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

Atmosphere: Context and situational-aware collaborative IoT architecture for edge-fog-cloud computing

The Internet of Things (IoT) has grown significantly in popularity, accompanied by increased capacity and lower cost of communications, and overwhelming development of technologies. At the same time, big data and realtime data analysis have taken on great importance and have been accompanied by unprecedented interest in sharing data among citizens, public administrations and other organisms, giving rise to what is known as the Collaborative Internet of Things. This growth in data and infrastructure must be accompanied by a software architecture that allows its exploitation. Although there are various proposals focused on the exploitation of the IoT at edge, fog and/or cloud levels, it is not easy to find a software solution that exploits the three tiers together, taking maximum advantage not only of the analysis of contextual and situational data at each tier, but also of two-way communications between adjacent ones. In this paper, we propose an architecture that solves these deficiencies by proposing novel technologies which are appropriate for managing the resources of each tier: edge, fog and cloud. In addition, the fact that two-way communications along the three tiers of the architecture is allowed considerably enriches the contextual and situational information in each layer, and substantially assists decision making in real time. The paper illustrates the proposed software architecture through a case study of respiratory disease surveillance in hospitals. As a result, the proposed architecture permits efficient communications between the different tiers responding to the needs of these types of IoT scenarios.This work was partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation and the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) under project FAME [RTI2018-093608-B-C33] and excellence network RCIS [RED2018-102654-T]. We also thank Carlos Llamas Jaén for his support with the setting up of the performance evaluation tests

A Service-Oriented Approach for Sensing in the Internet of Things: Intelligent Transportation Systems and Privacy Use Cases

This paper presents a Sensing-as-a-Service run-time Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), called 3SOA, for the development of Internet of Things (IoT) applications. 3SOA aims to allow interoperability among various IoT platforms and support service-oriented modelling at high levels of abstraction where fundamental SOA theories and techniques are fully integrated into a practical software engineering approach. 3SOA abstracts the dependencies of the middleware programming model from the application logic. This abstraction allows the development efforts to focus on writing the application logic independently from hardware platforms, middleware, and languages in which applications are programmed. To achieve this result, IoT objects are treated as independent entities that may interact with each other using a well-defined message exchange sequence. Each object is defined by the services it provides and the coordination protocol it supports. Objects are then able to coordinate their resources to address the global objectives of the system. To practically validate our proposals, we demonstrate an intelligent transportation system and data privacy functional prototypes as proof of concepts. The use cases show that 3SOA and the presented abstraction language allow the amalgamation of macroprogramming and node-centric programming to develop real-time and efficient applications over IoT

Case studies for a new IoT programming paradigm: Fluidware

A number of scientific and technological advancements enabled turning the Internet of Things vision into reality. However, there is still a bottleneck in designing and developing IoT applications and services: each device has to be programmed individually, and services are deployed to specific devices. The Fluidware approach advocates that to truly scale and raise the level of abstraction a novel perspective is needed, focussing on device ensembles and dynamic allocation of resources. In this paper, we motivate the need for such a paradigm shift through three case studies emphasising a mismatch between state of art solutions and desired properties to achieve

A Role-Based Approach for Orchestrating Emergent Configurations in the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) is envisioned as a global network of connected things enabling ubiquitous machine-to-machine (M2M) communication. With estimations of billions of sensors and devices to be connected in the coming years, the IoT has been advocated as having a great potential to impact the way we live, but also how we work. However, the connectivity aspect in itself only accounts for the underlying M2M infrastructure. In order to properly support engineering IoT systems and applications, it is key to orchestrate heterogeneous 'things' in a seamless, adaptive and dynamic manner, such that the system can exhibit a goal-directed behaviour and take appropriate actions. Yet, this form of interaction between things needs to take a user-centric approach and by no means elude the users' requirements. To this end, contextualisation is an important feature of the system, allowing it to infer user activities and prompt the user with relevant information and interactions even in the absence of intentional commands. In this work we propose a role-based model for emergent configurations of connected systems as a means to model, manage, and reason about IoT systems including the user's interaction with them. We put a special focus on integrating the user perspective in order to guide the emergent configurations such that systems goals are aligned with the users' intentions. We discuss related scientific and technical challenges and provide several uses cases outlining the concept of emergent configurations.Comment: In Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on the Internet of Agents @AAMAS201