Jorge Lanza

A Generic Context Management Framework for Personal Networking Environments

In this paper we introduce a high level architecture for a context management system for personal networks (PN). The main objective of the context management framework (CMF) described in this paper is to support the interactions between context information sources and context aware components, services and applications in a generic manner, independently of their nature and operation area. To this end, we propose a structure consisting of a context management interface, context access manager module, processing and storage module, and a data source abstraction layer. Nodes provide a certain set of these modules depending on their computational capabilities and their role within the system. We differentiate between basic context nodes (BCN), enhanced context nodes (ECN) and context management nodes (CMN) within the CMF. CMNs operate on two levels, i.e., local/cluster level and PN level. In the paper we also describe how these entities will interact with each other and how different context information will be exchanged within the personal network. Finally, we provide an outlook of the work and issues that need to be addressed in order to complete the described framework

Large-Scale mobile sensing enabled internet-of-things testbed for smart city services

Smart cities are one of the key application domains for the Internet-of-Things paradigm. Extending the Web into the physical realm of a city, by means of the widespread deployment of spatially distributed Internet-addressable devices with sensing and/or actuation capabilities, allows improving efficiency of city services. Vehicles moving around the city become excellent probes when the objective is to gather information across the city in a cost effective manner. Public transportation fleets, taxis, or vehicles such as waste collection trucks cover most of the urban areas with a limited number of vehicles. This paper presents the deployment of a large scale Internet-of-Things testbed that has been carried out in the city of Santander. It extends previous descriptions by providing a specification of one of the unique features of the testbed, namely, the devices that have been installed on 140 buses, taxis, and vans that every day drive around the city. Besides the physical characteristics of the devices installed and the lessons learnt during the deployment, the paper introduces the three mobile sensing network strategies used for distributing the data gathered. Finally, the paper sketches some of smart city services which might be provided using the information coming from the mobile IoT devices.

Integration of utilities infrastructures in a future internet enabled smart city framework

Improving efficiency of city services and facilitating a more sustainable development of cities are the main drivers of the smart city concept. Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) play a crucial role in making cities smarter, more accessible and more open. In this paper we present a novel architecture exploiting major concepts from the Future Internet (FI) paradigm addressing the challenges that need to be overcome when creating smarter cities. This architecture takes advantage of both the critical communications infrastructures already in place and owned by the utilities as well as of the infrastructure belonging to the city municipalities to accelerate efficient provision of existing and new city services. The paper highlights how FI technologies create the necessary glue and logic that allows the integration of current vertical and isolated city services into a holistic solution, which enables a huge forward leap for the efficiency and sustainability of our cities. Moreover, the paper describes a real-world prototype, that instantiates the aforementioned architecture, deployed in one of the parks of the city of Santander providing an autonomous public street lighting adaptation service. This prototype is a showcase on how added-value services can be seamlessly created on top of the proposed architecture.

A Proof-of-Concept for Semantically Interoperable Federation of IoT Experimentation Facilities

The Internet-of-Things (IoT) is unanimously identified as one of the main pillars of future smart scenarios. The potential of IoT technologies and deployments has been already demonstrated in a number of different application areas, including transport, energy, safety and healthcare. However, despite the growing number of IoT deployments, the majority of IoT applications tend to be self-contained, thereby forming application silos. A lightweight data centric integration and combination of these silos presents several challenges that still need to be addressed. Indeed, the ability to combine and synthesize data streams and services from diverse IoT platforms and testbeds, holds the promise to increase the potentiality of smart applications in terms of size, scope and targeted business context. In this article, a proof-of-concept implementation that federates two different IoT experimentation facilities by means of semantic-based technologies will be described. The specification and design of the implemented system and information models will be described together with the practical details of the developments carried out and its integration with the existing IoT platforms supporting the aforementioned testbeds. Overall, the system described in this paper demonstrates that it is possible to open new horizons in the development of IoT applications and experiments at a global scale, that transcend the (silo) boundaries of individual deployments, based on the semantic interconnection and interoperability of diverse IoT platforms and testbeds.

Unified IoT ontology to enable interoperability and federation of testbeds

After a thorough analysis of existing Internet of Things (IoT) related ontologies, in this paper we propose a solution that aims to achieve semantic interoperability among heterogeneous testbeds. Our model is framed within the EU H2020s FIESTA-IoT project, that aims to seamlessly support the federation of testbeds through the usage of semantic-based technologies. Our proposed model (ontology) takes inspiration from the well-known Noy et al. methodology for reusing and interconnecting existing ontologies. To build the ontology, we leverage a number of core concepts from various mainstream ontologies and taxonomies, such as Semantic Sensor Network (SSN), M3-lite (a lite version of M3 and also an outcome of this study), WGS84, IoT-lite, Time, and DUL. In addition, we also introduce a set of tools that aims to help external testbeds adapt their respective datasets to the developed ontology.

Practical Lessons From the Deployment and Management of a Smart City Internet-of-Things Infrastructure: The SmartSantander Testbed Case

The smart cities vision is inexorably turning into a reality. Among the different approaches used to realize more intelligent and sustainable environments, a common denominator is the role that information and communication technologies will play. Moreover, if there is one of these technologies that emerges among the rest, it is the Internet-of-Things (IoT). The ability to ubiquitously embed sensing and actuating capabilities that this paradigm enables is at the forefront of the technologies driving the urban environments transformation. However, there are very little practical experiences of the IoT infrastructure deployment at a large scale. This paper presents practical solutions to the main challenges faced during the deployment and management of a city-scale IoT infrastructure, which encompasses thousands of sensors and other information sources. The experience we have gained during the deployment and operation of the IoT-based smart city infrastructure carried out at Santander (Spain) has led to a number of practical lessons that are summarized in this paper. Moreover, the challenges and problems examples, excerpted from our own real-life experience, are described as motivators for the adopted solutions.

Bringing IoT to Hospital Logistics Systems Demonstrating the concept

This paper is focused on demonstrating a real testbed for managing logistics systems in hospital environment exploiting the benefits of M2M and IoT paradigms. The work presents an architecture based on low-cost devices interacting with an enterprise application server placed anywhere in the Internet following the architecture proposed by ETSI for M2M systems. Combining multiple communication technologies (NFC, UMTS, 802.11, ZigBee and 802.3) and adapting their capabilities to different functional requirements, we are capable of creating autonomous and self-managed systems. The deployed architecture integrates at end device level, a NFC reader for tracking the level of remaining stocks and multiple output interfaces for exchanging messages with the application server. The system copes with cost, availability, scalability and easy deployment requirements, being the functionality also adaptable to the requirements of potential customers.

Experimental assessment of a cross-layer solution for TCP/IP traffic optimization on heterogeneous personal networking environments

Future wireless communication scenarios will be characterized by the heterogeneity in terms of coexisting wireless access technologies. Many mobile terminals will support different air interfaces and in order to provide true multi-mode operation, the sole use of IP protocol is not enough. We present in this document the Universal Convergence Layer that residing on top of the different air interfaces offers a single interface to IP while supporting the cross-layer optimization of user data flows as well as many other key functionalities in personal networks communications. This document describes and discusses the implementation of this framework over real platforms. Furthermore, the results of the measurement campaign carried out to assess the benefits introduced by the dynamic interface selection mechanism implemented at the UCL will be also presented. The results obtained will allow us to extract conclusions about the appropriateness of the solution adopted.

Towards self-organising personal networks

Personal Network (PN) is an emerging concept which combines pervasive computing and strong user focus. The idea is that the users personal devices organise themselves in a secure and private personal network transparently of their geographical location. This paper studies a PN architecture where devices form clusters using shared key cryptography over short range radio links (or a local area network) and where the otherwise isolated clusters are interconnected over the IP infrastructure using dynamic tunnelling. True self-organisation of the PN requires establishing distributed consensus via a voting algorithm. Remarks on the linkage between the different voting algorithms and the ad hoc routing schemes are provided.

Design and Implementation of a Cloud-Based Platform for Unleashing the Personal and Communal Internet of Things

Internet of Things (IoT) concept has attracted a lot of attention in recent years and it is foreseen as one of the technologies that will leverage the Future Internet. It is seen as a major enabler of novel applications and services that will foster efficiency and will ease every day’s life. However, current IoT solutions are mainly focusing on the development of centralized solutions that do not promote the democratization of the IoT but rather concentrate the IoT around a set of cloud-based platforms which pretend to be open but limit the capacity of the people to tailor their Personal and Communal IoT. This paper describes a software platform based on available generic enablers as defined by the FIWARE initiative. It extends the existing architecture models to accommodate the requirements stemming from the vision of people-sourced IoT devices which are shared to create applications and services in smart communities where the owners of the shared devices are always empowered to control who, and in which circumstances, has access to the shared information.