Xiongnan Jin

IoT Service Selection Based on Physical Service Model and Absolute Dominance Relationship

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a paradigm where real-world entities can be connected to the Internet and provide services with the help of attached devices. With the development of IoT technologies, the number of devices deployed around the world as well as their services are increasing rapidly. Thus, selecting an appropriate service which satisfies a users requirements from such many services becomes a time consuming challenge. Therefore, to address this issue we propose a Physical Service Model (PSM) to describe heterogeneous IoT physical services. PSM contains three core concepts (Device, Resource and Service) and specifies their relationships. Based on PSM, we define four quality of service (QoS) attributes and rate candidate services according to user requirements. In order to dynamically aggregate individual QoS ratings and select physical services, we propose a Physical Service Selection (PSS) method which takes a user preference and an absolute dominance relationship among physical services into account. Finally, experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed method.

Short paper: Semantic URI-based event-driven physical mashup

To enhance the integration of different IoT application domains, we propose a two-layered IoT information model that consists of domain-independent and domain-specific models. In addition, for the meaningful composition of things and their services, a semantic URI as a unique identifier is allocated to a thing. Finally, a modeling approach of constructing physical mashups is proposed for the event-driven composition of IoT services. In order to show the efficiency of the proposed event-driven physical mashup approach, an energy management scenario in u-campus is demonstrated as a case study.

Automated deployment of IoT services based on semantic description

The Internet of Things (IoT) is making it possible for a large number of heterogeneous physical objects (or referred as “Things”) to be connected to the Internet. However, as more and more things are getting connected, interoperability issues have been raised as one of major challenges in achieving the vision of IoT. To cope with this issue, many researches and industry communities have begun to adopt Web technologies such as HTTP, JSON, and REST. With the current trend of the Web of Things (WoT), we encounter various IoT platforms (or middlewares) which are able to collect, manage and mashup a huge mass of things and their data. Considering the large number of heterogeneous things deployed across different platforms, the interoperability problem between things and platforms has now come to the fore. In this paper, we present a semantic approach to generating a service description and deploying a set of heterogeneous things to different platforms automatically.

A fast and scalable approach for IoT service selection based on a physical service model

Information Systems (ISs) have become one of the crucial tools for various organizations in managing and coordinating business processes. Now we are entering the era of the Internet of Things (IoT). IoT is a paradigm in which real-world physical things can be connected to the Internet and provide services through the computing devices attached. The IoT infrastructure is starting to be integrated with ISs thereby diminishing the boundaries between the physical world and the business IT systems. With the development of IoT technologies, the number of connected things and their available physical services are increasing rapidly. Thus, selecting an appropriate service that satisfies a user’s requirements from such services becomes a time-consuming challenge. To address this issue, we propose a Physical Service Model (PSM) as a common conceptual model to describe heterogeneous IoT physical services. PSM contains three core concepts (device, resource, and service) and specifies their relationships. Based on the proposed PSM, we define three types of Quality of Service (QoS) attributes and rate candidate services according to user requirements. To dynamically rate QoS values and select an appropriate physical service, we propose a Physical Service Selection (PSS) method that takes a user preference and an absolute dominance relationship among physical services into account. Finally, experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed method.

Towards a Semantic Model for Automated Deployment of IoT Services across Platforms

In the landscape of Web of Things (WoT), we encounter various WoT platforms. The WoT platforms can collect, manage and mash up a huge mass of things and their data by using Web technologies. Considering heterogeneous things deployed across different platforms, the interoperability issue between things and platforms has been raised as one of major challenges in achieving the vision of the Internet of Things (IoT). In this paper, we propose a Semantic Service Description (SSD) ontology to guarantee the semantic consistency of a service description. We also present an approach to generating a service description and deploying a set of heterogeneous things to different platforms automatically. Through the implementation of a prototype, the applicability of our proposal is demonstrated and the experimental results are discussed.

Automated mashup of CoAP services on the Internet of Things

The Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) is a specialized Web transfer protocol for use with constrained devices and networks in the Internet of Things (IoT). Although a single CoAP service provided by a CoAP-enabled device has its own value for its users, the functionality provided by an individual CoAP service is limited. Hence, an efficient method of manipulating a set of CoAP services concurrently and processing their output data is needed. However, existing approaches require users to manually discover services and create mashups. Manual discovery and mashups are quite time-consuming tasks especially in an IoT paradigm. In this paper, we propose a novel CoAP Service Gateway (CoAP-SG) as an intermediate network node between a resource-constrained network and the Internet. The CoAP-SG enables users to create a CoAP service mashup automatically through a single HTTP request. In addition, semantic similarity is proposed to select similar services in case there is no exact matchings. Experimental results with a prototype implementation show that the proposed approach is feasible in terms of execution time and scalability.

Enhancing CoAP proxy for semantic composition and multicast communication

Due to the resource constrained nature of things on the Internet of Things (IoT), a mechanism of managing things and processing their data needs to be low-cost in terms of power consumption and network traffic. The Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) is suitable for the IoT and supports multicast communication with things. However, multicast may lead to a traffic overload when the corresponding multiple responses travel through a CoAP-proxy concurrently. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to constructing a CoAP-proxy, which supports the efficient multicasting and grouping things based on the semantic description of a request. In addition, the proposed proxy merges multiple responses into an aggregated one, which is returned to a client. To demonstrate the feasibility, we implemented a prototype of the proposed CoAP-proxy and evaluated the performance of our approach in terms of the response time and network traffic.

Enabling smart objects discovery via constructing hypergraphs of heterogeneous IoT interactions

Recent advances in the Internet of Things (IoT) have led to the rise of a new paradigm: Social Internet of Things (SIoT). However, the new paradigm, as inspired by the idea that smart objects will soon have a certain degree of social consciousness, is still in its infant state for several reasons. Most of the related works are far from embracing the social aspects of smart objects and the dynamicity of inter-object social relations. Furthermore, there is yet to be a coherent structure for organising and managing IoT objects that elicit social-like features. To fully understand how and to what extent these objects mimic the behaviours of humans, we first model SIoT by scrutinising the distinct characteristics and structural facets of human-centric social networks. To elaborate, we describe the process of profiling the IoT objects that become social and classify various inter-object social relationships. Afterwards, a novel discovery mechanism, which utilises our hypergraph-based overlay network model, is proposed. To test the feasibility of the proposed approach, we have performed several experiments on our smart home automation demo box built with various sensors and actuators.

Poster Abstract: Semantically Enriched Object Identification for Internet of Things

To efficiently explore heterogeneous objects on the Internet and uniquely identify them, we propose a scalable physical-object naming system that reuses the existing ontologies and assigns URL-based semantic identifiers. We implement a prototype of the proposed system and evaluate its performance using synthetically generated data based on the W3C Semantic Sensor Network ontology.