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

Energy management for the smart home

Utility providers are under constant pressure to meet the ever-increasing demand for energy with a finite production capacity. Due to this, utility providers need to ensure that the demand does not exceed the supply. The use of demand response programs has been used as a solution to better match the available supply to the demand experienced on the grid. While demand response programs may improve the relationship between the supply and the demand, increasing consumer participation can further improve the effectiveness of demand response programs. The level of consumer participation is highly dependent on the incentives offered and the convenience of participating in the demand response program. However, most of these programs require consumers to actively monitor the available services and take appropriate action on their appliances. Home energy management systems attempt to provide convenience to consumers as well as increase their participation in demand response programs. They do this by enabling autonomous control and remote control of appliances. In addition, a home gateway makes it possible for the consumer and utility provider to interact with devices in the home remotely. Current solutions host the home energy management software on a home gateway or on a dedicated device in the home. Furthermore, these systems make use of proprietary software and devices to monitor and control the home environment. However, proprietary systems are costly to implement and maintain due to their dependence on the developers and the varying needs of consumers. This dissertation proposes a home energy management system solution that makes use of a standardized distributed machine-to-machine (M2M) middleware framework to support heterogeneous devices, technologies and protocols. In addition, the proposed solution shifts the software logic of the home energy management system from the gateway to a private cloud. This allows the system to leverage the benefits of virtualization and cloud computing such as cost efficiency, faster deployment and easier maintenance of the system. The proposed solution was implemented using a European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) compliant distributed M2M middleware framework (i.e. OpenMTC) and an open-source private cloud platform (i.e. OpenStack). A prototype was developed and tested with demand response programs that included a control demand response (DR) service, a consumption monitoring service and a time-of-use (ToU) service. In addition, the prototype made use of various third party applications, protocols and devices to support the aforementioned demand response services and provide automated and remote control of home appliances. Finally, an evaluation of the proposed system was conducted and concluded that the number of home energy management systems subscribed to the defined services influenced the effectiveness of these services because of the additional processing that the utility provider is required to perform

Internet of things for disaster management: state-of-the-art and prospects

Disastrous events are cordially involved with the momentum of nature. As such mishaps have been showing off own mastery, situations have gone beyond the control of human resistive mechanisms far ago. Fortunately, several technologies are in service to gain affirmative knowledge and analysis of a disaster's occurrence. Recently, Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm has opened a promising door toward catering of multitude problems related to agriculture, industry, security, and medicine due to its attractive features, such as heterogeneity, interoperability, light-weight, and flexibility. This paper surveys existing approaches to encounter the relevant issues with disasters, such as early warning, notification, data analytics, knowledge aggregation, remote monitoring, real-time analytics, and victim localization. Simultaneous interventions with IoT are also given utmost importance while presenting these facts. A comprehensive discussion on the state-of-the-art scenarios to handle disastrous events is presented. Furthermore, IoT-supported protocols and market-ready deployable products are summarized to address these issues. Finally, this survey highlights open challenges and research trends in IoT-enabled disaster management systems. © 2013 IEEE

Plataforma de gestão M2M

Mestrado em Engenharia de Computadores e TelemáticaThe Internet of Things is still a fast growing area and topic of interest. New solutions and implementations keep emerging, both in service oriented solutions or device oriented solutions with M2M communications, therefore promoting the creation of new business models. Thus, as a natural evolution, came the possibility to abstract sensor management from service creation. Allowing a delegation of sensor management from the sensor providers, to focus on content creation through services. However, this delegation brings new concerns regarding access control. Consequently, this dissertation proposes a possible solution to this problem, enclosed in a service oriented platform interconnected with an ETSI M2M solution. Promoting interoperability between sensors and allowing a great elasticity in service creation.A Internet das Coisas continua a ser uma área em grande crescimento e de grande interesse. Estão constantemente a surgir novas soluções e inplementações, tanto ao nível dos serviços como ao nível das comunicações Máquina-a-Máquina, promovendo assim o aparecimento de novos modelos de negócio. Desta forma surgiu naturalmente a possibilidade de abstrair a gestão de sensores da criação de serviços. Permitindo assim, uma delagação da gestão por parte de empresas detentoras de sensores, para se focarem no conteúdo com a criação de serviços. Contudo esta divisão acarreta algumas preocupações de segurança quanto ao controlo de acesso. Nesse sentido, esta dissertação propõe uma possível solução para o mesmo, englobada numa plataforma orientada ao serviços interligada com uma solução ETSI M2M. Promovendo a interoperabilidade entre sensores e permitindo assim uma grande elasticidade na criação de serviços

Medical application of the Internet of Things (IoT): prototyping a telemonitoring system

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a technological paradigm that can be perceived as an evolution of the internet. It is a shift from the traditional way of connecting devices to the internet, both in number and diversity of connected devices. This significant and marked growth in the number and diversity of devices connected to the internet has prompted a rethink of approaches to interconnect devices. The growth in the number of connected devices is driven by emerging applications and business models and supported by falling device costs while the growth in the diversity is driven by the reduction in the cost of manufacturing these devices. This has led to an increase in the number of users (not limited to people) of the internet. According to statistics by the ITU, by the end of 2015, about 3.2 billion people were using the Internet. Significantly, 34% of households in developing countries had Internet access, with more than 80% of households in developed countries. This indicates that it is realistic to leverage the IoT in living spaces. Appreciating this potential, many sectors of society are already positioning themselves to reap the benefits of this great promise. Hence the health sector would do well to adopt this technological paradigm to enhance service delivery. One specific area where the health sector can benefit from the adoption of the IoT is in telemonitoring and the associated early response to medical emergencies. Statistics and research show that there are areas in the medical field, that still need improvement to enhance service delivery. The Nursing Times has summed up these areas into four categories. The first one is a need to have a regular observation of patients and their vital signs. Here, health service providers (SPs) need to adopt creative and non-obtrusive methods that will encourage patients' participation in the monitoring of these vital signs. As much as possible, vital signs readings should be taken at convenient locations and times. Therefore, devices that have consistent internet access and are usually a part of daily life for most patients, such as the mobile phones would prove to be a key enabler of regular observation of vital signs. Furthermore, miniaturization of the vital signs monitoring or sensing devices would be a key step towards realizing this scenario. A lot of work is already being done to miniaturize these devices and make them as much a part of daily life as possible, as evidenced by advancements in the field of fitness and wearables. To map this use to the medical field, a system needs to be created that would allow for the aggregation of these disparate measuring and monitoring devices with medical information management systems. The second potential area of improvement is in the early recognition of deterioration of the patients. With regular observation of patients, it is possible to recognize deterioration at its early stage. Taking cognizance of the different needs of the various stakeholders is important to achieve the intended results. The third potential area of improvement is in the communication among stakeholders. This has to do with identifying the relevant data that must be delivered to the stakeholders during the monitoring and management process. Lastly, effective response to medical concerns is the other potential area of improvement. It is noted that patients do not generally get the right response at the right time because the information does not reach the rightly qualified personnel in good time. The regular and real-time capture of vital signs data coupled with added analytics can enable IoT SPs to design solutions that automate the management and transmission of medical data in a timely manner. This work addresses how the medical sector can adopt IoT-based solutions to improve service delivery, while utilizing existing resources such as smartphones, for the transmission and management of vital signs data, availing it to stakeholders and improve communication among them. It develops a telemonitoring system based on IoT design approaches. The developed system captures readings of vital signs from monitoring devices, processes and manages this data to serve the needs of the various stakeholders. Additionally, intelligence was added to enable the system to interpret the data and make decisions that will help medical practitioners and other stakeholders (patients, caregivers, etc.) to more timely, consistently and reliably provide and receive medical services/assistance. Two end user applications were developed. A cloud-based web application developed using PHP, HTML, and JavaScript and an Android mobile application developed using Java programming language in Android studio. An ETSI standards-compliant M2M middleware is used to aggregate the system using M2M applications developed in Python. This is to leverage the benefits of the standards-compliant middleware while offering flexibility in the design of applications. The developed system was evaluated to assess whether it meets the requirements and expectations of the various stakeholders. Finally, the performance of the proposed telemonitoring system was studied by analyzing the delay on the delivery of messages (local notifications, SMS, and email) to various stakeholders to assess the contribution towards reducing the overall time of the cardiac arrest chain of survival. The results obtained showed a marked improvement (over 28 seconds) on previous work. In addition to improved performance in monitoring and management of vital signs, telemonitoring systems have a potential of decongesting health institutions and saving time for all the stakeholders while bridging most of the gaps discussed above. The captured data can also provide the health researchers and physicians with most of the prerequisite data to effectively execute predictive health thereby improving service delivery in the health sector

An overview of IoT architectures, technologies, and existing open-source projects

Financiado para publicación en acceso aberto: Universidade da Coruña/CISUG[Abstract]: Today’s needs for monitoring and control of different devices in organizations require an Internet of Things (IoT) platform that can integrate heterogeneous elements provided by multiple vendors and using different protocols, data formats and communication technologies. This article provides a comprehensive review of all the architectures, technologies, protocols and data formats most commonly used by existing IoT platforms. On this basis, a comparative analysis of the most widely used open source IoT platforms is presented. This exhaustive comparison is based on multiple characteristics that will be essential to select the platform that best suits the needs of each organization.This research/work has been supported by GAIN (Galician Innovation Agency) and the Regional Ministry of Economy, Employment and Industry, Xunta de Galicia under grant COV20/00604 through the ERDF Galicia 2014-2020; and by grant PID2019-104958RB-C42 (ADELE) funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 . Funding for open access charge: Universidade da Coruña/CISUG.Xunta de Galicia; COV20/0060

Interoperability between OPC UA and oneM2M

AbstractA key requirement of realizing the connected world featured by IoT is to ensure interoperability among different connected devices. Interoperability is also at the basis of the realization of the novel vision of Industry 4.0; a lot effort is put to make interoperable the interchange of information between industrial applications, also including IoT ecosystems. For this reason, during these last years, several approaches aimed to enhance interoperability between industrial applications and IoT appeared in the literature. In this paper an interoperability proposal is presented. It is based on the idea to realize interworking between the two standards considered among the reference ones in the industrial and IoT domains. They are the OPC UA for the industrial domain and oneM2M for the IoT. Interworking is realized in such a way to allow industrial applications based on OPC UA to acquire information coming from oneM2M-based IoT devices. The proposal allows an OPC UA Server to publish each piece of information produced by oneM2M-based IoT devices, so that this information may be consumed by industrial applications playing the OPC UA Client role

NSCL na plataforma ETSI M2M

Mestrado em Engenharia de Computadores e TelemáticaThe evolution of every day gadgets into smart-devices able to react to their surrounding environment is enabling the development of novel applications aiming revolutionize the industry related to this technology. Currently much attention has been given to standardizing IoT and M2M in order to build an interoperable foundation that will enable the growth of the future Internet, where devices will communicate without, or at least minimizing, human intervention. In this dissertation is presented in first place issues such as: heterogeneity, scalability, addressing and the first approach taken by the ETSI M2M standard. Subsequently, is presented the ETSI M2M vision and high-level architecture together with current work in this area. Finally an implementation of the network middleware is going to be presented along with further testing.A evolução dos dispositivos do dia a dia em dispositivos inteligentes capazes de reagir ao ambiente que os rodeia está a permitir a criação de novas aplicações que visam revolucionar a industria. Atualmente tem-se dado muita atenção a estandardização da Internet das Coisas e comunicações máquinaa- máquina, com o objetivo de construir uma fundação interoperável que permitirá o crescimento futuro da Internet, onde os dispositivos irão comunicar sem, ou com mínima, intervenção humana. Nesta dissertação é apresentado em primeiro lugar requisitos como heterogeneidade, escalabilidade, endereçamento e a primeira abordagem feita pelo standard M2M do ETSI. Consequentemente, é a apresentada a visão e a arquitetura e o trabalho realizado nesta área. Por fim é apresentada a implementação da componente de rede realizada nesta dissertação juntamente com os respetivos testes