Giovanni Merlino

Sensing and Actuation as a Service: A New Development for Clouds

Cloud computing is among the hottest trends in ICT, aiming at providing on-demand computing and storage resources with guarantees on the quality of service. A limit of current Cloud implementations is the absence of mechanisms to effectively manage inputs from the physical world. Our idea is to move towards a pervasive Cloud, providing facilities and solutions able to interact with the surrounding environment enabling development of new and value added services. In this vision also mobile devices, such as PDAs, usually equipped with several sensors and actuators, have to be included in the overall picture. Mobile devices and their respective owners can decide whether, how and when to contribute to the Cloud, thus introducing further unknowns. In order to deal with all such issues, in this paper we propose a solution that gives way to the Sensing and Actuation as a Service (SAaaS) paradigm, a step towards the creation of a Cloud of sensors and actuators. This paper mainly focuses on the implementation of the underlying infrastructure at the basis of the SAaaS. An ad-hoc architecture and some preliminary background on this challenging vision are provided and discussed.

Mobile crowdsensing as a service

Consumer-centric mobile devices, such as smartphones, are an emerging category of devices at the edge of the Internet. Leveraging volunteers and their mobiles as a (sensing) data collection outlet is known as Mobile Crowd Sensing (MCS) and poses interesting challenges, with particular regard to the management of sensing resource contributors, dealing with their subscription, random and unpredictable join and leave, and node churn.To facilitate and expedite the (commercial) exploitation of this trend, in this paper we propose to adopt a service-oriented approach to cope with MCS application deployment into a sensing Cloud infrastructure, decoupling the MCS application domain from the infrastructure one. To this purpose we provide the building blocks for implementing such a novel take on MCS, which from a Cloud layering perspective can be identified as a platform service, i.e., an MCS as a service (MCSaaS). A prototype implementation that serves as a blueprint and a proof-of-concept of the proposed framework is presented, while an evaluation of the effectiveness of the MCSaaS paradigm has been provided using suitable mobility-related use cases for a validation of the concept, as well as a modeling approach through the adoption of generalized stochastic Petri nets. Emulation of deployment comparing (i) prototype of MCSaaS and (ii) current practices.Modeling of MCSaaS paradigm by Petri nets and evaluation against conventional MCS.Description of architectural elements of the platform and their interactions.MCSaaS platform for mass deployment of MCS apps, and their elastic user base adaptation.Mobile crowdsensing as a service paradigm for MCS apps design and deployment.

Stack4Things: Integrating IoT with OpenStack in a Smart City context

As the adoption of embedded systems, mobiles and other smart devices keeps rising, and the scope of their involvement broadens, for instance in the enablement of Smart City-like scenarios, a pressing need emerges to tame such complexity and reuse as much tooling as possible without resorting to vertical ad-hoc solutions, while at the same time taking into account valid options with regards to infrastructure management, and other more advanced functionalities. In this sense, a widely used and competitive framework for Infrastructure as a Service such as OpenStack, with its breadth in terms of feature coverage and expanded scope, looks like fitting the bill. This work thus describes rationale, efforts, and results so far achieved, for an integration of IoT paradigms and resource ecosystems with such a kind of Cloud-oriented environment, by focusing on a Smart City scenario, and featuring data collection and visualization as example use cases of such integration.

A Smart City Lighting Case Study on an OpenStack-Powered Infrastructure

The adoption of embedded systems, mobile devices and other smart devices keeps rising globally, and the scope of their involvement broadens, for instance, in smart city-like scenarios. In light of this, a pressing need emerges to tame such complexity and reuse as much tooling as possible without resorting to vertical ad hoc solutions, while at the same time taking into account valid options with regard to infrastructure management and other more advanced functionalities. Existing solutions mainly focus on core mechanisms and do not allow one to scale by leveraging infrastructure or adapt to a variety of scenarios, especially if actuators are involved in the loop. A new, more flexible, cloud-based approach, able to provide device-focused workflows, is required. In this sense, a widely-used and competitive framework for infrastructure as a service, such as OpenStack, with its breadth in terms of feature coverage and expanded scope, looks to fit the bill, replacing current application-specific approaches with an innovative application-agnostic one. This work thus describes the rationale, efforts and results so far achieved for an integration of IoT paradigms and resource ecosystems with such a kind of cloud-oriented device-centric environment, by focusing on a smart city scenario, namely a park smart lighting example, and featuring data collection, data visualization, event detection and coordinated reaction, as example use cases of such integration.

BEACON: A Cloud Network Federation Framework

This paper presents the BEACON Framework, which will enable the provision and management of cross-site virtual networks for federated cloud infrastructures in order to support the automated deployment of applications and services across different clouds and datacenters. The proposed framework will support different federation architectures, going from tightly coupled (datacenter federation) to loosely coupled (cloud federation and multi-cloud orchestration) architectures, and will enable the creation of Layer 2 and Layer 3 overlay networks to interconnect remote resources located at different cloud sites. A high level description of the main components of the BEACON framework is also introduced.

Enabling mechanisms for Cloud-based network virtualization in IoT

As part of a wider effort in integrating Internet of things (IoT) with the Cloud under the guise of infrastructure to be provided as-a-Service, network virtualization plays an essential role, both as an enabler of Infrastructure-as-a-Service scenarios and as a basic building block of the solution for the IoT-focused Cloud provider. Virtualization of the networking facilities for Cloud-managed IoT resources needs mechanisms to deal with the inherent complexity. This work outlines an implementation-agnostic approach to such a problem, reflected in our evolving Stack4Things architecture, derived from OpenStack, and implemented starting from such codebase, by leveraging also a choice of modern tooling and protocols. A specific use case and the discussion that follows are provided to frame the benefits of this strategy.

A hypervisor for infrastructure-enabled sensing Clouds

The lack of support and the shortcomings of Cloud computing in relation to pervasive applications can be addressed through the Sensing and Actuation as a Service (SAaaS) paradigm. In SAaaS, sensors and actuators, from both mobile devices and sensor networks, can be discovered, aggregated and elastically provided as a service according to the Cloud provisioning model. Nevertheless, managing a large set of sensing and actuation resources, characterized by volatility and heterogeneity, rises the need for specific mechanisms and strategies. In this paper we focus on management, abstraction and virtualization of sensing resources. More specifically, we describe the lowest level module of the SAaaS architecture, the hypervisor, that takes care of communication with devices and orchestrates their resources. The hypervisor operates according to policies and strategies coming from higher layers, and includes customization facilities that ease the integration of heterogeneous devices.

Application deployment for IoT: An infrastructure approach

Many current endeavors dealing with IoT and Cloud topics suggest leveraging sensing resources as mere data producers whereas the authors follow a Sensing and Actuation as a Service (SAaaS) approach. Among core ideas of SAaaS theres the enablement of an Infrastructure-oriented (i.e. IaaS-like) provisioning model for sensors and actuators alike. Such model matches technological requirements and constraints arising within certain application domains inspired by research about Future Internet topics. Aim of this paper is to explain why adopting the SAaaS paradigm for pervasively available and geographically distributed IT infrastructure is key, especially when field deployment of custom functionality is needed. Smart devices featuring always-on connectivity are the backbone of the IoT vision, and core building blocks of such infrastructure. Cloud-powered monitoring of urban areas and public facilities are among the most compelling scenarios to be found in IoT, and we are here focusing on these scenarios for two use cases. Actors, workflows and activities are described here in order to explain the main interactions and follow through outlining the use cases.

Stack4Things as a fog computing platform for Smart City applications

Fog computing envisions computation logic to be moved at the edge of the Internet where data needs to be quickly elaborated, decisions made, and actions performed. Delegating to the Cloud the whole burden of applications could not be efficient indeed, for example in case of workload bursts. This is especially true in the context of IoT and Smart City where thousands of smart objects, vehicles, mobiles, people interact to provide innovative services. We thus designed Stack4Things as an OpenStack-based framework spanning the Infrastructure-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service layers. It enables developers and users to manage an IoT infrastructure, remotely controlling nodes as well as virtualizing their functions and creating network overlays among them, implementing a provisioning model for Cyber-Physical Systems. Moreover, it provides mechanisms to scatter the application logic on top of the involved smart objects and to choose with fine granularity which specific tasks to delegate to centralized Cloud infrastructure. In this paper, we show the core Stack4Things mechanisms implementing a Fog computing approach towards a run-time “rewireable” Smart City paradigm. We demonstrate its effectiveness in a smart mobility scenario where vehicles interact with City-level smart objects to provide end users with highly responsive geolocalised services.

Stack4Things: An OpenStack-Based Framework for IoT

In the wake of the massive adoption of embedded systems, mobiles, and other smart devices, as the scope of their involvement keeps broadening, complexity may quickly become overwhelming and vertical ad-hoc solutions will not cut it anymore. We propose to reuse as much tooling as possible, taking into account suitable options with regard to infrastructure management, then piggybacking as much advanced functionalities as possible in such kind of environment. In this sense, a widely used and competitive framework for Infrastructure-as-a-Service such as OpenStack, with its breadth in terms of feature coverage and expanded scope, looks like fitting the bill. This work therefore describes the approach and the solutions so far preliminary implemented for enabling Cloud-mediated interactions with droves of sensor- and actuator-hosting nodes by proposing Stack4Things, a framework for Sensing-and-Actuation-as-a-Service. In particular, we focused on describing the subsystem of Stack4Things devoted to resource control and management, highlighting relevant requirements and justifying how our proposed framework addresses them, while also opening up possibilities for a range of future extensions towards complete fulfillment of the Sensing-and-Actuation-as-a-Service vision.