The requirement of supporting both latency sensitive and computing intensive Internet of Things (IoT) applications is consistently boosting the necessity for integrating Edge, Fog and Cloud infrastructure. Although there are a number of real-world frameworks attempt to support such integration, they have many limitations from various perspectives including platform independence, security, resource management and multi-application assistance. To address these limitations, we propose a simplified but effective framework, named FogBus for facilitating end-to-end IoT-Fog(Edge)-Cloud integration. FogBus offers a platform independent interface to IoT applications and computing instances for execution and interaction. It not only assists developers in building applications but also helps users in running multiple applications at a time and service providers to manage their resources. In addition, FogBus applies Blockchain, authentication and encryption techniques to secure operations on sensitive data. Because of its lightweight and cross platform software systems, it is easy to deploy, scalable and cost e_cient. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework by creating a computing environment with it that integrates finger pulse oximeter as IoT devices with Smartphone-based gateway and Raspberry Pi-based Fog nodes for Sleep Apnea analysis. We also run several experiments on this computing environment varying FogBus settings. The experimental results show that different FogBus settings can improve latency, energy, network and CPU usage of the computing infrastructure.
Jul 1, 2018·2018 IEEE International Conference on Internet of Things (iThings) and IEEE Green Computing and Communications (GreenCom) and IEEE Cyber, Physical and Social Computing (CPSCom) and IEEE Smart Data (SmartData)
As the deployments of IoT systems grow for a wide range of applications, there are new use-cases emerging where the organizations or individuals that own sensor devices are different from the individuals or organizations that have use for the data from those devices. In such settings it is helpful for the data consumer to be able to effortlessly get data streams in return for monetary payments. The advent of cryptocurrency technologies have made the establishment of bidirectional automatic data micro-payment channels (with data flowing in one direction and micro-payments in the other) feasible. We present an application layer protocol called the streaming data payment protocol (SDPP) which embodies this very idea. The protocol also makes provisions for the data provider to send automated invoices and the data consumer to provide signed receipts for data to be stored on an immutable distributed ledger for auditing and dispute resolution purposes. We present an implementation of SDPP using TCP for data transport and IOTA as both cryptocurrency and a distributed ledger.
Marcin Płóciennik, Mario Drobics, Ivana Podnar Žarko, Konstantinos V. Katsaros · 6 authors
In the current Internet of Things (IoT), centralized IoT structures greatly limit the direct, efficient and privacy preserving interaction with the locally available resources. A sustainable path for the future development of Smart Urban Environments, from Smart Homes and Offices, to Smart Neighborhoods and Cities, requires next-generation IoT solutions which are interoperable and decentralized. Building on direct device-to-device interactions and the existing infrastructure operated by open and interoperable platforms, a novel decentralized IoT architecture is required to offer both privacy-preserving and smart real-time interactions in Smart Spaces, leading thus to truly trustful ambient intelligence serving ordinary citizens in everyday situations. We present the key interoperability and security-related aspects which are designed and implemented within the H2020 project symbIoTe to pave the way for such decentralized IoT solutions. Furthermore, we analyze the requirements and technologies, namely Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), intelligent agents and edge technologies, as the building blocks for the next-generation IoT solutions.
This paper discusses supporting collaborative care of elderly through a reward system based on distributed ledger technologies. The design and implementation of such a reward system that connect elderly and volunteers by mutual agreements involve technologies such as smart contracts and blockchains. The work is motivated by the demographic change, where an aging population consequently increases the need for care. This causes a great tension in our society, as care resources become increasingly constrained, both regarding costs and availability of care staff. Much of the daily care of the elderly is today done by family members (spouses, children) and friends, often on a voluntarily basis, which adds to the tension. The core idea of this work is to help broaden the involvement of people in caring for our elderly, enabled by a system for collaborative care. The proposed system benefits from recent advances in distributed ledger technologies, which similarly to digital currencies, are build on the ability for mutual agreements between people who do not know each other. The system also benefits from recent gamification techniques to motivate people to collaborate on a larger scale through performing simple daily tasks. The proposed system benefits from inherent distributed ledger technologies advantages, such as a high level of decentralization, thus a high availability, and strong data consistency. These advantages make it interesting to develop the possible links between blockchains and the outside world to allow for a higher level of automation and distribution of services such as collaborative care. New models for distributed ledger technologies, such as Iota tangles or the Swirld platform, may however scale and perform better than blockchains. These should thus be considered for a full implementation and test of the system. In summary, this paper presents a novel framework and prototype implementation of a reward system supporting collaborative care of elderly, that is based on distributed ledger technologies.
Jinlai Xu, Balaji Palanisamy, Heiko Ludwig, Qingyang Wang
In the Internet of Things(IoT) era, the demands for low-latency computing for time-sensitive applications (e.g., location-based augmented reality games, real-time smart grid management, real-time navigation using wearables) has been growing rapidly. Edge Computing provides an additional layer of infrastructure to fill latency gaps between the IoT devices and the back-end computing infrastructure. In the edge computing model, small-scale micro-datacenters that represent ad-hoc and distributed collection of computing infrastructure pose new challenges in terms of management and effective resource sharing to achieve a globally efficient resource allocation. In this paper, we propose Zenith, a novel model for allocating computing resources in an edge computing platform that allows service providers to establish resource sharing contracts with edge infrastructure providers apriori. Based on the established contracts, service providers employ a latency-aware scheduling and resource provisioning algorithm that enables tasks to complete and meet their latency requirements. The proposed techniques are evaluated through extensive experiments that demonstrate the effectiveness, scalability and performance efficiency of the proposed model.
This paper presents the design and implementation of a reward system for collaborative care of elderly based on distributed ledger technologies. The work is motivated by the demographic change, where an aging population consequently increases the need for care. This causes a great tension in our society, as care resources become increasingly constrained, both regarding costs and availability of care staff. Much of the daily care of the elderly is today done by family members (spouses, children) and friends, often on a voluntarily basis, which adds to the tension. The core idea of this work is to help broaden the involvement of people in caring for our elderly, enabled by a system for collaborative care. The proposed system benefits from recent advances in distributed ledger technologies, which similarly to digital currencies, are build on the ability for mutual agreements between people who do not know each other. The system also benefits from recent gamification techniques to motivate people to collaborate on a larger scale through performing simple daily tasks. The system builds on rewards automatically given when these smart contracts are fulfilled, a gamification technique that is believed to maintain motivation of the volunteers. In this paper, we thus describe a reward system designed to connect elderly and volunteers by mutual agreements implemented as smart contracts.
We present an intelligence-based mobile solution addressing product life cycle and overall network management functions. Traditional network and service management systems rely on basic inventory information periodically collected from the network in order to establish the basic “Install Base” network view. Such collection systems, however, still require manual human manipulations given the required device's electronically embedded predefined parameters are often inaccurate or absent. Leveraging mobile agents and ubiquitous computing in networks, we developed the Mobile Smart Services (MoSS), a location-aware solution as well as a novel interactive interface to improve the collected parameters and Return Material Authorization (RMA) user experience. The fluid interaction, mobility, and efficiency of the system allow network service providers and customers to solve network management problems. The applications developed also enable ubiquitous inventory management, intelligent contract management and effective system diagnosis to improve productivity in complicated network systems.