MONICA in Hamburg: Towards Large-Scale IoT Deployments in a Smart City

Modern cities and metropolitan areas all over the world face new management challenges in the 21st century primarily due to increasing demands on living standards by the urban population. These challenges range from climate change, pollution, transportation, and citizen engagement, to urban planning, and security threats. The primary goal of a Smart City is to counteract these problems and mitigate their effects by means of modern ICT to improve urban administration and infrastructure. Key ideas are to utilise network communication to inter-connect public authorities; but also to deploy and integrate numerous sensors and actuators throughout the city infrastructure - which is also widely known as the Internet of Things (IoT). Thus, IoT technologies will be an integral part and key enabler to achieve many objectives of the Smart City vision. The contributions of this paper are as follows. We first examine a number of IoT platforms, technologies and network standards that can help to foster a Smart City environment. Second, we introduce the EU project MONICA which aims for demonstration of large-scale IoT deployments at public, inner-city events and give an overview on its IoT platform architecture. And third, we provide a case-study report on SmartCity activities by the City of Hamburg and provide insights on recent (on-going) field tests of a vertically integrated, end-to-end IoT sensor application.Comment: 6 page

Interoperability standards for cloud architecture

Enabling cloud infrastructures to evolve into a transparent platform raises interoperability issues. Interoperability requires standard data models and communication technologies compatible with the existing Internet infrastructure. To reduce vendor lock-in situations, cloud computing must implement common strategies regarding standards, interoperability and portability. Open standards are of critical importance and need to be embedded into interoperability solutions. Interoperability is determined at the data level as well as the service level. Relevant modelling standards and integration solutions shall be analysed in the context of clouds

Interoperability in IoT

Interoperability refers to the ability of IoT systems and components to communicate and share information among them. This crucial feature is key to unlock all of the IoT paradigm´s potential, including immense technological, economic, and social benefits. Interoperability is currently a major challenge in IoT, mainly due to the lack of a reference standard and the vast heterogeneity of IoT systems. IoT interoperability has also a significant importance in big data analytics because it substantively eases data processing. This chapter analyzes the critical importance of IoT interoperability, its different types, challenges to face, diverse use cases, and prospective interoperability solutions. Given that it is a complex concept that involves multiple aspects and elements of IoT, for a deeper insight, interoperability is studied across different levels of IoT systems. Furthermore, interoperability is also re-examined from a global approach among platforms and systems.González-Usach, R.; Yacchirema-Vargas, DC.; Julián-Seguí, M.; Palau Salvador, CE. (2019). Interoperability in IoT. Handbook of Research on Big Data and the IoT. 149-173. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/150250S14917

A look at cloud architecture interoperability through standards

Enabling cloud infrastructures to evolve into a transparent platform while preserving integrity raises interoperability issues. How components are connected needs to be addressed. Interoperability requires standard data models and communication encoding technologies compatible with the existing Internet infrastructure. To reduce vendor lock-in situations, cloud computing must implement universal strategies regarding standards, interoperability and portability. Open standards are of critical importance and need to be embedded into interoperability solutions. Interoperability is determined at the data level as well as the service level. Corresponding modelling standards and integration solutions shall be analysed

A survey of communication protocols for internet of things and related challenges of fog and cloud computing integration

The fast increment in the number of IoT (Internet of Things) devices is accelerating the research on new solutions to make cloud services scalable. In this context, the novel concept of fog computing as well as the combined fog-to-cloud computing paradigm is becoming essential to decentralize the cloud, while bringing the services closer to the end-system. This article surveys e application layer communication protocols to fulfill the IoT communication requirements, and their potential for implementation in fog- and cloud-based IoT systems. To this end, the article first briefly presents potential protocol candidates, including request-reply and publish-subscribe protocols. After that, the article surveys these protocols based on their main characteristics, as well as the main performance issues, including latency, energy consumption, and network throughput. These findings are thereafter used to place the protocols in each segment of the system (IoT, fog, cloud), and thus opens up the discussion on their choice, interoperability, and wider system integration. The survey is expected to be useful to system architects and protocol designers when choosing the communication protocols in an integrated IoT-to-fog-to-cloud system architecture.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

From BIM to BEMS, covering the design- to operational-phase interoperability gap

This paper deals with the FP7 EU project “Building as a Service” (BaaS). The BaaS project is a research initiative which aims at providing a generic solution for delivering standardization and interoperability concepts for building data and open middleware platform covering the Design- and Operational-Phase In-teroperability Gap in the application domain of “non-residential buildings.” There are two important phases in the building life-cycle: the design phase and the operational phase. Development and integration of ICT tech-nologies can help best coordinate the building design and operation phases. Overcoming interoperability gaps between both phases so as providing a way of integration to use existing and future tools and services would help to enhance building operations and controls. Better design, standardization and interoperability can con-tribute themselves to the goals of improving energy efficiency. Interoperable components working as services at the building level, will lead naturally to the concept of the Building as a Service ecosystem. This paper aims at analyzing some of the BaaS project topics: (1) building data management and interoperability: data warehouse to collect, organize, store and aggregate static and dynamic data from various in- and out-of-building sources; an IFC-based BIM will act as a central repository for all static building data, and a data warehouse will be used for dynamic data, both schemes mapped using a unique vocabulary. (2) Integration of building energy management Services using Open Service Middleware Platform technologies. A service middleware platform to abstract the building physical devices, support high level services on the cloud and facili-tate secure two-way communication between the physical and ICT layers (building) with high level services (cloud)

Middleware platform for distributed applications incorporating robots, sensors and the cloud

Cyber-physical systems in the factory of the future will consist of cloud-hosted software governing an agile production process executed by autonomous mobile robots and controlled by analyzing the data from a vast number of sensors. CPSs thus operate on a distributed production floor infrastructure and the set-up continuously changes with each new manufacturing task. In this paper, we present our OSGibased middleware that abstracts the deployment of servicebased CPS software components on the underlying distributed platform comprising robots, actuators, sensors and the cloud. Moreover, our middleware provides specific support to develop components based on artificial neural networks, a technique that recently became very popular for sensor data analytics and robot actuation. We demonstrate a system where a robot takes actions based on the input from sensors in its vicinity

A scalable middleware-based infrastructure for energy management and visualization in city districts

Following the Smart City views, citizens, policy makers and energy distribution companies need a reliable and scalable infrastructure to manage and analyse energy consumption data in a city district context. In order to move forward this view, a city district model is needed, which takes into account different data-sources such as Building Information Models, Geographic Information Systems and real-time information coming from heterogeneous devices in the district. The Internet of Things paradigm is creating new business opportunities for low-cost, low-power and high-performance devices. Nevertheless, because of the "smart devices" heterogeneity, in order to provide uniform access to their functionalities, an abstract point of view is needed. Therefore, we propose an distributed software infrastructure, exploiting service-oriented middleware and ontology solutions to cope with the management, simulation and visualization of district energy data