Bartolomé Rubio

State-of-the-art, challenges, and open issues in the integration of Internet of things and cloud computing

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a paradigm based on the Internet that comprises many interconnected technologies like RFID (Radio Frequency IDentification) and WSAN (Wireless Sensor and Actor Networks) in order to exchange information. The current needs for better control, monitoring and management in many areas, and the ongoing research in this field, have originated the appearance and creation of multiple systems like smart-home, smart-city and smart-grid. However, the limitations of associated devices in the IoT in terms of storage, network and computing, and the requirements of complex analysis, scalability, and data access, require a technology like Cloud Computing to supplement this field. Moreover, the IoT can generate large amounts of varied data and quickly when there are millions of things feeding data to Cloud Computing. The latter is a clear example of Big Data, that Cloud Computing needs to take into account. This paper presents a survey of integration components: Cloud platforms, Cloud infrastructures and IoT Middleware. In addition, some integration proposals and data analytics techniques are surveyed as well as different challenges and open research issues are pointed out.

A survey on quality of service support in wireless sensor and actor networks: Requirements and challenges in the context of critical infrastructure protection

Wireless sensor and actor networks (WSANs) are likely to become a pervasive technology in the near future due to the special characteristics of these devices and to the great number of applications where it can be applied. One of these applications is the critical infrastructure protection (CIP). In fact, WSANs have actually been identified as having the potential to become an integral part of the CIP. However, in order to achieve that goal, WSANs need to provide a set of features which includes a robust QoS. Unfortunately QoS support mechanisms in WSANs are still largely undeveloped. This paper studies the state-of-the-art of QoS management in WSANs by exploring existing proposals, challenges and open issues in the field. Emphasis is put on QoS in the context of CIP by focusing on the QoS requirements and the needs of CIP applications. Existing middleware and protocols are surveyed and the challenges and open issues in the field are presented.

Programming Approaches and Challenges for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) constitute a new pervasive and ubiquitous technology. They have been successfully used in various application areas and in future computing environments, WSNs will play an increasingly important role. However, programming sensor networks and applications to be deployed in them is extremely challenging. It has traditionally been an error-prone task since it requires programming individual nodes, using low-level programming issues and interfacing with the hardware and the network. This aspect is currently changing as different high-level programming abstractions and middleware solutions are coming into the arena. Nevertheless, many research challenges are still open. This paper presents a survey of the current state-of-the-art in the field, establishing a classification and highlighting some likely research challenges and future directions.

SBASCO: skeleton-based scientific components

SBASCO is a new programming environment for the development of parallel and distributed high-performance scientific applications. The approach integrates both skeleton-based and component technologies. The main goal of the proposal is to provide a high-level programmability system for the efficient development of numerical applications with performance portability on different platforms. We present the system programming model which considers two different views of a component interface: one from the point of view of the application programmer and another thought to be used by a configuration tool in order to establish efficient implementations. This can be achieved due to the knowledge at the interface level of data distribution and processor layout inside each component. The programming model borrows from software skeletons a cost model enhanced by a run-time analysis, which enables one to automatically establish a suitable degree of parallelism and replication of the internal structure of a component.

HERO: A hierarchical, efficient and reliable routing protocol for wireless sensor and actor networks

It is well known that the use of clusters makes wireless sensor and actor networks more scalable, and it also reduces energy consumption and improves their performance. Most hierarchical routing and clustering protocols are designed to be efficient when the data is sent from the sensor nodes to their cluster-head but not when it is sent the opposite way. In this paper, a simple mechanism to form clusters in an efficient way by using meta-data is proposed. And, furthermore, a novelty multi-hop and fault-tolerance routing protocol able to transport data from sensor nodes to their cluster-head and vice versa in an energy-efficient way is also presented. Moreover, this approach allows developers to establish the desired reliability level (in a quantitative way) between two nodes which are N hops far away from each other. The performance and the energy consumption of our approach is studied by means of a set of experiments which have been carried out by using the COOJA simulator.

PS-QUASAR: A publish/subscribe QoS aware middleware for Wireless Sensor and Actor Networks

It has been more than 30 years since the first research into Wireless Sensor and Actor Networks appeared. However, WSANs are still not a ubiquitous technology due to several factors which include a lack of Quality of Service (QoS) support or the absence of high level programming models. New applications with heterogeneous QoS requirements where WSANs can be successfully applied, such as Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP), have been recognized. PS-QUASAR, a middleware for WSANs that deals with these two issues, offers a high level simple programming model based on the publish/subscribe paradigm. In this model all nodes in the network are potential publishers of each of the topics. PS-QUASAR also handles QoS (reliability, deadline, priority) and supports a many-to-many exchange of messages between nodes in a fully distributed way by means of multicasting techniques. Performance evaluation via simulation using the Contiki operating system shows that the protocol can handle multiple publishers and subscribers at the same time whilst dealing with QoS requirements.

A service-oriented approach to facilitate WSAN application development

Due to the complex nature of developing Wireless Sensor and Actor Network (WSAN) applications it is obvious that new frameworks, tools, middleware and higher-level abstractions are needed to make the task of the developers easier. Depending on the WSAN system we want to develop, different characteristics must be taken into account but, perhaps, some of the most important are the capacity to add real-time constraints, the QoS and, of course energy saving. Our proposal USEME is a service-oriented and component-based framework which allows the easy combination of macro-programming and node-centric programming to develop real-time and efficient applications over WSANs. USEME allows the specification of real-time constraints between services, permits the use of groups to structure the network and is platform independent. Two prototypes (Imote2.Net and SunSPOT) have been implemented and several performance tests have been carried out.

A Component Framework for Wireless Sensor and Actor Networks

Wireless sensor and actor networks (WSANs) constitute an emerging and pervasive technology that is attracting increased interest for a wide range of applications. WSANs have two major requirements: coordination mechanisms for both sensor-actor and actor-actor interactions, and real-time communication to perform correct and timely actions. Additionally, the development of WSAN applications is notoriously difficult, due to the extreme resource limitations of nodes. This paper introduces a framework to facilitate the task of the application programmer taking into account these special characteristics of WSANs. We propose a real-time component model using light-weight components. In addition, a high-level coordination model based on tuple channels is integrated into the framework including high-level constructs that abstract the details of communication and facilitate the data-centric behavior of sensor queries.

A Service-Oriented Middleware for Wireless Sensor and Actor Networks

Wireless Sensor and Actor Networks are potentially one of the most important technologies of this century. There are many fields where they can be used in order to develop varied and interesting applications: high security environments, environmental monitoring, objects and events detection, military surveillance and precision agriculture. On the other hand, the ease of programming is a major barrier to the adoption of this kind of system. Recently, different high-level programming abstractions and middleware have appeared as promising solutions. In this paper, a middleware is proposed for USEME, a Service-Oriented Framework focussed on the deployment of lightweight services in sensors and actors. The high-level model supported abstracts application programmers from implementation tasks such as discovery, communication, group formation or real-time constraints.

USEME: A Service-Oriented Framework for Wireless Sensor and Actor Networks

We are in the presence of a new and powerful technology called wireless sensor and actor networks. There are many fields where we can apply this technology to develop varied and interesting applications: high security environments, environmental monitoring,industrial monitoring, medicine, precision agriculture. This technology brings the need to develop new frameworks in order to make easier the application developers task. Recently, different high-level programming abstractions and middleware have appeared as promising solutions. In this paper, a new service-oriented framework is introduced. The general scheme of the framework and a detailed description of the programming model are presented. The approach is oriented to deploy lightweight services on sensors and actors.Services can be composed among them by means of the port concept to form complex ad-hoc systems. A building monitoring and control application is described as a motivation example and it is used along the paper in order to show the expressiveness and usability of the abstract programming language proposed.