Vol. 72, n° 1-2, January-February 2017
Content available on Springerlink
Guest editors
Nadjib Aistaadi, ESIEE Paris, France
Raouf Boutaba, University of Waterloo, ON, Canada
Yutaka Takahashi, University of Kyoto, Japan
Editorial
Cloudification of the Internet of Things
Nadjib Aistaadi, Raouf Butaba, Yutaka Takahashi
Information-centric sensor networks for cognitive IoT: an overview
Departement of Computer Engineering, Middle East Technical University, Northern Cyprus Campus, Turkey
Abstract Information-centric sensor networks (ICSNs) are a paradigm of wireless sensor networks that focus on delivering information from the network based on user requirements, rather than serving as a point-to-point data communication network. Introducing learning in such networks can help to dynamically identify good data delivery paths by correlating past actions and results, make intelligent adaptations to improve the network lifetime, and also improve the quality of information delivered by the network to the user. However, there are several factors and limitations that must be considered while choosing a learning strategy. In this paper, we identify some of these factors and explore various learning techniques that have been applied to sensor networks and other applications with similar requirements in the past. We provide our recommendation on the learning strategy based on how well it complements the needs of ICSNs, while keeping in mind the cost, computation, and operational overhead limitations.
Keywords Information-centric sensor networks, Cognitive node, QoI, Reinforcement learning.
A resilient Internet of Things architecture for smart cities
, Karima Velasquez, Marilia Curado, Edmundo Monteiro
Departement of Informatics Engineering, University of Coimbra, Portugal
Abstract Nowadays, technology is such an integral part of our lives that the dependency on its benefits is growing faster than ever. With the arrival of the paradigms of smart cities and the Internet of Things, citizens are able to improve their quality of life. Given that sensors and actuators deployed in smart cities usually have limited resources, today, it is a common practice to use cloud computing to extend the scope and benefits of smart cities. Taking into consideration that communication between applications and devices is vital for a good performance of services in a smart city, it is necessary to design new architectures and mechanisms to provide reliability in communications. A key aspect that has to be addressed by the new communications approaches is the possibility to recover the network and its services in case of faults, without human intervention. In this paper, a novel architecture to improve the resilience level of the infrastructure in the Internet of Things is proposed. Moreover, technologies to implement the components from the architecture are suggested. This proposal is discussed within the scope of the SusCity project.
Keywords Internet of Things, Smart city, Resilience, Cloud computing, Architecture.
The design of the gateway for the Cloud of Things
Riccardo Petrolo1, Roberto Morabito2, Valeria Loscr, Nathalie Mitton1
(1) Inria Lille, France
(2) Ericsson Research NomadicLab, Finland
Abstract The increasing momentum of the Internet of Things (IoT) leaded to the development of a huge number of applications in different domains. Those applications are based on different standards and protocols, making therefore the IoT landscape widely fragmented. In this context, the evolution of Web semantic technologies together with the popularity of Cloud computing represents a solution to enable the horizontal integration of various IoT applications and platforms. This is what the Cloud of Things (CoT) aims to achieve. In this paper, we propose the design of a gateway for the Cloud of Things. The proposed gateway is able to manage semantic-like things and at the same time to act as an end-point for the presentation of data to users. Moreover, thanks to the use of virtualized software—which introduces a negligible impact in terms of performance—the gateway enables a lightweight and dense deployment of services. The paper describes the above technologies and how to combine them in order to design the gateway. Furthermore, we provide information about use cases, hardware, performance evaluation, and future hints to enhance the gateway.
Keywords Cloud of Things, Distributed cloud computing, Sensor Networks, Internet of Things.
Meeting IoT platform requirements with open pub/sub solutions
Daniel Happ, Niels Karowski, Thomas Menzel, Vlado Handziski, Adam Wolisz
Technische Universität Berlin, Telecommunication Networks Group (TKN), Germany
Abstract The internet of things (IoT) will enable a range of applications providing enhanced awareness and control of the physical environment. Current systems typically sense and actuate physical phenomena locally and then rely on a cloud-based publish/subscribe infrastructure for distribution of sensor and control data to end-users and external services. Despite the popularity of pub/sub solutions in this context, it is still unclear which features such a middleware should have to successfully meet the specific requirements of the IoT domain. Questions like how a large number of connected devices that only sporadically send small sensor data messages affect the throughput, and how much additional delay cloud-based pub/sub systems typically introduce, that are very important for practitioners, have not been tackled in a systematic way. In this work, we address these limitations by analyzing the main requirements of IoT platforms and by evaluating which of those features are supported by prominent open pub/sub solutions. We further carry out a performance evaluation in the public cloud using four popular pub/sub implementations: rabbitMQ (AMQP), mosquitto (MQTT), ejabberd (XMPP), and ZeroMQ. We study the maximum sustainable throughput and delay under realistic load conditions using traces from real sensors. While the core features are similar, the analyzed pub/sub systems differ in their filtering capabilities, semantic guarantees, and encoding. Our evaluation indicates that those differences can have a notable impact on throughput and delay of cloud-based IoT platforms.
Keywords IoT, Pub/sub, AMQP, MQTT, XMPP, ZeroMQ, Performance evaluation.
Stack4Things: a sensing-and-actuation-as-a-service framework for IoT and cloud integration
Francesco Longo1, Dario Bruneo1, Salvatore Distefano1, Giovanni Merlino1,2, Antonio Puliafito1
(1) Università degli Studi di Messina, Italy
(2) Kazan Federal University, Russia
Abstract 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.
Keywords IoT, Cloud, OpenStack, WebSocket, WAMP, SAaaS.
Enabling the IoT paradigm through multi-tenancy supported by scalable data acquisition layer
Nikola , , ,
(1) Schneider Electric DMS NS, Serbia
(2) Computing and Control Dpt, University of Novi Sad, Serbia
Abstract The Internet of things (IoT) is composed of a large number of end systems. Data gathered from these end systems are processed in the cloud environment. This paper delineates multi-tenancy as a prerequisite for enabling cost effective IoT solutions using any cloud platform. In the IoT world, a large number of end systems imply a large number of users who should have open access to specific subsets of data. As multi-tenancy includes sharing the same application instance, security is a key requirement when engineering new software as a service (SaaS) applications. This paper describes multi-tenant implementation approaches and inspects security aspects and data isolation. It proposes a solution for data layer scalability in order to achieve the desired performances. Furthermore, it proposes an SOA solution to provide a secure multi-tenant web service with scalable data layers. We demonstrate that the proposed approach results in some performance loss, which is not acceptable for performance critical applications but is acceptable for services developed for tenants themselves. We experimentally confirm our data scalability theory based on an actor model and developed a cost estimator. Finally, we conclude that application level multi-tenancy is necessary from a cost efficiency point of view in a scenario involving a large number of users. The solution was tested in a private cloud environment.
Keywords IoT, Cloud, Multi-tenancy, Actor model, Scalable database, Multi-tenant patterns, Multi-tenant design, Multi-tenant SOA.
Scheduling internet of things applications in cloud computing
Husnu S. Narman1, Md. Shohrab Hossain2, Mohammed Atiquzzaman3, Haiying Shen1
(1) Holcombe Dpt of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Clemson University, USA (2) Departement of Computer Science and Engineering, Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology, Bangladesh
(3) School of Computer Science, University of Oklahoma, USA
Abstract Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the greatest technology revolutions in the history. Due to IoT potential, daily objects will be consciously worked in harmony with optimized performances. However, today, technology is not ready to fully bring its power to our daily life because of huge data analysis requirements in instant time. On the other hand, the powerful data management of cloud computing gives IoT an opportunity to make the revolution in our life. However, the traditional cloud computing server schedulers are not ready to provide services to IoT because IoT consists of a number of heterogeneous devices and applications which are far away from standardization. Therefore, to meet the expectations of users, the traditional cloud computing server schedulers should be improved to efficiently schedule and allocate IoT requests. There are several proposed scheduling algorithms for cloud computing in the literature. However, these scheduling algorithms are limited because of considering neither heterogeneous servers nor dynamic scheduling approach for different priority requests. Our objective is to propose dynamic dedicated server scheduling for heterogeneous and homogeneous systems to efficiently provide desired services by considering priorities of requests. Results show that the proposed scheduling algorithm improves throughput up to 40 % in heterogeneous and homogeneous cloud computing systems for IoT requests. Our proposed scheduling algorithm and related analysis will help cloud service providers build efficient server schedulers which are adaptable to homogeneous and heterogeneous environments by considering system performance metrics, such as drop rate, throughput, and utilization in IoT.
Keywords Internet of things, Cloud computing, Analytical model, Heterogeneous and homogeneous multi server, Multi-class, Queuing system, Performance, Priority.
A secure cloud-based Personal Health Record framework for a multi-owner environment
D. Sangeetha, V. Vaidehi
Madras Institute of Technology, Anna University, India
Abstract Personal Health Record (PHR) is an upcoming online service model for sharing health information. It helps patients to create, control, and share their health information with other users as well as healthcare providers. When PHR is outsourced to a third party semi trusted server, issues such as unauthorized access, privacy, and security concerns arise which remains an open challenge in a multi owner cloud environment. To overcome these challenges, a secure cloud based PHR framework for sharing PHRs among multiple users using attribute-based encryption (ABE) is proposed. In this proposed framework, patients can encrypt their PHRs and store them on semi trusted cloud servers. Moreover, patients can maintain control over access to their PHRs by assigning fine-grained, attribute-based access privileges to chosen data users. In order to achieve fine-grained access control, the proposed PHR framework is divided into personal domain (PSDs) and public domain (PUDs). To ensure security in a cloud based PHR framework, a secure key-policy attribute-based encryption (S-KP-ABE) and privacy preserving decentralized collusion resistant attribute-based encryption (PP-DCR-ABE) algorithm is implemented in the PSDs and PUDs, respectively. From the experimental analysis, it is shown that the proposed cloud based PHR framework improves the efficiency of the system in terms of encryption, decryption, and key generation time in both the domains. Also, the proposed framework is proved to be collusion resistant and the security analysis ensures privacy preservation, trustworthiness between user and authorities, thereby enhancing the security of PHR users in a multi owner environment.
Keywords Personal Health Record, Attribute-based encryption, Fine-grained access control, Privacy preservation, Collusion attack.
Service placement for latency reduction in the Internet of Things
Karima Velasquez, David Perez Abreu, Marilia Curado, Edmundo Monteiro
Departement of Informatics Engineering, University of Coimbra, Portugal
Abstract New services and applications become part of our daily activities as we evolve into new solutions supported by cutting-edge paradigms, like the Internet of Things and Smart Cities. In order to properly achieve the benefits theoretically provided by these models, new kinds of services must be designed. These new services have special requirements, as well as the users that access to them. One of these requirements is low latency levels, since a delayed reply could render to chaos for applications such as eHealth and public safety. The communication infrastructure must cope with these challenges by offering innovative solutions. One of these solutions is a smart service placement system that facilitates the location of services in the proper position according to specific needs. On this paper, a service placement architecture for the Internet of Things is proposed, with especial emphasis in its main module, the Service Orchestrator, for which implementation details are provided, including a model for the service placement task. Furthermore, technologies to implement the modules from the architecture are suggested. This proposal, as well as its validation, is framed within the scope of the SusCity project.
Keywords Latency, Fog, IoT, Service placement.