Mathieu Boussard

The Internet of Things: The Next Technological Revolution

A wide range of researchers from academia and industry, as well as businesses, government agencies, and cities, are exploring the technologies comprising the Internet of Things from three main perspectives: scientific theory, engineering design, and the user experience.

IoT Reference Architecture

In this chapter we present our IoT Reference Architecture. This IoT Reference Architecture is, among others, designed as a reference for the generation of compliant IoT concrete architectures that are tailored to one’s specific needs. For other usages of the IoT Architectural Reference Model see Chap. 3.

The Web of things vision: Things as a service and interaction patterns

This paper presents our vision of the Web of Things, where real world objects and cloud services interact through the web. In this prospect, mechanisms to embody object-as-a-service, along with novel navigation and interaction paradigms are needed to enable common physical objects in the surroundings to be considered as new stakeholders in traditional web applications.

Providing user support in Web-of-Things enabled smart spaces

With the proliferation of connected devices, ubiquitous computing success now depends on the availability of tools and interfaces to support users in connected environments. We present a platform realizing ambient intelligence concepts that empower users in the context of Smart Spaces based on the Web of Things. This platform adopts RESTful principles to expose connected resources and defines i) a development framework to host and publish objects, ii) user interfaces and semantic based tools to find and compose real world objects iii) an application model with a set of ontologies to consume them. Our approach permits fast and simple deployments of Smart Spaces composed of Web enabled objects. With the clear objective of confronting our approach to end users, we implemented a set of user interfaces to navigate within Smart Spaces and tools to intuitively design mashups composing real world resources. We present these user support mechanisms through a semantic engine component as well as a set of browsing modalities.

Software-Defined LANs for Interconnected Smart Environment

In this paper, we propose a solution to delegate the control and the management of the network connecting the many devices of a smart environment to a software entity, while keeping end-users in control of what is happening in their networks. For this, we rely on the logical manipulation of all connected devices through device abstraction and network programmability. Applying Software Defined Networking (SDN) principles, we propose a software-based solution that we call Software-Defined LANs in order to interconnect devices of smart environments according to the services the users are requesting or expecting.We define the adequate virtualization framework based on Virtual Objects and Communities of Virtual Objects. Using these virtual entities, we apply the SDN architectural principles to define a generic architecture that can be applied to any smart environment. Then we describe a prototype implementing these concepts in the home networking context, through a scenario in which users of two different homes can easily interconnect two private but shareable DLNA devices in a dedicated video-delivery SD-LAN. Finally we provide a discussion of the benefits and challenges of our approach regarding the generalization of SDN principles, autonomic features, Internet of Things scalability, security and privacy aspects enabled by SD-LANs intrinsic properties.

A Scalable IoT Service Search Based on Clustering and Aggregation

With the Internet of Things (IoT), we are facing a proliferation of connected devices distributed over a collection of geographical locations and offering new services to users referred to as IoT services. These services are highly heterogeneous and their number is growing fast. To facilitate IoT service search, some solutions rely on the use of Semantic Web technologies to create homogenous service descriptions to reason on and support accurate and flexible search. However, most existing approaches are centralized and fail to scale with respect to the number of advertised services. To address this scalability issue, we present in this paper a distributed, semantic-based IoT service search system. It relies on a hierarchical network of semantic gateways that represent geographical locations and host semantic service descriptions. To answer a service query, our approach is based on request matching and forwarding though the use of routing tables and similarity thresholds. Based on defined metrics, recursive clustering and information aggregation are performed over the hierarchy of gateways to construct the routing tables. We prove theoretically that our method ensures an accurate search of all matching services within the system. Experimental results show that our method enables to reduce greatly search cost with comparison to a centralized approach and has an acceptable search path length.

Communication hyperlinks: Call me my way

This paper presents the concept of a new kind of communication mechanism that we call a communication hyperlink. Using Web mechanisms, communication hyperlinks propose a new communication paradigm by putting back the asymmetry of the Web in the communication world: as a communication end-point, you decide how your correspondent may join you, without giving out any private information, and you provide the caller all the needed communication resources, without the need on his side for any credentials or account information. Since communication hyperlinks can take the form of a simple URL, they can be sent/retrieved using any media, from office documents to Web sites or blogs. When a user clicks on a communication hyperlink, all necessary resources, stored as software components or configuration data on the server, are downloaded and activated - without any need for installing additional software or creating any account for the caller. The paper describes the model and reference architecture implemented for the experimentation of these communication hyperlinks. Considerations on a running experimentation of this approach and associated business possibilities are given.

Efficient semantic-based IoT service discovery mechanism for dynamic environments

The adoption of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and semantic Web technologies in the Internet of Things (IoT) enables to enhance the interoperability of devices by abstracting their capabilities as services and to enrich their descriptions with machine-interpretable semantics. This facilitates the discovery and composition of IoT services. The increasing number of IoT services, their dynamicity and geographical distribution require mechanisms to enable scalable and efficient discovery. We propose in this paper a semantic based IoT service discovery system that supports and adapts to the dynamicity of IoT services. The discovery is distributed over a hierarchy of semantic gateways. Within a semantic gateway, we implement mechanisms to dynamically organize its content over time, in order to minimize the discovery cost. Results show that our approach enables to maintain a scalable and efficient discovery and limits the number of updates sent to a neighboring gateway.

Navigating the web of things: visualizing and interacting with web-enabled objects

The Web of Things vision aims to turn real-world objects into resources of the Web. The creation of accessible and addressable Virtual Objects, i.e. services that expose the status and capabilities of connected real-world objects using REST APIs, allows for new machine-to-machine interactions to be designed but also for a new user experience to be shaped. Indeed, the change brought about by the connectivity of objects and their ability to share information raises design issues that have to be considered by manufacturers and service providers alike. In this paper, we present an approach to the Web of Things based on both technical and user-centered points of view. We argue that new user interfaces have to be designed to allow users to visualize and interact with virtual objects and environments that host them. We illustrate our vision with an interaction mockup that allows the user to navigate the Web of Things through three devices (a smart phone, a web tablet and a desktop web browser).

A Process for Generating Concrete Architectures

This chapter addresses the question of how to generate concrete architectures with the IoT ARM, which is one of the many uses to which an architectural reference model can be put (see Chaps. 3 and 4). This topic was already touched upon in Section “Generation of Architectures” in Chap. 3, but it is covered in greater depth in this section.