Paolo Brizzi

The VIRTUS Middleware: An XMPP Based Architecture for Secure IoT Communications

Before a wider adoption of the Internet of Things (IoT) vision occurs, many urgent technological and social challenging issues still need to be addressed, including device interoperability, systems autonomy, privacy and security concerns, which could have a significant impact on several aspects of everyday-life or potential end-user. Due to the very large number of technologies normally in place within the IoT paradigm, some type of middleware layer is employed to enforce seamless integration of devices and data within the same information network. Within such middleware, data must be exchanged respecting strict protection constraints. Both the networking and security issues have driven the design and the development of the VIRTUS Middleware, an IoT middleware relying on the open XMPP protocol to provide secure event- driven communications within an IoT scenario. Leveraging the standard security features provided by XMPP, the middleware offers a reliable and secure communication channel for distributed applications, protected with both authentication (through TLS protocol) and encryption (SASL protocol) mechanisms. The proposed architecture provides the possibility to isolate an instance of VIRTUS, allowing the exchange of data only within a private network. This paper presents an overview of VIRTUS, providing an overall platform description and details regarding its security features.

Hybrid WSN and RFID indoor positioning and tracking system

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs), consisting of a large number of nodes to detect ambient environment, are widely deployed in a predefined area to provide more sophisticated sensing, communication, and processing capabilities, especially concerning the maintenance when hundreds or thousands of nodes are required to be deployed over wide areas at the same time. Radio frequency identification (RFID) technology, by reading the low-cost passive tags installed on objects or people, has been widely adopted in the tracing and tracking industry and can support an accurate positioning within a limited distance. Joint utilization of WSN and RFID technologies is attracting increasing attention within the Internet of Things (IoT) community, due to the potential of providing pervasive context-aware applications with advantages from both fields. WSN-RFID convergence is considered especially promising in context-aware systems with indoor positioning capabilities, where data from deployed WSN and RFID systems can be opportunistically exploited to refine and enhance the collected data with position information. In this papera, we design and evaluate a hybrid system which combines WSN and RFID technologies to provide an indoor positioning service with the capability of feeding position information into a general-purpose IoT environment. Performance of the proposed system is evaluated by means of simulations and a small-scale experimental set-up. The performed analysis demonstrates that the joint use of heterogeneous technologies can increase the robustness and the accuracy of the indoor positioning systems.

Industrial application development exploiting IoT vision and model driven programming

In recent years there has been a huge discussion about the IoT (Internet of Things) concept, and even more about IoT within industrial environment. The real IoT is a network of devices with local intelligence (sensors, lights, gas pumps, HVAC systems), which shares access & control mechanisms to push and pull status and command information from the networked world. However, there are still some issues, limiting the IoT diffusion: the devices involved are heterogeneous, with proprietary system of chips, protocols and interface; furthermore, there is a lack of development toolkits, enabling developers to create and evaluate IoT prototypes in simple and flexible manner. The ebbits [1] platform addressed those issues, taking advantages from the IoT vision and providing a middleware infrastructure for the integration of heterogeneous industrial devices and sensors, transforming them into web services and thus enabling their seamless integration into existing legacy systems. This paper will introduce the platform and its software architecture, describing features like semantic devices interoperability and entity virtualization. Furthermore, the paper will describe an innovative, IoT oriented, model driven development toolkit. This toolkit leverages on the semantic discovery service, allowing to dynamically selecting and locating available resources or devices, and provides a flexible instrument, including a graphical interface, that enables developers to compose mashup applications.

Heterogeneous Applications, Tools, and Methodologies in the Car Manufacturing Industry Through an IoT Approach

Due to the growth of industrial Internet services, todays production environment is on the edge of a new era of innovations and changes. This is taking place through the convergence of the global industrial system with the power of advanced computing, analytics, low-cost sensing, and new levels of connectivity enabled by the Internet of Things (IoT). These innovations will bring higher efficiency, flexibility, and interoperability among industries, although they belong to different production ecosystems. This paper describes an IoT platform and the related prototypes developed within the project: Enabling Business-Based Internet of Things and Services (ebbits), with a focus on the industrial domain. Heterogeneous applications were deployed and tested, including a wireless sensor and actuator network for industrial machines monitoring and a radio-frequency-identification-based system for operator management, locating, and authorization, which also includes an interactive user interface for portable devices to visualize real-time information from physical-world devices. Moreover, tools for model-driven development are used to simplify the process of building IoT applications. Those developments are based on IoT middleware that is developed and deployed by the project to enable the seamless integration of heterogeneous technologies and processes into mainstream enterprise systems. This paper also presents the prototypal deployment of the developed prototypes in the car manufacturing industry.

Food Traceability Chain Supported by the Ebbits IoT Middleware

The paper presents the food traceability prototype, which was implemented as a pilot application of the FP7 EU project ebbits. The platform architecture, built upon the principles of the Internet of Things (IoT), People, and Services, is described in aspects of the supported interoperability and semantic orchestration of services involved in the food production chain. The platform represents physical objects as digital objects that go through different phases in the production chain. The information produced in each phase is stored by involved actors and could be retrieved back by the consumers through orchestrating services provided by the actors in the production chain. These services are resolved by a product service orchestration, which is supported by a semantic backend.

Enhancing traceability and industrial process automation through the VIRTUS middleware

Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) are considered a key instrument to improve efficiency and flexibility of industrial processes. This paper provides an experience report about the application of an ICT-based approach, derived from the Internet-of-Things (IoT) concept, to logistics in industrial manufacturing environments, aimed at enhancing awareness and control of logistic flows. The described solution performs assets management and inbound-outbound monitoring of goods by interconnecting business processes entities and devices providing physical-world data through an existing IoT-oriented middleware named VIRTUS. The VIRTUS Middleware, based on the open XMPP standard protocol and leveraging the OSGi framework, provides a scalable, agile, event-driven, network independent tool to manage an ecosystem of heterogeneous interconnected objects. The described solution has been validated within an actual industrial environment made of geographically-separated production plants.

XMPP-based infrastructure for IoT network management and rapid services and applications development

The information technology ecosystem is today facing many radical and methodological changes driven by the Internet-of-Things (IoT): those innovations impact at various levels, ranging from the device-to-device communication paradigms to the value-added services built on top of them. Though several IoT platforms addressing IoT design requirements have recently been raised in State-of-the-Art (SoTA), there is still a lack of platforms and tools which can help end-users to easily develop IoT applications and to configure and manage IoT infrastructures. In order to address these challenges, this work introduces the system development platform (SDP) developed within the IMPReSS project and specifically one of its components, namely, the IoT Platform’s Infrastructure for Configurations (IoT-PIC). It supports developers and users in arranging, configuring, and monitoring the various components of an IoT platform. Specifically, the paper highlights the solution adopted to face two services: IoT Network Management (NM) and platform commissioning. The proposed infrastructure, based on the eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP), provides means for device discovery and IoT network monitoring, enabling also the mash-up of the platform entities. The platform commissioning tool leverages this feature to compose available modules and services, to implement the desired IoT application. This paper also describes the Resource Adaptation Interface (RAI), which virtualizes physical devices within the IoT platform.

Beekup: A distributed and safe P2P storage framework for IoE applications

Cloud computing and, in particular, cloud storage, has successfully boosted a variety of applications, in several domains; with proven acceptance and benefits by end users. While peculiar features of the cloud, e.g., redundancy, scalability and accessibility, are still highly desirable, several new scenarios are nowadays emerging, which call for additional features and/or different interpretations of the underlying paradigm. With the recent rising of the Internet of Everything, for example, some of the cloud principles should be partly reconsidered to better address scenarios involving a high number of devices, each carrying limited storage capacity, which can possibly operate in connection “islands” due to erratic or unreliable network connections. In this paper we start addressing these needs by presenting the Beekup system: a P2P storage framework, based on Tahoe-LAFS. Beekup enables cloud-like storage on edge devices supporting a variety of applications: from private secure file backup, to sensor-level distributed storage of raw data. Two main testbeds centered on private cloud storage and distributed sensor-data backup are analyzed in the paper, together with corresponding user applications. Initial outcomes from experiments and encouraging feedback from users involved in system trials, confirm the potential viability of the approach.