A resource oriented integration architecture for the Internet of Things: A business process perspective

The vision of the Internet of Things (IoT) foresees a future Internet incorporating smart physical objects that offer hosted functionality as IoT services. These services when integrated with the traditional enterprise level services form the creation of ambient intelligence for a wide range of applications. To facilitate seamless access and service life cycle management of large, distributed and heterogeneous IoT resources, service oriented computing and resource oriented approaches have been widely used as promising technologies. However, a reference architecture integrating IoT services into either of these two technologies is still an open research challenge. In this article, we adopt the resource oriented approach to provide an end-to-end integration architecture of front-end IoT devices with the back-end business process applications. The proposed architecture promises a programmer friendly access to IoT services, an event management mechanism to propagate context information of IoT devices, a service replacement facility upon service failure, and a decentralized execution of the IoT aware business processes.     

普适计算中间件技术的研究与进展

当前,普适计算已经成为计算机科学中一个极具活力和影响力的研究领域。普适计算环境规模很大并且具有高度异构性,如网络架构的异构性、硬件平台的异构性、操作系统的异构性、应用服务的异构性等,而普适计算中间件技术可以解决异构性和跨平台特征,提供不同服务的集成应用,因此成为普适计算中的一个研究热点。基于此,本文对于目前国外关于普适计算中间件技术的研究现状做了一个总结;通过分析和比较,给出了普适计算中间件的设计原则;探讨了普适计算中间件技术的未来发展方向。     

物联网安全测评技术综述

近年来,物联网大规模应用于智能制造、智能家居、智慧医疗等产业,物联网的安全问题日益突出,给物联网的发展带来了前所未有的挑战。安全测评技术是保障物联网安全的重要手段,在物联网应用的整个开发生命周期都需要进行安全测评工作,以保证物联网服务的安全性和健壮性。物联网节点面临计算能力、体积和功耗受限等挑战,智慧城市等应用场景提出了大规模泛在异构连接和复杂跨域的需求。本文首先总结了目前物联网中常用的安全测评方法和风险管理技术;然后从绿色、智能和开放三个方面分析物联网安全技术的发展现状和存在的安全问题,并总结了物联网安全测评面临的挑战以及未来的研究方向。     

A survey on service-oriented middleware for wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are used for many applications such as environmental monitoring, infrastructure security, healthcare applications, and traffic control. The design and development of such applications must address many challenges dictated by WSN characteristics on one hand and the targeted applications on the other. One of the emerging approaches used for relaxing these challenges is using service-oriented middleware (SOM). Service-oriented computing, in general, aims to make services available and easily accessible through standardized models and protocols without having to worry about the underlying infrastructures, development models, or implementation details. SOM could play an important role in facilitating the design, development, and implementation of service-oriented systems. This will help achieve interoperability, loose coupling, and heterogeneity support. Furthermore, SOM approaches will provision non-functional requirements like scalability, reliability, flexibility, and Quality of Service (QoS) assurance. This paper surveys the current work in SOM and the trends and challenges to be addressed when designing and developing these solutions for WSN.     

An Adaptive Middleware for Context-Sensitive Communications for Real-Time Applications in Ubiquitous Computing Environments

Context-sensitivity is an important expected capability in applications in ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) environments. These applications need to use different contextual information from the user, host device, on board sensors, network, and the ambient environments to systematically adapt their actions. In addition, some context-sensitive applications may use specific contextual conditions to trigger impromptu and possibly short-lived interactions with applications in other devices. This property, referred to as context-sensitive or context-aware communications, allows applications to form short-range mobile ad hoc networks consisting of mobile and stationary devices, sensors, and other computing resources. Real-time applications, especially those having reactive behavior, running on embedded devices and requiring context-sensitive communications support, pose new challenges related to systematic representation of specific contexts, associations of contexts with real-time actions, timely context data collection and propagation, and transparent context-sensitive connection establishment. An object-based middleware can be effective to meet these challenges if such a middleware can provide a well-defined development framework as well as lightweight runtime services. In this paper, an adaptive and object-based middleware, called reconfigurable context-sensitive middleware (RCSM) is presented to facilitate context-sensitive communications in ubicomp environments. To facilitates context-sensitive communications, RCSM provides a context-aware interface definition language for specifying context-sensitive interfaces of real-time objects, an object container framework for generating interfaces-specific context-analyzers, and a context-sensitive object request broker for context-sensitive object discovery and impromptu connection management. RCSM is adaptive in the sense that depending on the context-sensitive behavior of the applications, it adapts its object discovery and connection management mechanisms.     

Service-oriented middleware: A survey

Service-oriented computing aims to make services available and easily accessible through standardized models and protocols without having to worry about the underlying infrastructures, development models or implementation details. This helps achieve interoperability and loose coupling among distributed application components and also among user processes. In addition, this model offers users an on-demand usage model where they only use the services needed for the time needed, which relieves them from having to build and maintain a complete system in house. However, the design and implementation of robust and efficient service-oriented applications are still as complex and demanding as any other type of distributed application. Thus middleware can play an important role in facilitating the design, development and implementation of service-oriented systems. Furthermore, middleware approaches will provision non-functional requirements like performance, scalability, reliability, flexibility and quality of service (QoS) assurance. A lot of work has been done in this area and in this paper we survey some of this work in service-oriented middleware (SOM). As we study the different projects we develop a list of the main requirements that SOM should support. We also discuss the main objectives and characteristics of the surveyed approaches, and then we highlight the challenges to be addressed when designing and developing SOM solutions that satisfy the requirements of different application domains.     

A middleware solution for integrating and exploring IoT and HPC capabilities

Even with the considerable advances in the development of middleware solutions, there is still a substantial gap in Internet of Things (IoT) and high-performance computing (HPC) integration. It is not possible to expose services such as processing, storage, sensing, security, context awareness, and actuating in a unified manner with the existing middleware solutions. The consequence is the utilization of several solutions with their particularities, thus requiring different skills. Besides that, the users have to solve the integration and all heterogeneity issues. To reduce the gap between IoT and HPC technologies, we present the JavaCá&Lá (JCL), a middleware used to help the implementation of distributed user-applications classified as IoT-HPC. This ubiquity is possible because JCL incorporates (1) a single application programming interface to program different device categories; (2) the support for different programming models; (3) the interoperability of sensing, processing, storage, and actuating services; (4) the integration with MQTT technology; and (5) security, context awareness, and actions services introduced through JCL application programming interface. Experimental evaluations demonstrated that JCL scales when doing the IoT-HPC services. Additionally, we identify that customized JCL deployments become an alternative when Java-Android and vice-versa code conversion is necessary. The MQTT brokers usually are faster than JCL HashMap sensing storage, but they do not perform distributed, so they cannot handle a huge amount of sensing data. Finally, a short example for monitoring moving objects exemplifies JCL facilities for IoT-HPC development.     

Combining heterogeneous service technologies for building an Internet of Things middleware

Radio-frequency identification (RFID) is a technology that allows ordinary objects to be uniquely identified by “smart tags” which are also capable of storing small quantities of data. The term Internet of Things was originated from a vision strongly coupled with supply-chain concerns and RFID tagged objects. However the idea of such Internet of Things has evolved in a wider sense, referring now to a ubiquitous object society combining RFID, sensor networks and pervasive computing technologies. This scenario involves different requirements such as heterogeneity and dynamicity of objects, sensors, applications and protocols as well as the need for allowing the dynamic evolution of such applications. These issues seemed to be easily addressed if the principles of service-oriented computing (SOC), like loose coupling and heterogeneity, are used for constructing such architectures and applications. In this paper we underline what benefits SOC can offer to constructing a middleware for the Internet of Things. These concepts have been applied in a service-oriented middleware that tries to leverage the existing Internet of Things architectural concepts by using SOC principles in order to bring more flexibility and dynamicity. We describe the approaches used in that middleware and the lessons learned from that experience. This middleware was initially tested on an application for tracking and monitoring supply-chain objects, and later extended to target wider application domains that are also described in this paper. The project described here has become part of the OW2 AspireRFID open-source project.     

Efficient data-forwarding method in delay-tolerant P2P networking for IoT services

These days Internet of Things (IoT), which consists of smart objects such as sensor nodes is the most important technology for providing intelligent services. In the IoT ecosystem, wireless sensor networks deliver collected information from IoT devices to a server via sink nodes, and IoT services are provided by peer-to-peer (P2P) networking between the server and the IoT devices. Particularly, IoT applications with wide service area requires the mobile sink nodes to cover the service area. To employ mobile sink nodes, the network adopts delay-tolerant capability by which delay-tolerant nodes try to transmit data when they connect to the mobile sink node in the application service field. However, if the connection status between a IoT device and a mobile sink node is not good, the efficiency of data forwarding will be decreased. In addition, retransmission in bad connection cause high energy consumption for data transmission. Therefore, data forwarding in the delay-tolerant based services needs to take the connection status into account. The proposed method predicts the connection status using naïve Bayesian classifier and determines whether the delay tolerant node transmits data to the mobile sink node or not. Furthermore, the efficiency of the proposed method was validated through extensive computer simulations.     

Internet of Things for the Future of Smart Agriculture: A Comprehensive Survey of Emerging Technologies

This paper presents a comprehensive review of emerging technologies for the internet of things (IoT)-based smart agriculture. We begin by summarizing the existing surveys and describing emergent technologies for the agricultural IoT, such as unmanned aerial vehicles, wireless technologies, open-source IoT platforms, software defined networking (SDN), network function virtualization (NFV) technologies, cloud/fog computing, and middleware platforms. We also provide a classification of IoT applications for smart agriculture into seven categories: including smart monitoring, smart water management, agrochemicals applications, disease management, smart harvesting, supply chain management, and smart agricultural practices. Moreover, we provide a taxonomy and a side-by-side comparison of the state-of-the-art methods toward supply chain management based on the blockchain technology for agricultural IoTs. Furthermore, we present real projects that use most of the aforementioned technologies, which demonstrate their great performance in the field of smart agriculture. Finally, we highlight open research challenges and discuss possible future research directions for agricultural IoTs.      

Fog computing for next-generation Internet of Things: Fundamental,state-of-the-art and research challenges

In recent times, the Internet of Things (IoT) applications, including smart transportation, smart healthcare, smart grid, smart city, etc. generate a large volume of real-time data for decision making. In the past decades, real-time sensory data have been offloaded to centralized cloud servers for data analysis through a reliable communication channel. However, due to the long communication distance between end-users and centralized cloud servers, the chances of increasing network congestion, data loss, latency, and energy consumption are getting significantly higher. To address the challenges mentioned above, fog computing emerges in a distributed environment that extends the computation and storage facilities at the edge of the network. Compared to centralized cloud infrastructure, a distributed fog framework can support delay-sensitive IoT applications with minimum latency and energy consumption while analyzing the data using a set of resource-constraint fog/edge devices. Thus our survey covers the layered IoT architecture, evaluation metrics, and applications aspects of fog computing and its progress in the last four years. Furthermore, the layered architecture of the standard fog framework and different state-of-the-art techniques for utilizing computing resources of fog networks have been covered in this study. Moreover, we included an IoT use case scenario to demonstrate the fog data offloading and resource provisioning example in heterogeneous vehicular fog networks. Finally, we examine various challenges and potential solutions to establish interoperable communication and computation for next-generation IoT applications in fog networks.     

Fog computing for the integration of agents and web services in an autonomic reflexive middleware

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) has emerged as a dominant architecture for interoperability between applications, by using a weakly coupled model based on the flexibility provided by web services, which has led to a wide range of applications, which is known as cloud computing. On the other hand, multi-agent system (MAS) is widely used in the industry, because it provides an appropriate solution to complex problems, in a proactive and intelligent way. Specifically, intelligent environments (smart city, smart classroom, cyber-physical system, and smart factory) obtain great benefits by using both architectures, because MAS endows intelligence to the environment, while SOA enables users to interact with cloud services, which improve the capabilities of the devices deployed in the environment. Additionally, the fog computing paradigm extends the cloud computing paradigm to be closer to the things that produce and act on the intelligent environment, allowing to deal with issues like mobility, real time, low latency, geo-localization, among other aspects. In this sense, in this article we present a middleware, which not only is capable of allowing MAS and SOA to communicate in a bidirectional and transparent way, but also it uses the fog computing paradigm autonomously, according to the context and to the system load factor. Additionally, we analyze the performance of the incorporation of the fog computing paradigm in our middleware and compare it with other works.     

ASCM:基于SOA的嵌入式安全关键中间件

由于嵌入式安全关键系统自身的特点和应用环境的特殊性,导致了设计分布式嵌入式安全关键应用比一般的嵌入式实时应用要困难得多。提出了一种新的基于SOA构架的自适应安全关键中间件,极大地简化了嵌入式安全关键系统应用的开发,并对相应的体系结构和关键技术进行了讨论。另外,针对嵌入式安全关键系统运行环境的特殊性,重点讨论了SOA构架中基于动态配置服务的端到端的自适应QoS管理机制和实时容错机制的设计和实现。     

Smart City and IoT

The new Internet of Things (IoT) applications are enabling Smart City initiatives worldwide. It provides the ability to remotely monitor, manage and control devices, and to create new insights and actionable information from massive streams of real-time data. The main features of a smart city include a high degree of information technology integration and a comprehensive application of information resources. The essential components of urban development for a smart city should include smart technology, smart industry, smart services, smart management and smart life. The Internet of Things is about installing sensors (RFID, IR, GPS, laser scanners, etc.) for everything, and connecting them to the internet through specific protocols for information exchange and communications, in order to achieve intelligent recognition, location, tracking, monitoring and management. With the technical support from IoT, smart city need to have three features of being instrumented, interconnected and intelligent. Only then a Smart City can be formed by integrating all these intelligent features at its advanced stage of IOT development. The explosive growth of Smart City and Internet of Things applications creates many scientific and engineering challenges that call for ingenious research efforts from both academia and industry, especially for the development of efficient, scalable, and reliable Smart City based on IoT. New protocols, architectures, and services are in dire needs to respond for these challenges. The goal of the special issue is to bring together scholars, professors, researchers, engineers and administrators resorting to the state-of-the-art technologies and ideas to significantly improve the field of Smart City based on IoT.     

EMMA: Epidemic Messaging Middleware for Ad hoc networks

The characteristics of mobile environments, with the possibility of frequent disconnections and fluctuating bandwidth, have forced a rethink of traditional middleware. In particular, the synchronous communication paradigms often employed in standard middleware do not appear to be particularly suited to ad hoc environments, in which not even the intermittent availability of a backbone network can be assumed. Instead, asynchronous communication seems to be a generally more suitable paradigm for such environments. Message oriented middleware for traditional systems has been developed and used to provide an asynchronous paradigm of communication for distributed systems, and, also for some specific mobile computing systems recently. In this paper, we present our experience in designing, implementing, and evaluating Epidemic Messaging Middleware for Ad hoc networks (EMMA), an adaptation of Java Message Service (JMS) for mobile ad hoc environments, discussing in detail the design challenges and the solutions that have been adopted.

物联网智能终端适配中间件开发模式

针对目前大多数的智能终端应用开与服务开发,需针对终端不同种类、不同的操作系统等进行定制,存在开发周期长,成本高,增加了重复性劳动和资源浪费的问题,阐述并提出研发一款适合各类智能终端的物联网应用适配中间件,以匹配不同数据源和不同终端.研究了中间件的系统架构和技术架构,采用面向对象的思想,融合MVC(Model View Control),Adapter,Singleton等多种设计模式.智能终端中间件能够提高物联网领域行业应用能力,扩大物联网领域的接入渠道.     

Malicious insiders attack in IoT based Multi-Cloud e-Healthcare environment: <Emphasis Type="Italic">A Systematic Literature Review</Emphasis>

The emergence of Internet of Things (IoT) has introduced smart objects as the fundamental building blocks for developing a smart cyber-physical universal environment. The IoTs have innumerable daily life applications. The healthcare industry particularly has been benefited due to the provision of ubiquitous health monitoring, emergency response services, electronic medical billing, etc. Since IoT devices possess limited storage and processing power, therefore these intelligent objects are unable to efficiently provide the e-health facilities, or process and store enormous amount of collected data. IoTs are merged with Cloud Computing technology in Multi-Cloud form that basically helps cover the limitations of IoTs by offering a secure and on-demand shared pool of resources i.e., networks, servers, storage, applications, etc., to deliver effective and well-organized e-health amenities. Although the framework based on the integration of IoT and Multi-Cloud is contributing towards better patient care, yet on the contrary, it is challenging the privacy and reliability of the patients’ information. The purpose of this systematic literature review is to identify the top security threat and to evaluate the existing security techniques used to combat this attack and their applicability in IoT and Multi-Cloud based e-Healthcare environment.     

基于SOA的嵌入式安全关键中间件

由于嵌入式安全关键系统自身的特点和应用环境的特殊性,导致了设计分布式嵌入式安全关键应用比一般的嵌入式实时应用要困难得多。提出了一种新的基于SOA构架的自适应安全关键中间件,极大地简化了嵌入式安全关键系统应用的开发,并对相应的体系结构和关键技术进行了讨论。另外,针对嵌入式安全关键系统运行环境的特殊性,重点讨论了SOA构架中基于动态配置服务的端到端的自适应QoS管理机制和实时容错机制的设计和实现。     

Intelligent service processing in common USN middleware

The Ubiquitous sensor network (USN) is composed of several heterogeneous sensors with a variety of characteristics. An application based on the sensor network also has various requirements to provide services to users. Therefore it is important to develop the common USN middleware for flexible integration between the sensor networks and applications. Especially, this paper focuses on intelligent service management which is one of the main functions of USN middleware. Several applications in the sensor network environment support not only monitoring services, but also sensor-based context-awareness and intelligent services. In many applications, however, approaches to support intelligent services depend on the application because the standard method has been undefined yet. Therefore this paper proposes a common method for processing intelligent services in USN middleware independent of an application. The proposed method is implemented and evaluated as a component of USN middleware.     

Efficient allocation of resources in multiple heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are useful for a wide range of applications, from different domains. Recently, new features and design trends have emerged in the WSN field, making those networks appealing not only to the scientific community but also to the industry. One such trend is the running different applications on heterogeneous sensor nodes deployed in multiple WSNs in order to better exploit the expensive physical network infrastructure. Another trend deals with the capability of accessing sensor generated data from the Web, fitting WSNs in novel paradigms of Internet of Things (IoT) and Web of Things (WoT). Using well-known and broadly accepted Web standards and protocols enables the interoperation of heterogeneous WSNs and the integration of their data with other Web resources, in order to provide the final user with value-added information and applications. Such emergent scenarios where multiple networks and applications interoperate to meet high level requirements of the user will pose several changes in the design and execution of WSN systems. One of these challenges regards the fact that applications will probably compete for the resources offered by the underlying sensor nodes through the Web. Thus, it is crucial to design mechanisms that effectively and dynamically coordinate the sharing of the available resources to optimize resource utilization while meeting application requirements. However, it is likely that Quality of Service (QoS) requirements of different applications cannot be simultaneously met, while efficiently sharing the scarce networks resources, thus bringing the need of managing an inherent tradeoff. In this paper, we argue that a middleware platform is required to manage heterogeneous WSNs and efficiently share their resources while satisfying user needs in the emergent scenarios of WoT. Such middleware should provide several services to control running application as well as to distribute and coordinate nodes in the execution of submitted sensing tasks in an energy-efficient and QoS-enabled way. As part of the middleware provided services we present the Resource Allocation in Heterogeneous WSNs (SACHSEN) algorithm. SACHSEN is a new resource allocation heuristic for systems composed of heterogeneous WSNs that effectively deals with the tradeoff between possibly conflicting QoS requirements and exploits heterogeneity of multiple WSNs.