(Archived) - IoT

Learning Semantic Features from Web Services

mantunes — Wed, 27 Jul 2016 17:06:19 +0000

In recent years the technological world has grown by incorporating billions of small sensing devices, collecting and sharing real-world information. As the number of such devices grows, it becomes increasingly difficult to manage all these new information sources. There is no uniform way to share, process and understand context information. It is our personal belief that IoT and M2M scenarios will only achieve their full potential when all the devices will work and learn together without human interaction. In this paper we review the most relevant semantic metrics and propose a new unsupervised model that minimizes sense-conflation problem. Our solution was evaluated against Miller-Charles dataset, outperforming our previous work in every metric.

Smart Cloud of Things: An Evolved IoT Platform for Telco Providers

mantunes — Wed, 20 Jan 2016 11:05:23 +0000

Although many environments are powered by smart solutions, users do not
have a simple way to gather their collective knowledge and program devices’
behaviour. Telecommunication (Telco) providers wish to act as the facilitator,
but still lack proper components for enabling integrated services over their
networks, even though this work is already in active standardisation. In
this work we present the architecture of a IoT solution developed in close
collaboration with Telco providers, its evolution, which we call SCoT (Smart
Cloud of Things), and the best practices from the several pilots we have been
running. The architecture builds upon ETSI standards, combined with a rich
service execution environment, providing facilitated orchestration of services
and devices, as well as integrated portals for end users access.

Information-Centric Networking for the Internet of Things: Challenges and Opportunities

dcorujo — Mon, 17 Aug 2015 10:18:16 +0000

In view of evolving the Internet infrastructure, Information-Centric Networking (ICN) is promoting a communication model, which is fundamentally different from the traditional IP address-centric model. The ICN approach consists in the retrieval of content by (unique) names, regardless of origin server location (i.e., IP address), application and distribution channel, thus enabling in-network caching/replication and content-based security. The expected benefits in terms of improved data dissemination efficiency and robustness in challenging communication scenarios, claim the high potential of ICN as an innovative networking paradigm in the Internet of Things (IoT) domain. IoT is a challenging environment, mainly due to the high number of heterogeneous and potentially constrained networked devices, the unique and heavy traffic patterns. The application of ICN principles in such a context opens new opportunities, while requiring careful design choices. This article critically discusses potential ways towards this goal, by surveying the current literature, after presenting several possible motivations for the introduction of ICN in the context of IoT. Major challenges and opportunities are also highlighted, serving as guidelines for progress beyond the state of the art in this timely and increasingly relevant topic.

Adapting SDN datacenters to support Cloud IIoT applications

dcorujo — Wed, 24 Jun 2015 13:05:57 +0000

IIoT (Industrial Internet of Things) cloud applications require reliable, fault-tolerant networks, supporting real-time guarantees and allowing interaction with other applications already existing in the datacenter. The Software Defined Networks (SDN) paradigm is especially suited for the management of the network cloud because of its fine grained admission control and the management flexibility provided by the centralized resource management. This paper presents a SDN management approach for IIoT datacenters, which provides an efficient fault-tolerant network, enabled with deterministic QoS guarantees. By taking advantage of a centralized resource management mechanism, the proposed solution integrates topology definition with resource allocation, allowing to efficiently distribute available network resources for admitted packet flows.

Unified platform for M2M Telco Providers

mantunes — Tue, 09 Sep 2014 14:13:24 +0000

Although many environments are powered by M2M solutions, users do not have a simple way to gather their collective knowledge and program devices' behaviour. Also, Telco providers still lack proper components for enabling integrated services over their networks. We present the final architecture of the APOLLO project, which developed a full blown enhanced M2M platform encompassing sensors, management and applications platform for a major Telco provider. APOLLO builds on top of ETSI M2M specifications and rich service execution environments providing easy orchestration of services to end-users.

Semantic-based Publish/Subscribe for M2M

mantunes — Tue, 09 Sep 2014 13:54:58 +0000

The number of connected devices is expected to soar in the coming years, each one of them collects and distributes real-world information though various systems. As the number of such connected devices grows, it becomes increasingly difficult to store and share all these new sources of information. Several context representation schemes try to standardize this informa-tion, however none of them have been widely adopted. Publish/ subscribe paradigm has proven to be an adequate abstraction for large scale information dissemination, but none of current variations is well suited for context information. In a previous publication we addressed these challenges, however our solution has some drawbacks: poor scalability and semantic extraction. The aim of this paper is twofold. First, we discuss an efficient way to deal with representation schemes diversity and propose a d-dimensional context organization model. Second, we propose a semantic-based publish/subscribe system that is well suited for M2M scenarios. Our evaluation shows that d-dimensional organization model outperforms our previous solution in both speed and space requirements.

MINDiT: A Framework for Media Independent Access to Things

dcorujo — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 10:39:37 +0000

Deploying Smart Environments often implies a plethora of co-existing devices and services, each with their own set of features, requirements and interfacing characteristics. These intricate scenarios are further exacerbated when such devices are coupled with networking capabilities, globalizing their interaction opportunities to create the so-called Internet of Things. In such interconnected heterogeneous environments, the joint operation of entities requires a flexible framework that enables and simplifies interfacing between elements. In this paper, we propose MINDiT, a framework that provides a common abstract interface towards the communication support with different entities. It incorporates cross-layer mechanisms inspired on the existing IEEE 802.21 technology, suitably modified to facilitate and optimize deployment in scenarios featuring both high-level, and low-powered network-restricted entities. MINDiT was validated through a prototype built over an open-source IEEE 802.21 implementation. We further compared its signaling impact against other solutions, and evaluated its performance over a smart environment featuring a multimedia scenario with multiple devices and services.

A Framework for the Connectivity of an Internet of Things

dcorujo — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 12:33:03 +0000

The evolution of telecommunications has allowed the
coupling of networking features to an ever-increasing plethora
of devices, enabling their connectivity and berthing of an
Internet of Things (IoT). However, the assorted nature of such
“things” implies disparate specifications, requirements and
interfacing, for interaction with high-level decision modules,
services and agents involved in the most distinct kind of
scenarios. The joint operation of all networkable things in a
truly integrated IoT vision requires a flexible framework able to
facilitate interfacing with different elements and concepts. In
this paper we present a framework that builds over the concept
of Media Independence, further enhancing it to encompass the
abstraction of different “things”, by providing the means for
accessing their different interfacing procedures. We highlight
the feasibility and flexibility of this framework by introducing it
into an IoT scenario, enabling a flexible way for interface
retrieval and control of different entities, paving the way for a
truly universal and dynamic connectivity vision.

Sensor Context Information for Energy-Efficient Optimization of Wireless Procedures

dcorujo — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 12:28:49 +0000

The wide deployment of Wireless Local Area
Networks (WLAN) we are witnessing today increases
connectivity opportunities for mobile terminal devices, such as
smartphones. However, continuous scanning for WLAN points of
attachment can be a power exhausting mechanism for such
battery-powered devices. These mobile devices, besides being
equipped with different wireless access interfaces, are also
coupled with sensors such as accelerometer, GPS , luminance
and magnetic compass. In fact, sensors are increasingly being
coupled into different devices and environments and are able to
convey sensing information through networks into decision
entities able to optimize different processes. In this paper we
propose a framework where media independent sensing
information is used to enhance wireless link management
towards energy-efficiency. This framework enables the
dissemination of sensing information towards local and remote
decision entities, enhancing other processes (e.g. mobility) with
sensing information in order to provide true Ambient
Intelligence scenarios. We introduce this framework into a
wireless management scenario able to provide energy-efficient
optimal network connectivity.

A Framework for Flexible Sensor Information Dissemination

msilva — Mon, 16 May 2011 12:42:45 +0000

The integration of the digital world into every aspect of our lives is becoming more and more preeminent. Nowadays, not only humans but also devices and the environments where we dwell are also able to provide their own information, through the usage of sensors. Through their interconnection over communication networks, sensors enable Ambient Intelligent scenarios achieving a true Internet of Things, and crossing the gap between computer systems and the real world. However, the different sensing devices and information generated by them, are of such disparate nature that it becomes increasingly difficult to access and make use of such heterogeneous data. In this paper, we propose a framework which not only considers a media independent information access to sensors and their supplied data, but is also flexible enough to configure and provide different means to best transport collected sensor information via wireless gateways, facilitating its deployment in different scenarios. We demonstrate its usefulness by providing a throughput efficient approach towards the collection and dissemination of sensing data, through sensing information compression and aggregation of multiple sources.