Tamas Pflanzner

A survey of IoT cloud providers

Cloud Computing enables flexible resource provisions that has become hugely popular for many businesses to take advantage of responding quickly to new demands from customers. Many cloud providers follow recent trends in cloud application development, and offer federation capabilities at the platform level, thus creating Platform-as-a-Service solutions. There is a growing number of providers offering IoT-specific services, since cloud computing has the potential to satisfy IoT needs such as hiding data generation, processing and visualization tasks. While cloud provider offerings have been widely studied, IoT-specific features are still unexplored due to their recent appearance. In this paper we investigate such basic properties of IoT cloud providers by presenting a survey and a classification of them, which are the main contributions of this work. This work can be useful for application developers planning to exploit IoT capabilities of PaaS cloud providers. We also present the needs for an IoT device simulator based on the results of this survey, which can further ease IoT cloud system development in the future.

A Private Gateway for Investigating IoT Data Management

By responding to the new trend represented by the appearance of the Internet of Things (IoT), several cloud providers have started to offer specific management services. In recent years, we have already seen that cloud computing has managed to serve IoT needs by making data generation, processing and visualization tasks transparent to the users. In IoT Cloud systems developers do not only have to buy and configure sensor devices, but they also have to develop so-called gateway applications to manage the data comings from these devices. In this paper we show how to develop such a private gateway, and present a comprehensive simulation environment, where IoT Cloud applications can be investigated without initial investments. Finally, we evaluate the proposed gateway with real sensor data.

A Taxonomy and Survey of IoT Cloud Applications

Internet of Things (IoT) systems are realized by dynamic global network infrastructure with self-configuring capabilities, in which things can interact and communicate in the environment through the Internet by exchanging sensor data, and react autonomously to events generally without direct human intervention. Such systems can be utilized in many application areas, thus they may have very different properties. There is a growing number of cloud providers offering IoT-specific services, since cloud computing has the potential to satisfy IoT needs such as standardizing the custom data structures of the devices, processing and visualization tasks. IoT application developers do not only have to decide which cloud provider to use, but they also have to choose which combination of protocols and data structures best fits their application. As a result, it is necessary to know what properties these systems have and to learn to what extent cloud providers support IoT capabilities. In this paper, we address these issues and investigate 23 IoT cloud use cases and perform a detailed classification of them in a survey, and introduce a taxonomy of IoT application properties based on this survey. We also compare current cloud providers supporting IoT capabilities and gather requirements for IoT device simulation to support further research on IoT application development. Received on 08 July 2017; accepted on 12 September 2017; published on 06 October 2017

Analyzing IoT, Fog and Cloud Environments Using Real Sensor Data

There is a growing number of communicating devices joining the Internet, and we will soon face a world of a distributed computing environment with interconnected smart devices. Cloud-based systems have also started to dominate the Internet space, with the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm. In spite of the huge developments in the connectivity of devices, there is still much to do in areas such as device connectivity, communication protocols, latency, Internet bandwidth, inter-operability. In this context, Fog Computing, the latest paradigm, can come to rescue to improve the service quality by keeping and processing the data close to the user. This suggests that IoT applications can be supported by Cloud and Fog technologies to aid in the data management tasks. Besides, in many real-world solutions, we need to use simulations to investigate the inner workings of complex ICT systems. In the current presentation, our goal is to provide means to develop efficient data management algorithms in a simulation environment. In this chapter, we first analyze sensor data formats in the context of smart cities and develop a data retrieval tool for gathering and filtering the considered open datasets. We analyze three smart city initiatives that met our criteria and publish open data produced by the IoT sensors and devices. Then, we discuss how IoT data could be made available via the use of this tool for simulation environments. We also exemplify its utilization in an open-source IoT device simulator.

Traffic Management for Cloud Federation

The chapter summarizes activities of COST IC1304 ACROSS European Project corresponding to traffic management for Cloud Federation (CF). In particular, we provide a survey of CF architectures and standardization activities. We present comprehensive multi-level model for traffic management in CF that consists of five levels: Level 5 - Strategies for building CF, Level 4 - Network for CF, Level 3 - Service specification and provision, Level 2 - Service composition and orchestration, and Level 1 - Task service in cloud resources. For each level we propose specific methods and algorithms. The effectiveness of these solutions were verified by simulation and analytical methods. Finally, we also describe specialized simulator for testing CF solution in IoT environment.

Simulating Sensor Devices for Experimenting with IoT Cloud Systems

As a growing number of powerful devices join the Internet, a new world of smart devices is being formed. This new trend is due to the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm, which also has a significant impact on the global Internet traffic. There are also more and more cloud providers offering IoT-specific services, since cloud computing has the potential to satisfy IoT needs such as hiding data generation and processing and visualization of tasks. While each cloud provider offers its own set of features, two critical features they all have in common are the ability to connect devices and to store the data generated by those devices. Using the capabilities of smartphones, many things can be simulated simultaneously supporting most types of IoT devices. In this chapter, we introduce and categorize IoT cloud providers and classify common IoT applications. Based on these findings, we propose a mobile IoT simulator called MobIoTSim that helps researchers to learn IoT device handling without buying real sensors and to test and demonstrate IoT applications utilizing multiple devices. We also show how to develop gateway services in cloud environments that can be connected to MobIoTSim to manage the simulated devices and evaluate device handling scalability. By using this tool, developers can examine the behavior of IoT systems and develop and evaluate IoT cloud applications in a more convenient and efficient way.

Performance Analysis of an OpenStack Private Cloud

Cloud Computing is a novel technology offering flexible resource provisions for business stakeholders to manage IT applications and data responding to new customer demands. It is not an easy task to determine the performance of the ported applications in advance. The virtualized nature of these environments always represent a certain level of performance degradation, which is also dependent on the types of resources and application scenarios. In this paper we have set up a performance evaluation environment within a private OpenStack deployment, and defined general use cases to be executed and evaluated in this cloud. These test cases are used for investigating the internal behavior of OpenStack in terms of computing and networking capabilities of its provisioned virtual machines. The results of our investigation reveal the performance of general usage scenarios in a local cloud, give an insight for businesses planning to move to the cloud and provide hints where further development or fine tuning is needed in order to improve OpenStack systems.

Towards Enabling Clouds for IoT: Interoperable Data Management Approaches by Multi-clouds

Cloud computing is a novel technology enabling flexible resource provisions for business organizations to manage applications and data responding to new demands from customers. Mobile devices also benefit from cloud services. The huge data that users produce with these devices are continuously posted to online services, which require the use of several cloud providers at the same time to efficiently store these data. Using cloud-based storage services, such as Personal Clouds for these purposes, is free for certain amount of data; therefore, uniting these separate storages can provide a suitable solution for user needs. The Internet of Things (IoT) provides a way to improve social networking by interdisciplinary efforts that can be effectively supported by cloud computing solutions. In this chapter, we propose novel approaches for composing and interoperating cloud solutions to support IoT functionality. We exemplify (1) how to unite separate Personal Clouds in an autonomous way to cope with the enormous data that users produce and share in social networks, (2) how to manage and share user data produced by mobile devices in different IaaS Clouds, and (3) how to build applications using different clouds in an interoperable and autonomous way. The results of evaluation of the proposed approaches have also been presented.

Towards Enabling Scientific Workflows for the Future Internet of Things

Cloud computing offers on-demand access to computational, infrastructure and data resources operated from a remote source. This novel technology has opened new ways of flexible resource provisions for businesses to manage applications and data responding to new demands from customers. In the current web application scenario a rapidly growing number of powerful devices join the Internet, significantly impacting on the global traffic volume and foreshadowing a world of smart devices, or things in the Internet of Things (IoT) perspective. This trend calls for an ecosystem that provides means to interconnect and control these devices. In this position paper we envision the integration of IoT into Cloud-enabled scientific workflows to support the proliferation of IoT with the help of cloud technologies. These enhanced workflows will enable the creation and management of user applications that bring clouds and IoT closer to users by hiding the complexity and cumbersome utilization of virtualized resources, data sources and things. The goal of this approach is to ease the lives of users and foster scientific work by engaging the Internet of Things.

Towards Data Interoperability of Cloud Infrastructures Using Cloud Storage Services

Cloud Computing is becoming more and more popular, and various cloud services have appeared to make our lives easier. Mobile devices can also benefit from Cloud services: the huge data users produce with these devices are continuously posted to online services, which may require the modification of these data. Using cloud storage services together with computation-intensive infrastructure services can provide a suitable solution for these needs. In this paper we address the open issue of data interoperability in clouds, and propose an approach to manage and share user data produced by mobile devices in different IaaS clouds. The approach is exemplified with an image generator application, and the performance of the application is evaluated with Android devices and a private IaaS cloud.