An IoT Testbed for the Software Defined City Vision: The #SmartMe Project

© 2016 IEEE.To kickstart the process of morphing Messina into a «smart» city, an explicit mission for the crowdfunded #SmartME project, it is essential to set up an infrastructure of smart devices embedding sensors and actuators, to be scattered all over the urban area. An horizontal framework coupled with the Fog computing approach, by moving logic toward the «extreme» edge of the Internet where data needs to be quickly elaborated, decisions made, and actions performed, is a suitable solution for data- intensive services with time-bound constraints as those usually required by citizens. This is especially true in the context of IoT and Smart City where thousands of smart objects, vehicles, mobiles, people interact to provide innovative services. We thus designed Stack4Things as an OpenStack-based framework spanning the Infrastructure-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service layers. We present some of the core Stack4Things functionalities implementing a Fog computing approach towards a run- time «rewireable» Smart City paradigm, by outlining node management and contextualization mechanisms, also describing its usage in terms of already supported and developed verticals, as well as a specific example related to environmental data collection through #SmartME

Dependability modeling of Software Defined Networking

© 2015 Elsevier B.V. Software Defined Networking (SDN) is a new network design paradigm that aims at simplifying the implementation of complex networking infrastructures by separating the forwarding functionalities (data plane) from the network logical control (control plane). Network devices are used only for forwarding, while decisions about where data is sent are taken by a logically centralized yet physically distributed component, i.e., the SDN controller. From a quality of service (QoS) point of view, an SDN controller is a complex system whose operation can be highly dependent on a variety of parameters, e.g., its degree of distribution, the corresponding topology, the number of network devices to control, and so on. Dependability aspects are particularly critical in this context. In this work, we present a new analytical modeling technique that allows us to represent an SDN controller whose components are organized in a hierarchical topology, focusing on reliability and availability aspects and overcoming issues and limitations of Markovian models. In particular, our approach allows to capture changes in the operating conditions (e.g., in the number of managed devices) still allowing to represent the underlying phenomena through generally distributed events. The dependability of a use case on a two-layer hierarchical SDN control plane is investigated through the proposed technique providing numerical results to demonstrate the feasibility of the approach

IoT-cloud authorization and delegation mechanisms for ubiquitous sensing and actuation

© 2016 IEEE.In the roadmap for the implementation of ubiquitous computing, ubiquitous sensing and actuation is a milestone still to be reached. It refers to providing sensing and actuation facilities anytime and everywhere. This does not just imply to interconnect sensors and actuators through the Internet, but also and mainly to provide this facilities. IoT-Cloud computing paradigms such as the sensing and actuation as a service one could be a proper way to address this problem. In past work we developed an SAaaS framework extending OpenStack with specific functionalities for resource constrained nodes, Stack4Things. In this paper we focus on access control, authorization and delegation mechanisms which are basic mechanisms for the implementation of the UbSA vision. Thus starting from Stack4Things, we describe how we adapted and extended mechanisms provided by OpenStack, with specific regard to Keystone, with new functionalities for delegation and access control. A use case in the smart city scenario of #SmartME describes the proposed solution in practice

Stack4Things: a sensing-and-actuation-as-a-service framework for IoT and cloud integration

© 2016, Institut Mines-Télécom and Springer-Verlag France. With the increasing adoption of embedded smart devices and their involvement in different application fields, complexity may quickly grow, thus making vertical ad hoc solutions ineffective. Recently, the Internet of Things (IoT) and Cloud integration seems to be one of the winning solutions in order to opportunely manage the proliferation of both data and devices. In this paper, following the idea to reuse as much tooling as possible, we propose, with regards to infrastructure management, to adopt a widely used and competitive framework for Infrastructure-as-a-Service such as OpenStack. Therefore, we describe approaches and architectures so far preliminary implemented for enabling Cloud-mediated interactions with droves of sensor- and actuator-hosting nodes by presenting Stack4Things, a framework for Sensing-and-Actuation-as-a-Service (SAaaS). In particular, starting from a detailed requirement analysis, in this work, we focus on the subsystems of Stack4Things devoted to resource control and management as well as on those related to the management and collection of sensing data. Several use cases are presented justifying how our proposed framework can be viewed as a concrete step toward the complete fulfillment of the SAaaS vision

Personalized Health Tracking with Edge Computing Technologies

© 2016, Springer Science+Business Media New York.The health monitoring component is the essential block, a pillar of several e-health systems. Plenty of health tracking applications and specific technologies such as smart devices, wearables, and data management systems are available. To be effective, promptly reacting to issues, a health monitoring service must ensure short delays in data sensing, collection, and processing activities. This is an open problem that distributed computing paradigms, such as Internet of Things (IoT), Cloud, and Edge computing, could address. The solution proposed in this paper is based on Stack4Things, an IoT-Cloud framework to manage edge nodes such as mobiles, smart objects, network devices, workstations, as a whole, a computing infrastructure allowing to provide resources on-demand, as services, to end users. Through Stack4Things facilities, the health tracking system can locate the closer computing resource to offload processing and thus reducing latency per the Edge computing paradigm

Cloud-based network virtualization: An IoT use case

© Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering 2015. In light of an overarching scheme about extending the capabilities of Internet of things (IoT) with Cloud-enabled mechanisms, network virtualization is a key enabler of infrastructure-oriented IoT solutions. In particular, without network virtualization infrastructure cannot really be considered flexible enough to meet emerging requirements, and even administrative duties, such as management, maintenance and large-scale automation, would turn out to be brittle and addressed by special casing, leading to loss of generality and a variety of corner cases. We propose a Cloud-based network virtualization approach for IoT, based on the Open- Stack IaaS framework, where its networking subsystem, Neutron, gets extended to accomodate virtual networks and arbitrary topologies among virtualmachines and globally dispersed smart objects, whichever the setup and constraints of the underlying physical networks. This work outlines a motivating use case for our approach, and the ensuing discussion is provided to frame the benefits of the underlying design

Hospitalized Patient Monitoring and Early Treatment Using IoT and Cloud

© 2016, Springer Science+Business Media New York.The adoption of Internet of Things devices and, more in general, embedded systems, endowed with sensors and actuators, keeps rising globally, and the scope of their involvement broadens, for instance in e-Health applications. This work describes our integration of IoT paradigms and resource ecosystems with a tailored Cloud-oriented device-centric environment, by focusing on an e-Health scenario, featuring monitoring and early treatment of hospitalized patients, by focusing on Cloud-enabled event detection coupled with coordinated reaction

Enabling mechanisms for Cloud-based network virtualization in IoT

© 2015 IEEE.As part of a wider effort in integrating Internet of things (IoT) with the Cloud under the guise of infrastructure to be provided as-a-Service, network virtualization plays an essential role, both as an enabler of Infrastructure-as-a-Service scenarios and as a basic building block of the solution for the IoT-focused Cloud provider. Virtualization of the networking facilities for Cloud-managed IoT resources needs mechanisms to deal with the inherent complexity. This work outlines an implementation-agnostic approach to such a problem, reflected in our evolving Stack4Things architecture, derived from OpenStack, and implemented starting from such codebase, by leveraging also a choice of modern tooling and protocols. A specific use case and the discussion that follows are provided to frame the benefits of this strategy

A Stack4Things-based platform for mobile crowdsensing services

© 2016 International Telecommunication Union.As mobiles grow pervasive in people's lives and expand their reach, Mobile CrowdSensing (MCS) and similar paradigms are going to play an ever more prominent role. There is a pressing need then to ease developers and service providers in embracing the opportunity, and that means offering a platform for such efforts. This in turn means providing a solid foundational architecture with abstractions and sound layering for MCS application designs to be mapped over it. This should base on a flexible infrastructure able to provide resources to MCS applications according to their requirements, hopefully on-demand. A service-oriented/Cloud model can perfectly fill this gap. This paper is a first step in this direction, proposing to adopt Stack4Things (S4T), an OpenStack-based platform for managing sensing and IoT nodes, for runtime customization of resources and their functions to support MCS services and applications. This implies developing and extending the S4T platform further to the specific requirements coming from off-the-shelf, e.g., Android-based, mobiles, as well as describing an example S4T-powered MCS application, Pothole Detection Mapping, to highlight the role of the platform

Quantitative evaluation of Cloud-based network virtualization mechanisms for IoT

Copyright © 2016 EAI. Integration of the Internet of Things (IoT) with the Cloud may lead to a range of different architectures and solutions. Our efforts in this domain are mainly geared towards making IoT systems available as service-oriented infrastructure. Under Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) scenarios, network virtualization is a core building block of any solution, even more so for IoT-focused Cloud providers. Enabling mechanisms are required to support virtualization of the networking facilities for IoT resources that are managed by the Cloud. This work describes an approach to network virtualization based on popular off-the-shelf tools and protocols in place of application-specific logic, acting as a blueprint in the design of the Stack4Things architecture, an OpenStack-derived framework to provide IaaS-like services from a pool of IoT devices. We quantitatively evaluate the underlying mechanisms demonstrating that the proposed approach exhibits mostly comparable performance with respect to standard technologies for virtual private networks, or at least good enough for the kind of underlying hardware, e.g., smart boards, whilst still representing a more flexible solution