Arne Bröring

Enabling IoT Ecosystems through Platform Interoperability

Today, the Internet of Things (IoT) comprises vertically oriented platforms for things. Developers who want to use them need to negotiate access individually and adapt to the platform-specific API and information models. Having to perform these actions for each platform often outweighs the possible gains from adapting applications to multiple platforms. This fragmentation of the IoT and the missing interoperability result in high entry barriers for developers and prevent the emergence of broadly accepted IoT ecosystems. The BIG IoT (Bridging the Interoperability Gap of the IoT) project aims to ignite an IoT ecosystem as part of the European Platforms Initiative. As part of the project, researchers have devised an IoT ecosystem architecture. It employs five interoperability patterns that enable cross-platform interoperability and can help establish successful IoT ecosystems.

Recipes for IoT applications

The Internet of Things (IoT) is on rise. More and more physical devices and their virtual shadows emerge and become accessible through IoT platforms. Marketplaces are being built to enable and monetize the access to IoT offerings, i.e., data and functions offered by platforms, things, and services. In order to maximize the usefulness of such IoT offerings we need mechanisms that allow their efficient and flexible composition. This paper describes a novel approach for such compositions. The approach is based on the notion of Recipes that define work-flows on how their ingredients, i.e., instances of IoT offerings, shall interact with each other. Furthermore the paper presents a novel user interface that enables users to create and instantiate recipes by selecting their ingredients. An example from the smart mobility domain guides through the paper, illustrates our approach, and demonstrates as a proof-of-concept.

A Categorization of Discovery Technologies for the Internet of Things

Discovery of things as well as their resources, metadata, properties, and capabilities is a fundamental requirement in any Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem. This paper analyzes the state of the art of communication technologies for the IoT with respect to discovery functionalities. Therefore, a comprehensive study of the technology landscape on IoT discovery mechanisms is provided. As a key contribution, we introduce a novel categorization of the available discovery technologies. Further, we identify and analyze the generic interaction pattern of each category. Finally, the technologies of each category are evaluated. With this evaluation at hand, IoT system designers are given decision making support. In the future, this analysis will serve as a basis for a generic discovery framework for the IoT. This work has been elaborated as part of the W3C Web of Things interest group.

An Architecture for Interoperable IoT Ecosystems

The Internet of Things (IoT) is maturing and more and more IoT platforms that give access to things are emerging. However, the real potential of the IoT lies in growing IoT cross-domain ecosystems on top of these platforms that will deliver new, unanticipated value added applications and services. We identified two crucial aspects that are important to grow an IoT ecosystem: (i) interoperability to enable cross-platform and even cross-domain application developments on top of IoT platforms as well as (ii) marketplaces to share and monetize IoT resources. Having these two crucial pillars of an IoT ecosystem in mind, we present in this article the BIG IoT architecture as the foundation to establish IoT ecosystems. The architecture fulfills essential requirements that have been assessed among industry and research organizations as part of the BIG IoT project. We demonstrate a first proof-of-concept implementation in the context of an exemplary smart cities scenario.

On the Road to Secure and Privacy-Preserving IoT Ecosystems

The Internet of Things (IoT) is on the rise. Today, various IoT platforms are already available, giving access to myriads of things. Initiatives such as BIG IoT are bringing those IoT platforms together in order to form ecosystems. BIG IoT aims to facilitate cross-platform and cross-domain application developments and establish centralized marketplaces to allow resource monetization. This combination of multi-platform applications, heterogeneity of the IoT, as well as enabling marketing and accounting of resources results in crucial challenges for security and privacy. Hence, this article analyses the requirements for security in IoT ecosystems and outlines solutions followed in the BIG IoT project to tackle those challenges. Concrete analysis of an IoT use case covering aspects such as public, private transportation, and smart parking is also presented.

Business Models for Interoperable IoT Ecosystems

The Internet of Things (IoT) is growing and more and more devices, so-called “things”, are being connected every day. IoT platforms provide access to those “things” and make them available for services and applications. Today, a broad range of such IoT platforms exist with differing functional foci, target domains, and interfaces. However, to fully exploit the economic impact of the IoT, it is essential to enable applications to interoperate with the various IoT platforms. The BIG IoT project aims at enabling this interoperability and supporting the creation of vibrant IoT ecosystems, which facilitate the development of cross-platform and cross-domain applications. While the value of interoperability for the overall economy is well understood and cannot be underestimated, some stakeholders may still need to find their business value in interoperable IoT ecosystems. Thus, this paper identifies the different stakeholders of such ecosystems, and analyses how these stakeholders can enhance their existing business models when taking part in an interoperable IoT ecosystem.

Engineering and operation made easy - a semantics and service oriented approach to building automation

Building automation systems control many aspects of todays buildings - lightning control, air condition, shading, access control, and surveillance, just to name a few. This diversity and the diversity of related technologies and protocols entails that the extension or integration of building automation systems requires a major effort. To address these challenges, the ITEA3 Building as a Service (BaaS) project developed a reference architecture that is based on a service oriented approach enhanced with semantic descriptions that aims at model based code generation and simple integration of legacy devices. In this paper, we present an overview of the BaaS reference architecture with a specific focus on the information model and on the envisioned way to take advantage of the semantic descriptions for information filtering, search and discovery throughout the lifecycle of a building automation system.

Internet of Robotic Things - Converging Sensing/Actuating, Hyperconnectivity, Artificial Intelligence and IoT Platforms

The Internet of Things (IoT) concept is evolving rapidly and influencing new developments in various application domains, such as the Internet of Mobile Things (IoMT), Autonomous Internet of Things (A-IoT), Autonomous System of Things (ASoT), Internet of Autonomous Things (IoAT), Internet of Things Clouds (IoT-C) and the Internet of Robotic Things (IoRT) etc. that are progressing/advancing by using IoT technology. The IoT influence represents new development and deployment challenges in different areas such as seamless platform integration, context based cognitive network integration, new mobile sensor/actuator network paradigms, things identification (addressing, naming in IoT) and dynamic things discoverability and many others. The IoRT represents new convergence challenges and their need

Matching Offerings and Queries on an Internet of Things Marketplace

A marketplace for the Internet of Things acts as the corner stone of an IoT ecosystem, by matching the offer (i.e., data or functionalities) with the demand coming from IoT applications (e.g. analytics). In this paper, we present the semantic matching implemented on the public BIG IoT marketplace, accessible at https://market.big-iot.org/.

BIG IoT: Interconnecting IoT Platforms from Different Domains—First Success Story

The Internet of Things (IoT) is today separated by different vertically oriented platforms for integration of all the different devices. Developers who aim to access other platforms and access that data are forced to manually adapt their interfaces to the specific platform API and data models.