Ivan Farris

Social Virtual Objects in the Edge Cloud

The social Internet of Things (SIoT) paradigm, in which objects establish social-like relationships, presents several interesting features to improve network navigability, object trustworthiness, and interactions between elements across IoT platforms. Implementations of the SIoT model envision cyber counterparts of physical objects--social virtual objects--virtualized in the cloud. Such an approach has several advantages but suffers from a few major problems. In fact, objects might be located far from the datacenter hosting the cloud, resulting in long delays and inefficient use of communication resources. This article investigates how to address these issues by exploiting the computing resources at the edge of the network to host the virtual objects of the SIoT and provides early experimental results.

MIFaaS: A Mobile-IoT-Federation-as-a-Service Model for dynamic cooperation of IoT Cloud Providers

Abstract In the Internet of Things (IoT) arena, a constant evolution is observed towards the deployment of integrated environments, wherein heterogeneous devices pool their capacities to match wide-ranging user requirements. Solutions for efficient and synergistic cooperation among objects are, therefore, required. This paper suggests a novel paradigm to support dynamic cooperation among private/public local clouds of IoT devices. Differently from device-oriented approaches typical of Mobile Cloud Computing, the proposed paradigm envisages an IoT Cloud Provider (ICP)-oriented cooperation, which allows all devices belonging to the same private/public owner to participate in the federation process. Expected result from dynamic federations among ICPs is a remarkable increase in the amount of service requests being satisfied. Different from the Fog Computing vision, the network edge provides only management support and supervision to the proposed Mobile-IoT-Federation-as-a-Service (MIFaaS), thus reducing the deployment cost of peripheral micro data centers. The paper proposes a coalition formation game to account for the interest of rational cooperative ICPs in their own payoff. A proof-of-concept performance evaluation confirms that obtained coalition structures not only guarantee the satisfaction of the players’ requirements according to their utility function, but also these introduce significant benefits for the cooperating ICPs in terms of number of tasks being successfully assigned.

Providing ultra‐short latency to user‐centric 5G applications at the mobile network edge

Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) will play a key role in next-generation mobile networks to extend the range of supported delay-sensitive applications. Furthermore, an increasing attention is paid to provide user-centric services, to better address the strict requirements of novel immersive applications. In this scenario, MEC solutions need to efficiently cope with user mobility, which requires fast relocation of service instances to guarantee the desired Quality of Experience. However, service migration is still an open issue, especially for resource-constrained edge nodes interconnected by high-latency and low-bandwidth links. In this paper, by leveraging the potential of lightweight container-based virtualization techniques, we investigate a novel approach to support service provisioning in dynamic MEC environments. In particular, we present a framework where proactive service replication for stateless applications is exploited to drastically reduce the time of service migration between different cloudlets and to meet the latency requirements. The performance evaluation shows promising results of our approach with respect to classic reactive service migration.

Tag-based cooperative data gathering and energy recharging in wide area RFID sensor networks

The Wireless Identification and Sensing Platform (WISP) conjugates the identification potential of the RFID technology and the sensing and computing capability of the wireless sensors. Practical issues, such as the need of periodically recharging WISPs, challenge the effective deployment of large-scale RFID sensor networks (RSNs) consisting of RFID readers and WISP nodes. In this view, the paper proposes cooperative solutions to energize the WISP devices in a wide-area sensing network while reducing the data collection delay. The main novelty is the fact that both data transmissions and energy transfer are based on the RFID technology only: RFID mobile readers gather data from the WISP devices, wirelessly recharge them, and mutually cooperate to reduce the data delivery delay to the sink. Communication between mobile readers relies on two proposed solutions: a tag-based relay scheme, where RFID tags are exploited to temporarily store sensed data at pre-determined contact points between the readers; and a tag-based data channel scheme, where the WISPs are used as a virtual communication channel for real time data transfer between the readers. Both solutions require: (i) clustering the WISP nodes; (ii) dimensioning the number of required RFID mobile readers; (iii) planning the tour of the readers under the energy and time constraints of the nodes. A simulative analysis demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed solutions when compared to non-cooperative approaches. Differently from classic schemes in the literature, the solutions proposed in this paper better cope with scalability issues, which is of utmost importance for wide area networks.

Federated edge-assisted mobile clouds for service provisioning in heterogeneous IoT environments

In this paper, we present a novel hybrid approach, where Fog computing features are used to support a dynamic cloud cooperation of mobile IoT devices. In particular, we introduce the so-called Mobile-IoT-Federation-as-a-Service (MI-FaaS) paradigm, according to which edge nodes operate as orchestrators to manage federations among public/private IoT clouds that enable integrated IoT applications. To this aim, we propose an algorithm to foster the federation of local IoT clouds based on an utility function accounting for the number of executed tasks to be maximized. The presented performance evaluation validates the enhancements achievable by the proposed solutions in terms of number of task requests being successfully executed.

A novel paradigm to exchange data in RFID piconets

In this paper a new paradigm is proposed, according to which a group of RFID readers establishes a piconet, called RAN (RFID Area Network), similarly to Bluetooth or Zigbee devices and exchanges data by only using RFID tags as a common “virtual channel”. The proposal represents an interesting enabling factor of pure RFID ecosystems, wherein RFID enabled devices (such as mobile RFID readers, RFID reader cards embedded into cellular/mobile devices, etc.) only rely on the RFID technology for identification, for sensing and, now, for low-bitrate data exchange as well. Suitable algorithms to handle interference and collision problems during the data exchange within a piconet are proposed and the performance of the introduced paradigm is assessed.

Performance evaluation of RFID tag-based “virtual” communication channels

The widespread deployment of RFID technology and EPCglobal compliant devices paved the way for research activities on unconventional uses of RFID, beyond the mere identification of people and goods. Focus of this paper is on a recent proposal of passive RFID tags exploitation, in particular their data storage capacity, as a new “virtual” communication channel to exchange data within piconets of RFID readers. Although earlier researches already demonstrated the great potential of this paradigm, still an analytical model for the channel performance evaluation is lacking. The model we propose in this paper, to evaluate goodput and delay over the RFID channel, considers aspects like collisions and tag memory management problems. The trustworthiness of the obtained analytical results is also validated through a simulative campaign. The study definitely helps in (i) defining data transfer rates as a function of number of readers and storage capacity of available tags, and (ii) finding the number of readers that can be served while satisfying goodput and traffic delay constraints.

Evaluating Performance of Containerized IoT Services for Clustered Devices at the Network Edge

The constant and fast increase in the number of heterogeneous Internet of Things (IoT) devices that populate everyday life environments brings new challenges to the full exploitation of the computation, memory, sensing, and actuation resources associated to them. In this context, device virtualization solutions and platforms may definitely play a key role in enabling the desired tradeoff between flexibility and performance. This paper focuses on lightweight virtualization technologies for IoT devices, suitably thought to effectively deploy new integrated applications and to create a novel distributed and virtualized ecosystem. Two different frameworks for container-based IoT service provisioning are compared, the one based on a direct interaction between two cooperating devices and the other based on the presence of a manager supervising the operations between cooperating devices forming a cluster. In the latter case, accounting for the growing impetus to move intelligence toward the edge of the network, management features are implemented at the network access point to provide short latency responses. We also introduce the outcomes of a thorough performance evaluation campaign conducted via a real IoT testbed. The measurements, performed by accounting for the constraints of typical IoT nodes, shed light on the actual feasibility of container-based IoT frameworks.

Lightweight service replication for ultra-short latency applications in mobile edge networks

Edge Cloud infrastructure will play a key role in extending the range of supported real-time cloud applications, by guaranteeing extremely fast response times. However, user mobility requires fast relocation of service instances, which represents an open challenge for resource-constrained cloudlets interconnected by high-latency and low-bandwidth links. In this paper, we investigate container-based virtualization techniques to support dynamic Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) environments. In particular, we design a framework to guarantee fast response time, by proactively exploiting service replication. A preliminary performance analysis is conducted to identify the possible advantages introduced by the proposed approach compared to classic migration procedures.

Performance assessment of an enhanced RFID sensor tag for long-run sensing applications

In this paper we present a battery-less RFID sensor tag, operating at 868 MHz, characterized by a novel impedance matching, guaranteeing improvements in terms of wireless energy transfer efficiency. A more efficient energy transfer is of high interest for several applications and, in particular, for a reduced recharging time of the embedded capacitor. This represents a fundamental step to enlarge the range of applications usually limited to classic wireless sensor networks, such as data logging or environmental sensing in large spaces. Challenges related to energy replenishment and data collection should be taken into account to enable an effective deployment of large networks. In particular, we investigate on the number of mobile readers moving around a sensing network to gather data and transfer energy, such that all nodes are kept alive and all data is collected. The improvements introduced by the new RFID sensor tag for this application will be evaluated with respect to state-of-the-art devices.