Panagiotis Vlacheas

Enabling smart cities through a cognitive management framework for the internet of things

The Internet of Things (IoT) is expected to substantially support sustainable development of future smart cities. This article identifies the main issues that may prevent IoT from playing this crucial role, such as the heterogeneity among connected objects and the unreliable nature of associated services. To solve these issues, a cognitive management framework for IoT is proposed, in which dynamically changing real-world objects are represented in a virtualized environment, and where cognition and proximity are used to select the most relevant objects for the purpose of an application in an intelligent and autonomic way. Part of the framework is instantiated in terms of building blocks and demonstrated through a smart city scenario that horizontally spans several application domains. This preliminary proof of concept reveals the high potential that self-reconfigurable IoT can achieve in the context of smart cities.

Virtualization and Cognitive Management of Real World Objects in the Internet of Things

This paper presents a framework for the virtualization of real world objects and the cognitive management of their virtual counterparts. The framework consists of three levels of functionality and each level comprises cognitive entities that provide the means for self-management and learning, allowing for smart, flexible applications and objects. The presented framework enables the abstraction of the heterogeneity that derives from the vast amount of diverse objects/devices, while enhancing reliability and facilitates the consideration of the views of various users/stakeholders (owners of objects & communication means) for ensuring proper application provision, business integrity and, therefore, maximization of exploitation opportunities. The paper also presents a corresponding prototype that has been developed for the validation of the proposed approach, in a real-life fire detection scenario in a Smart Home.

Cognitive Management for the Internet of Things: A Framework for Enabling Autonomous Applications

The handling of the number of objects that will be part of the Internet of Things (IoT) and the various networking technologies used for their interconnection requires suitable architecture and technological foundations. Despite significant work on architectures and test facilities for the IoT, there is still a lack of management functionality to overcome the technological heterogeneity and complexity of the underlying networks and IoT infrastructure, so as to enhance context/situational-awareness, reliability, and energy-efficiency of IoT applications. This article presents a cognitive management framework for the IoT aiming to address these issues, comprising three levels of functionality: virtual objects (VOs), composite VOs (CVOs), and service levels. Cognitive entities at all levels provide the means for self-management (configuration, optimization, and healing) and learning. Three fundamental processes of this framework are presented: dynamic CVO creation, knowledge-based CVO instantiation, and CVO self-healing. A first prototype implementation of this framework and corresponding derived results are presented.

A Model-Based Security Toolkit for the Internet of Things

The control and protection of user data is a very important aspect in the design and deployment of the Internet of Things (IoT). The heterogeneity of the IoT technologies, the number of the participating devices and systems, and the different types of users and roles create important challenges in the IoT context. In particular, requirements of scalability, interoperability and privacy are difficult to address even with the considerable amount of existing work both in the research and standardization community. In this paper we propose a Model-based Security Toolkit, which is integrated in a management framework for IoT devices, and supports specification and efficient evaluation of security policies to enable the protection of user data. Our framework is applied to a Smart City scenario in order to demonstrate its feasibility and performance.

Operator-driven framework for establishing and unifying autonomic network and service management solutions

It is commonly recognized that the technology progress, dynamism but also complexity of telecommunication networks and services increase with rapid paces. Such challenges cannot be efficiently handled by traditional networking and management schemes. Autonomics in network and services management appear as the most viable way out. However, despite the significant research efforts and achievements in this field, a few and only recently start to convince operators for their deployability. In this direction, UniverSelf is a research initiative which proposes a pragmatic solution for overcoming the increasing complexity a) by consolidating and capitalizing on lessons learnt and b) by identifying and solving actual, first-priority, immediate and mid-term manageability problems encountered by operators. The cornerstone of UniverSelf approach is the Unified Management Framework (UMF), an operator-driven framework that designates processes, tools and methods for establishing (legacy, emerging and yet undiscovered) autonomic solutions in the joint management of networks and services. This paper provides a first concise description of the UMF design in terms of core, reusable and cohesive functional blocks and interfaces, as derives from the elaboration of requirements elicited from a set of operator problems (use cases). The design is complemented by principles and goals that address important high-level challenges such as the unification/federation of diverse autonomic solutions and technology domains, the governance of autonomic infrastructures and services, as well as the embodiment of autonomic solutions (intelligence) into the management ecosystem.

Cognitive Networks for Future Internet: Status and Emerging Challenges

This work provided an overview of the cognitive networks and systems for a wireless FI by considering the current status and looking forward at the emerging challenges. Emphasis was placed on the opportunistic networking paradigm to provide an insight on research regarding operator-governed ONs that are assumed to be coordinated extension of the infrastructure. For the coordination of operator-governed ONs, cognitive management entities are introduced. Moreover, further emphasis was placed on an operator-governed, end-to-end, autonomic, joint network and services management, which was elaborated as a part of this work. Network and services management is enabled through the definition of a UMF, which has a main goal to unify and federate various research outcomes and will advance the routine management tasks to the level of governance of the entire network.semantic.

Design of a Security Gateway for iKaaS Platform

The iKaaS (intelligent Knowledge-as-a-Service) platform integrates the data on multiple local clouds organically and provides the data to various types of applications as knowledge while taking security and privacy fully into account. However, access control on the iKaaS platform is not without complications because the application may access personal data in different countries from the one where the application exists. We thus design a security gateway that is set at the entrance of each local cloud and can control access while interpreting the differences in regulations and guidelines between countries.

A Cognitive Management Framework for Empowering the Internet of Things

This work presents a Cognitive Management framework for empowering the Internet of Things (IoT). This framework has the ability to dynamically adapt its behaviour, through self-management functionality, taking into account information and knowledge (obtained through machine learning) on the situation (e.g., internal status and status of environment), as well as policies (designating objectives, constraints, rules, etc.). Cognitive technologies constitute a unique and efficient approach for addressing the technological heterogeneity of the IoT and obtaining situation awareness, reliability and efficiency. The paper also presents a first indicative implementation of the proposed framework, comprising real sensors and actuators. The preliminary results of this work demonstrate high potential towards self-reconfigurable IoT.

Multi-Objective Traffic Engineering for Future Networks

An important goal towards the design of Future Networks is to achieve the best ratio of performance to energy consumption and at the same time assure manageability. This paper presents a general problem formulation for Energy-Aware Traffic Engineering and proposes a distributed, heuristic Energy-Aware Traffic Engineering scheme (ETE) that provides load balancing and energy-awareness in accordance with the operators needs. Simulation results of ETE compared to the optimal network performance confirm the capability of ETE to meeting the needs of Future Networks.

Autonomics in wireless network management: Advances in standards and further challenges

The increase of user traffic demand, the numerous and QoS-pretentious applications and services, as well as the evolving and emerging business models comprise prominent characteristics of the Future Internet (FI). They also comprise challenges that will necessitate significant alterations in the way that networks delivering FI services are managed, and which are insufficiently addressed by existing solutions. In this respect, autonomic systems exposing self-management and learning capabilities have appeared as the most viable direction for tackling the foreseen complexity and realizing the FI vision. At the same time wireless networking and its evolution will constitute an integral part of FI and thus, the adaptation and integration of the related exploratory work in autonomics into the existing wireless network management is a major challenge to address. The concept of Autonomic Wireless Network Management (AWNM) is the result of this integration. AWNM has been investigated by many research efforts, but also engaged working groups within major standardization bodies. This article will go through the most relevant related standardization activities and explain how autonomics-related ideas are integrated. In particular, 3GPP SON is considered as a rather near-time activity of the new trend in autonomic networking in the wireless domain; on the other hand, it is shown that IEEE DySPAN 1900.4/1900.4a and ETSI RRS Working Group 3 address more disruptive ways forward and are therefore targeting a mid- to longerterm time-frame. Extrapolating the inherent trends, the expected further evolution of the intelligently self-managed wireless communications framework is finally outlined.