Enabling High-Level Application Development for the Internet of Things

Application development in the Internet of Things (IoT) is challenging because it involves dealing with a wide range of related issues such as lack of separation of concerns, and lack of high-level of abstractions to address both the large scale and heterogeneity. Moreover, stakeholders involved in the application development have to address issues that can be attributed to different life-cycles phases. when developing applications. First, the application logic has to be analyzed and then separated into a set of distributed tasks for an underlying network. Then, the tasks have to be implemented for the specific hardware. Apart from handling these issues, they have to deal with other aspects of life-cycle such as changes in application requirements and deployed devices. Several approaches have been proposed in the closely related fields of wireless sensor network, ubiquitous and pervasive computing, and software engineering in general to address the above challenges. However, existing approaches only cover limited subsets of the above mentioned challenges when applied to the IoT. This paper proposes an integrated approach for addressing the above mentioned challenges. The main contributions of this paper are: (1) a development methodology that separates IoT application development into different concerns and provides a conceptual framework to develop an application, (2) a development framework that implements the development methodology to support actions of stakeholders. The development framework provides a set of modeling languages to specify each development concern and abstracts the scale and heterogeneity related complexity. It integrates code generation, task-mapping, and linking techniques to provide automation. Code generation supports the application development phase by producing a programming framework that allows stakeholders to focus on the application logic, while our mapping and linking techniques together support the deployment phase by producing device-specific code to result in a distributed system collaboratively hosted by individual devices. Our evaluation based on two realistic scenarios shows that the use of our approach improves the productivity of stakeholders involved in the application development

Modeling the Internet of Things: a simulation perspective

This paper deals with the problem of properly simulating the Internet of Things (IoT). Simulating an IoT allows evaluating strategies that can be employed to deploy smart services over different kinds of territories. However, the heterogeneity of scenarios seriously complicates this task. This imposes the use of sophisticated modeling and simulation techniques. We discuss novel approaches for the provision of scalable simulation scenarios, that enable the real-time execution of massively populated IoT environments. Attention is given to novel hybrid and multi-level simulation techniques that, when combined with agent-based, adaptive Parallel and Distributed Simulation (PADS) approaches, can provide means to perform highly detailed simulations on demand. To support this claim, we detail a use case concerned with the simulation of vehicular transportation systems.Comment: Proceedings of the IEEE 2017 International Conference on High Performance Computing and Simulation (HPCS 2017

Software-Defined Lighting.

For much of the past century, indoor lighting has been based on incandescent or gas-discharge technology. But, with LED lighting experiencing a 20x/decade increase in flux density, 10x/decade decrease in cost, and linear improvements in luminous efficiency, solid-state lighting is finally cost-competitive with the status quo. As a result, LED lighting is projected to reach over 70% market penetration by 2030. This dissertation claims that solid-state lighting’s real potential has been barely explored, that now is the time to explore it, and that new lighting platforms and applications can drive lighting far beyond its roots as an illumination technology. Scaling laws make solid-state lighting competitive with conventional lighting, but two key features make solid-state lighting an enabler for many new applications: the high switching speeds possible using LEDs and the color palettes realizable with Red-Green-Blue-White (RGBW) multi-chip assemblies. For this dissertation, we have explored the post-illumination potential of LED lighting in applications as diverse as visible light communications, indoor positioning, smart dust time synchronization, and embedded device configuration, with an eventual eye toward supporting all of them using a shared lighting infrastructure under a unified system architecture that provides software-control over lighting. To explore the space of software-defined lighting (SDL), we design a compact, flexible, and networked SDL platform to allow researchers to rapidly test new ideas. Using this platform, we demonstrate the viability of several applications, including multi-luminaire synchronized communication to a photodiode receiver, communication to mobile phone cameras, and indoor positioning using unmodified mobile phones. We show that all these applications and many other potential applications can be simultaneously supported by a single lighting infrastructure under software control.PhDElectrical EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/111482/1/samkuo_1.pd

Enabling High-Level Application Development in the Internet of Things

International audienceThe sensor networking field is evolving into the Internet of Things~(IoT), owing in large part to the increased availability of consumer sensing devices, including modern smart phones. However, application development in the IoT still remains challenging, since it involves dealing with several related issues, such as lack of proper identification of roles of various stakeholders, as well as lack of suitable (high-level) abstractions to address the large scale and heterogeneity in IoT systems. Although the software engineering community has proposed several approaches to address the above in the general case, existing approaches for IoT application development only cover limited subsets of above mentioned challenges. In this paper, we propose a multi-stage model-driven approach for IoT application development based on a precise definition of the role to be played by each stakeholder involved in the process -- domain expert, application designer, application developer, device developer, and network manager. The abstractions provided to each stakeholder are further customized using the inputs provided in the earlier stages by other stakeholders. We have also implemented code-generation and task-mapping techniques to support our approach. Our initial evaluation based on two realistic scenarios shows that the use of our techniques/framework succeeds in improving productivity in the IoT application development process

Requirements and Recommendations for IoT/IIoT Models to automate Security Assurance through Threat Modelling, Security Analysis and Penetration Testing

The factories of the future require efficient interconnection of their physical machines into the cyber space to cope with the emerging need of an increased uptime of machines, higher performance rates, an improved level of productivity and a collective collaboration along the supply chain. With the rapid growth of the Internet of Things (IoT), and its application in industrial areas, the so called Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT)/Industry 4.0 emerged. However, further to the rapid growth of IoT/IIoT systems, cyber attacks are an emerging threat and simple manual security testing can often not cope with the scale of large IoT/IIoT networks. In this paper, we suggest to extract metadata from commonly used diagrams and models in a typical software development process, to automate the process of threat modelling, security analysis and penetration testing, without detailed prior security knowledge. In that context, we present requirements and recommendations for metadata in IoT/IIoT models that are needed as necessary input parameters of security assurance tools.Comment: 8 pages, Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security (ARES 2019) (ARES '19), August 26-29, 2019, Canterbury, United Kingdo