters the unique experience of dealing with a large number of semantically interoperable data sources. This system architecture was developed by following the Architectural Reference Model (ARM) methodology promoted by the IoT-A project (FP7 “light house” project on Architecture for the Internet of Things). Through this process, the FIESTAIoT architecture is composed of a set of Views that deals with a “logical” functional decomposition (Functional View, FV) and data structuring and annotation, data flows and inter-functional component interactions (Information View, IV)

Towards an interoperability certification method for semantic federated experimental IoT testbeds

IoT deployments and then related experiments tend to be highly heterogeneous leading to fragmented and non-interoperable silo solutions. Yet there is a growing need to interconnect such experiments to create rich infrastructures that will underpin the next generation of cross sector IoT applications in particular as using massive number of data. While research have been carried out for IoT test beds and interoperability for some infrastructures less has been done on the data. In this paper, we present the first step of the FIESTA certification method for federated semantic IoT test bed, which provides stakeholders with the means of assessing the interoperability of a given IoT testbed and how it can be federated with other ones to create large facility for experimenter. Focus is given on data and semantic context of the test beds and how they can interoperate together for larger experiments with data

Integrating a smart city testbed into a large-scale heterogeneous federation of future internet experimentation facilities: the SmartSantander approach

For some years already, there has been a plethora of research initiatives throughout the world that have deployed diverse experimentation facilities for Future Internet technologies research and development. While access to these testbeds has been sometimes restricted to the specific research community supporting them, opening them to different communities can not only help those infrastructures to achieve a wider impact, but also to better identify new possibilities based on novel considerations brought by those external users. On top of the individual testbeds, supporting experiments that employs several of them in a combined and seamless fashion has been one of the main objectives of different transcontinental research initiatives, such as FIRE in Europe or GENI in United States. In particular, Fed4FIRE project and its continuation, Fed4FIRE+, have emerged as "best-in-town" projects to federate heterogeneous experimentation platforms. This paper presents the most relevant aspects of the integration of a large scale testbed on the IoT domain within the Fed4FIRE+ federation. It revolves around the adaptation carried out on the SmartSantander smart city testbed. Additionally, the paper offers an overview of the different federation models that Fed4FIRE+ proposes to testbed owners in order to provide a complete view of the involved technologies. The paper is also presenting a survey of how several specific research platforms from different experimentation domains have fulfilled the federation task following Fed4FIRE+ concepts.This work was partially funded by the European project Federation for FIRE Plus (Fed4FIRE+) from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Programme with the Grant Agreement No. 732638 and by the Spanish Government (MINECO) by means of the projects ADVICE: Dynamic provisioning of connectivity in high density 5G wireless scenarios (TEC2015-71329-C2-1-R) and Future Internet Enabled Resilient Cities (FIERCE)

Using Semantic Web Technologies to Query and Manage Information within Federated Cyber-Infrastructures

A standardized descriptive ontology supports efficient querying and manipulation of data from heterogeneous sources across boundaries of distributed infrastructures, particularly in federated environments. In this article, we present the Open-Multinet (OMN) set of ontologies, which were designed specifically for this purpose as well as to support management of life-cycles of infrastructure resources. We present their initial application in Future Internet testbeds, their use for representing and requesting available resources, and our experimental performance evaluation of the ontologies in terms of querying and translation times. Our results highlight the value and applicability of Semantic Web technologies in managing resources of federated cyber-infrastructures.EC/FP7/318389/EU/Federation for FIRE/Fed4FIREEC/FP7/732638/EU/Federation for FIRE Plus/Fed4FIREplu