Shancang Li

Internet of Things in Industries: A Survey

Internet of Things (IoT) has provided a promising opportunity to build powerful industrial systems and applications by leveraging the growing ubiquity of radio-frequency identification (RFID), and wireless, mobile, and sensor devices. A wide range of industrial IoT applications have been developed and deployed in recent years. In an effort to understand the development of IoT in industries, this paper reviews the current research of IoT, key enabling technologies, major IoT applications in industries, and identifies research trends and challenges. A main contribution of this review paper is that it summarizes the current state-of-the-art IoT in industries systematically.

Compressed Sensing Signal and Data Acquisition in Wireless Sensor Networks and Internet of Things

The emerging compressed sensing (CS) theory can significantly reduce the number of sampling points that directly corresponds to the volume of data collected, which means that part of the redundant data is never acquired. It makes it possible to create standalone and net-centric applications with fewer resources required in Internet of Things (IoT). CS-based signal and information acquisition/compression paradigm combines the nonlinear reconstruction algorithm and random sampling on a sparse basis that provides a promising approach to compress signal and data in information systems. This paper investigates how CS can provide new insights into data sampling and acquisition in wireless sensor networks and IoT. First, we briefly introduce the CS theory with respect to the sampling and transmission coordination during the network lifetime through providing a compressed sampling process with low computation costs. Then, a CS-based framework is proposed for IoT, in which the end nodes measure, transmit, and store the sampled data in the framework. Then, an efficient cluster-sparse reconstruction algorithm is proposed for in-network compression aiming at more accurate data reconstruction and lower energy efficiency. Performance is evaluated with respect to network size using datasets acquired by a real-life deployment.

A decision support system for product design in concurrent engineering

Compared with the traditional sequential design method, concurrent engineering is a systematic approach to integrate concurrent design of products and their related processes. One of the key factors to successfully implement concurrent engineering is information technology. In order to design a product and its manufacturing process simultaneously, information on product features, manufacturing requirements, and customer demands must be processed while the design is concurrently going on. There is an increased understanding of the importance of the correct decisions being made at the conceptual design and development stages that involve many complex evaluation and decision-making tasks. In order to promote the efficiency in concurrent product development, appropriate evaluation and decision tools need to be provided. In this paper, the characteristics of fuzzy, multi-stage evaluation and decision making in concurrent product development process are analyzed and a decision support system for product design in concurrent engineering is presented. An example is given to illustrate the application of the system.

Integration of hybrid wireless networks in cloud services oriented enterprise information systems

This article presents a hybrid wireless network integration scheme in cloud services-based enterprise information systems (EISs). With the emerging hybrid wireless networks and cloud computing technologies, it is necessary to develop a scheme that can seamlessly integrate these new technologies into existing EISs. By combining the hybrid wireless networks and computing in EIS, a new framework is proposed, which includes frontend layer, middle layer and backend layers connected to IP EISs. Based on a collaborative architecture, cloud services management framework and process diagram are presented. As a key feature, the proposed approach integrates access control functionalities within the hybrid framework that provide users with filtered views on available cloud services based on cloud service access requirements and user security credentials. In future work, we will implement the proposed framework over SwanMesh platform by integrating the UPnP standard into an enterprise information system.

QoS-Aware Scheduling of Services-Oriented Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) contains a large number of different devices and heterogeneous networks, which make it difficult to satisfy different quality of service (QoS) requirements and achieve rapid services composition and deployment. In addition, some services in service-oriented IoT are required to be reconfigurable and composable for QoS-aware services. This paper proposed a three-layer QoS scheduling model for service-oriented IoT. At application layer, the QoS schedule scheme explores optimal QoS-aware services composition by using the knowledge of each component service. At network layer, the model aims at dealing with scheduling of heterogeneous networks environment; at sensing layer, it deals with the information acquisition and resource allocation scheduling for different services. The proposed QoS-aware scheduling for service-oriented IoT architecture is able to optimize the scheduling performance of IoT network and minimize the resource costs.

A polychromatic sets approach to the conceptual design of machine tools

Currently very few computer-aided conceptual design systems are available to support the initial development of a machine tool and its structure (concept, calculation, design) and the verification of the prototype. In recent years, polychromatic sets have emerged as a promising approach for mathematical modelling. The theory, techniques, and approaches of polychromatic sets are capable of playing an important role in the conceptual design of a variety of products including machine tools. In this paper, the concept of polychromatic sets is introduced, and a polychromatic sets approach for the conceptual design of machine tools is proposed. The usefulness of the proposed method is illustrated by a conceptual design example of a machining centre of drilling, milling, and boring. Applying the proposed approach to machine tools helps to make right decisions in the conceptual design stage. Due to its powerful mathematical modelling capability, the polychromatic sets technique proposed in this paper may possibly be extended and applied to design evaluation problems encountered in other design tasks in manufacturing systems including process planning.

A Continuous Biomedical Signal Acquisition System Based on Compressed Sensing in Body Sensor Networks

The emerging compressed sensing (CS) holds considerable promise for continuously acquiring biomedical signals in body sensor networks (BSNs), which enables nodes to employ a much lower sampling rate than Nyquist while still able to accurately reconstruct signals. CS-based BSNs are expected to significantly enhance the quality of healthcare and improve the ability of prevention, early diagnosis, and treatment of chronic diseases. However, existing BSNs are still unable to support long-term monitoring in healthcare, as well as providing an energy-efficient low communication burden and inexpensive scheme. Capitalizing on the sparsity of biomedical signals in transfer domains, this paper develops a continuous biomedical signal acquisition system, which explores a sparsification model to find the sparse representation of biomedical signals. The sparsified measurements of signals are wirelessly transmitted to a fusion center through BSNs. Meanwhile, a weighted group sparse reconstruction algorithm is proposed to accurately reconstruct the signals at the fusion center. Simulation results show that, on random sampling over BSN, the proposed group sparse algorithm shows good efficiency, strong stability, and robustness.

A Distributed Consensus Algorithm for Decision Making in Service-Oriented Internet of Things

In a service-oriented Internet of things (IoT) deployment, it is difficult to make consensus decisions for services at different IoT edge nodes where available information might be insufficient or overloaded. Existing statistical methods attempt to resolve the inconsistency, which requires adequate information to make decisions. Distributed consensus decision making (CDM) methods can provide an efficient and reliable means of synthesizing information by using a wider range of information than existing statistical methods. In this paper, we first discuss service composition for the IoT by minimizing the multi-parameter dependent matching value. Subsequently, a cluster-based distributed algorithm is proposed, whereby consensuses are first calculated locally and subsequently combined in an iterative fashion to reach global consensus. The distributed consensus method improves the robustness and trustiness of the decision process.

The Internet of Things: a security point of view

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide an in-depth overview of the security requirements and challenges for Internet of Things (IoT) and discuss security solutions for various enabling technologies and implications to various applications. Design/methodology/approach – Security requirements and solutions are analysed based on a four-layer framework of IoT on sensing layer, network layer, service layer, and application layer. The cross-layer threats are analysed followed by the security discussion for the enabling technologies including identification and tracking technologies, WSN and RFID, communication, networks, and service management. Findings – IoT calls for new security infrastructure based on the new technical standards. As a consequence, new security design for IoT shall pay attention to these new standards. Security at both the physical devices and service-applications is critical to the operation of IoT, which is indispensable for the success of IoT. Open problems remain in a number o...

Adaptive and Secure Load-Balancing Routing Protocol for Service-Oriented Wireless Sensor Networks

Service-oriented architectures for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been proposed to provide an integrated platform, where new applications can be rapidly developed through flexible service composition. In WSNs, the existing multipath routing schemes have demonstrated the effectiveness of traffic distribution over multipaths to fulfill the quality of service requirements of applications. However, the failure of links might significantly affect the transmission performance, scalability, reliability, and security of WSNs. Thus, by considering the reliability, congestion control, and security for multipath, it is desirable to design a reliable and service-driven routing scheme to provide efficient and failure-tolerant routing scheme. In this paper, an evaluation metric, path vacant ratio, is proposed to evaluate and then find a set of link-disjoint paths from all available paths. A congestion control and load-balancing algorithm that can adaptively adjust the load over multipaths is proposed. A threshold sharing algorithm is applied to split the packets into multiple segments that will be delivered via multipaths to the destination depending on the path vacant ratio. Simulations demonstrate the performance of the adaptive and secure load-balance routing scheme.