Hasan Derhamy

A survey of commercial frameworks for the Internet of Things

In 2011 Ericsson and Cisco estimated 50 billion Internet connected devices by 2020, encouraged by this industry is developing application frameworks to scale the Internet of Things. This paper presents a survey of commercial frameworks and platforms designed for developing and running Internet of Things applications. The survey covers frameworks supported by big players in the software and electronics industries. The frameworks are evaluated against criteria such as architectural approach, industry support, standards based protocols and interoperability, security, hardware requirements, governance and support for rapid application development. There is a multitude of frameworks available and here a total 17 frameworks and platforms are considered. The intention of this paper is to present recent developments in commercial IoT frameworks and furthermore, identify trends in the current design of frameworks for the Internet of Things; enabling massively connected cyber physical systems.

IoT Interoperability—On-Demand and Low Latency Transparent Multiprotocol Translator

In the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) there is a clear need for a high level of interoperability between independently developed systems, often from different vendors. Traditional methods of interoperability including protocol gateways and adapters are often used at the network layer. Recent work on application interoperability has emphasized the use of middleware or protocol proxy/gateway. However, middleware tends to move the interoperability problem rather than solving it, and there are scalability issues with increasing the number of proxies, reconfiguration effort, and required bandwidth and processing overheads. This paper proposes a secure, on-demand, and transparent protocol translator for the IIoT. Targeting the challenge of interoperability between Internet protocol-based communication protocols, this paper analyzes current solutions and develops a set of requirements to be met by IoT protocol interoperability. The proposed protocol translator is not a middleware, it is a service-oriented architecture-based participant, it is used on-demand when needed, it does not introduce design time dependencies, it operates transparently, it supports low-latency, and it is secured through the use of Arrowhead authorization and authentication.

Translation error handling for multi-protocol SOA systems

The IoT research area has evolved to incorporate a plethora of messaging protocol standards, both existing and new, emerging as preferred communications means. The variety of protocols and technologies enable IoT to be used in many application scenarios. However, the use of incompatible communication protocols also creates vertical silos and reduces interoperability between vendors and technology platform providers. In many applications, it is important that maximum interoperability is enabled. This can be for reasons such as efficiency, security, end-to-end communication requirements etc. In terms of error handling each protocol has its own methods, but there is a gap for bridging the errors across protocols. Centralized software bus and integrated protocol agents are used for integrating different communications protocols. However, the aforementioned approaches do not fit well in all Industrial IoT application scenarios. This paper therefore investigates error handling challenges for a multi-protocol SOA-based translator. A proof of concept implementation is presented based on MQTT and CoAP. Experimental results show that multi-protocol error handling is possible and furthermore a number of areas that need more investigation have been identified.

Enabling IoT automation using local clouds

Various forms of cloud computing principles and technologies are becoming important recently. This paper addresses cloud computing for automation and control applications. Its argued that the open Internet cloud idea has such limitations that its not appropriate for automation. Since automation is physically and geographically local, it is inevitable to introduce the concept of local automation clouds. Its here proposed that local automation clouds should be self contained an be able to execute the intended automation functionalities without any external resources. Thus providing a fence at the rim of the local cloud preventing any inbound or outbound communication. Such a local cloud provides possibilities to address key requirements of both todays and future automation solutions. Adding mechanisms for secure inter-cloud administration and data tranfere enables local automation cloud to meet IoT automation system requirements as: 1) Interoperability of a wide range of IoT and legacy devices 2) Automation requirement on latency guarantee/prediction for communication and control computations. 3) Scalability of automation systems enabling very large integrated automation systems 4) Security and related safety of automation systems 5) Ease of application engineering 6) Multi stakeholder integration and operations agility. How these requirements can be met in such a local automation cloud is discussed with references to proposed solutions. The local automation cloud concept is further verified for a compartment climate control application. The control application included an IoT controller, four IoT sensors and actuators, and a physical layer communication gateway. The gateway acted as host for local cloud core functionalities. The climate control application has successfully been implemented using the open source Arrowhead Framework and its supports for design and implementation of self contained local automation clouds.

Towards industrial Internet of Things: An efficient and interoperable communication framework

Interoperability between shop floor devices and upper layer systems is a key challenge for enabling Internet of Things in industrial applications. Standardized protocols such as IPv6, CoAP, and XML can be used to address this issue. Widely used XML-based technologies such as SenML, EEML, OPC-UA as well as others rely on XML to be able to support a wide range of sensor and actuator applications. However, this approach results in high communication overhead due to the verbose nature of plain text messages encoded in XML. When devices are communicating using 6LoWPAN over IEEE 802.15.4, it is important to keep the messages small enough to fit into one MAC-layer frame to avoid fragmentation and hence conserving bandwidth and transmission energy. One possible solution is to integrate differential binary delta-encoding with a service-based framework based on CoAP, SenML and EXI. The proposed efficient communication approach for service-based architecture can compress a series of events up to 90-95%. The proposed framework is a holistic approach for enabling distributed monitoring and control applications and a move towards realizing the vision of Services of Things.

Orchestration of Arrowhead services using IEC 61499: Distributed automation case study

This paper presents a novel approach to automation of flexible manufacturing systems with mechatronic intelligence and distributed control. The mechatronic intelligence layer is implemented using a combination of wireless sensor/actuator networks with service-oriented architecture, where services are located at the device level, as well as in local and global Clouds following the Arrowhead framework.

Protocol interoperability of OPC UA in service oriented architectures

Industrial Internet of Things covers all aspects of networked intelligent manufacturing systems. This means covering a wide array of application domains and user requirements. In such scenarios it is not feasible to define a single protocol for all situations. Hence, a multi-protocol approach is required. OPC UA has strong backing from Industry 4.0 as the protocol for the Industrial Internet of Things. Interoperability of OPC UA has been investigated in the context of migration from legacy and with protocols such as DPWS. Additionally HTTP and CoAP have been investigated as possible transport mediums. However, OPC UA interoperability has not been investigated within a multi-protocol settings and no generic protocol translation exists. This paper proposes an OPC UA translator following the service translator model proposed in the Arrowhead project. Utilizing a mapping to intermediate format, it can be used along side CoAP, HTTP and MQTT protocols.

Relative localization with computer vision and UWB range for flying robot formation control

Relative localization is a core problem for swarm robotics since each swarm node must determine where neighboring robots are located to accomplish cooperative tasks such as formation control. In this paper we present a system that performs relative localization between a stationary marker and a flying robot in real-time. Relative distances are obtained using ultra-wide band radio, while a low-cost webcam provide angle measurements. To achieve the latter, we employed the Camshift algorithm and a Kalman filter. We tested our system outdoors during daylight using centimeter-accuracy GPS measurements as ground truth. Three data sets have been collected from a series of experiments and it shows that errors in estimated relative positions are between +/-0.190 m on the x-East axis and +/-0.291 m on the z-North axis at 95% confidence level.