Toward interoperability in a web of things

In this position paper we explore the challenges and issues around interoperability in the web of things. A key concern is how to increase interoperability while maintaining a high degree of innovation and exploration in the community. To that end we propose a hub- centric approach toward interoperability consisting of four levels or stages. We are working to validate this approach in the context of a large-scale IoT ecosystem project consisting of eight IoT hubs in different domains where a key requirement is hub-to-hub and hub- application interoperability

Smart Cities:an IoT-centric approach

A number of recent Smart City testbeds and deployments have focused on the use of the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm and technologies for improving the efficiency of city infrastructures. Building on this work, we have explored the use of IoT hubs as easy-to-use aggregators and focal points for access to emerging data infrastructures of smart cities. A hub can support not only access to infrastructure data, but also participatory sensing and crowd sourced data where city employees and citizens contribute directly to the data infrastructure of a city. In this way, smart cities can realize a variety of new applications created by local entrepreneurs and community groups without the need for ongoing coordination by governments. In this paper, we outline the growing interest in a hub-centric approach to the IoT and discuss our own experiences in building an IoT hub for two Smart City projects, one in the UK and the other in Canada

City Hub:a cloud based IoT platform for Smart Cities

Cloud based Smart City hubs are an attractive approach to addressing some of the complex issues faced when deploying PaaS infrastructure for Smart Cities. In this paper we introduce the general notion of IoT hubs and then discusses our work to generalize our IoT hub as a Smart City PaaS. Two key issues are identified, support for hybrid public/private cloud and interoperability. We briefly describe our approach to these issues and discuss our experiences deploying two cloud-based Smart City hubs, one in the UK and the other in Canada

IoT interoperability:a hub-based approach

Interoperability in the Internet of Things is critical for emerging services and applications. In this paper we advocate the use of IoT ‘hubs’ to aggregate things using web protocols, and suggest a staged approach to interoperability. In the context of a UK government funded project involving 8 IoT projects to address cross-domain IoT interoperability, we introduce the HyperCat IoT catalogue specification. We then describe the tools and techniques we developed to adapt an existing data portal and IoT platform to this specification, and provide an IoT hub focused on the highways industry called ‘Smart Streets’. Based on our experience developing this large scale IoT hub, we outline lessons learned which we hope will contribute to ongoing efforts to create an interoperable global IoT ecosystem

Cross-tier application and data partitioning of web applications for hybrid cloud deployment

Hybrid cloud deployment offers flexibility in trade-offs between the cost-savings/scalability of the public cloud and control over data resources provided at a private premise. However, this flexibility comes at the expense of complexity in distributing a system over these two locations. For multi-tier web applications, this challenge manifests itself primarily in the partitioning of application- and database-tiers. While there is existing research that focuses on either application-tier or data-tier partitioning, we show that optimized partitioning of web applications benefits from both tiers being considered simultaneously. We present our research on a new cross-tier partitioning approach to help developers make effective trade-offs between performance and cost in a hybrid cloud deployment. In two case studies the approach results in up to 54% reduction in monetary costs compared to a premise only deployment and 56% improvement in execution time compared to a naïve partitioning where application-tier is deployed in the cloud and data-tier is on private infrastructure

Developing IoT applications in the Fog:a distributed dataflow approach

In this paper we examine the development of IoT applications from the perspective of the Fog Computing paradigm, where computing infrastructure at the network edge in devices and gateways is leverage for efficiency and timeliness. Due to the intrinsic nature of the IoT: heterogeneous devices/resources, a tightly coupled perception-action cycle and widely distributed devices and processing, application development in the Fog can be challenging. To address these challenges, we propose a Distributed Dataflow (DDF) programming model for the IoT that utilises computing infrastructures across the Fog and the Cloud. We evaluate our proposal by implementing a DDF framework based on Node-RED (Distributed Node-RED or D-NR), a visual programming tool that uses a flow-based model for building IoT applications. Via demonstrations, we show that our approach eases the development process and can be used to build a variety of IoT applications that work efficiently in the Fog

Smart Cities:an overview of the technology trends driving smart cities

Smart Cities: An Overview of the Technology Trends Driving Smart Cities. IEEE Technology trend papers aim to highlight key technologies that are shaping the world around us and impacting the daily working life of IEEE Members. They offer a high-level overview of a technology area and sufficient information for IEEE Members to be aware of upcoming technologies. This paper is a part of the series and focused on smart cities highlighting several key technology trends driving their growth

Smart cities:engaging users and developers to foster innovation ecosystems

Increasingly, city planners and government officials understand that cities are engines of innovation and wealth creation. Equally, there is a growing understanding that the application of technology in support of Smart Cities helps grow the urban economy and deliver better services to citizens. However, often Smart City projects are top- down projects focused on improving city infrastructure using technology. We argue, and our experience over the last decade has shown, that often, citizen driven, or grass-roots based Smart City projects deliver better value and sustainable success. In this paper we report on our work to engage citizens and the technology community in smart city projects and highlight some lessons learnt from our experiences. We show how a modest investment in a Smart City Data Hub (using our IoT platform – WoTKit) plus development tools based on Node-RED helps bootstrap a Smart City innovation cluster

Toward a distributed data flow platform for the web of things (distributed node-RED)

Several web-based platforms have emerged to ease the development of interactive or near real-time IoT applications by providing a way to connect things and services together and process the data they emit using a data flow paradigm. While these platforms have been found to be useful on their own, many IoT scenarios require the coordination of computing resources across the network: on servers, gateways and devices themselves. To address this, we explore how to extend existing IoT data flow platforms to create a system suitable for execution on a range of run time environments, toward supporting distributed IoT programs that can be partitioned between servers, gateways and devices. Eventually we aim to automate the distribution of data flows using appropriate distribution mechanism, and optimization heuristics based on participating resource capabilities and constraints imposed by the developer

SoS-centric Middleware Services for Interoperability in Smart Cities Systems

Modern cities are supported by many IT systems managed by distinct public and private agents. Such legacy systems are often incompatible since, in general, they use old, dependent and nonstandardised technologies. This results in an environment in which there is no interoperability among smart city systems, preventing richer and more interesting applications to be used by citizens, companies, and city administration. An alternative to solve the lack of interoperability is the adoption of a System-of- Systems (SoS) approach. A SoS is a set of independent and heterogeneous constituent systems that interoperate to accomplish a global mission. The collaboration among such constituent systems enables a SoS to offer new functionalities that cannot be provided by any of these systems working as individual entities. The goal of this paper is to propose SoS-centric middleware services to support the management and execution of SoS in Smart Cities environments in a dynamic, transparent and scalable way. The proposed services, once integrated into a smart city platform, support interoperability among different systems operating in a city. Moreover, this paper also presents a motivational case study to make it clear the issues that must be addressed when multiple independent systems are brought together to provide a new Smart City service or application