4G is a promising solution for the future mobile Internet through integrating heterogeneous radio access technologies (RATs) based on the Internet Protocol (IP) where multi-standard wireless devices allow mobile users to experience ubiquitous connectivity by roaming across different networks and connecting through the RAT that best suits their traffic requirements. However, holding multiple active interfaces incurs significant power consumption to the wireless devices. This necessitates investigating disruptive techniques for decreasing the power consumption of the 4G wireless devices. In this paper, we demonstrate how cognitive radio and cooperative communication can be integrated in 4G networks to conduct wireless devices to either perform vertical handover or execute relaying by exploiting their available short range interfaces (e.g., WiMedia, Bluetooth, etc) to reduce their power consumption while still enabling the required QoS. Simulation and experimental results validate that 4G wireless devices can double their battery lifetime by adopting the proposed strategies.
CONCORD is the Facilitation and Support action for the EU-funded Future Internet Public-Private Partnerships (FI PPP) programme. CONCORD coordinates FI PPP cross-project activities. It facilitates knowledge transfer and co-creation across projects as well as with related external groups. It focuses on future-oriented strategic planning for FI PPP and on bringing a valuable contribution via unbiased outsider attention to FI PPP structures and processes.
iCore is an EU FP7 Integrated Project aimed at leveraging on the use of cognitive technologies for empowering the Internet of Things to deliver on the current expectations which see it as one of the main pillars of the Future Internet. The project brings together a strong set of industrial Partners, mostly from Europe but spanning also China and Japan which collaborate with research centers and universities to deliver solutions that address heterogeneity and reusability of IoT objects while striving for self-management capabilities that keep low complexity as the numbers of interconnected objects increase exponentially.
The Smart City concept relates to improving efficiency of city services and facilitating a more sustainable development of cities. However, it is important to highlight that, in order to effectively progress towards such smart urban environments, the people living in these cities must be tightly engaged in this endeavour. This paper presents two novel services that have been implemented in order to bring the Smart City closer to the citizen. The Participatory Sensing service we are proposing exploits the advanced features of smartphones to make the user part of the ubiquitous sensing infrastructure over which the Smart City concept is built. The Augmented Reality service is connected to the smart city platform in order to create an advanced visualization tool where the plethora of available information is presented to citizens embedded in their natural surroundings. A brief description of the smart city platform on top of which these services are built is also presented.
Complying with security and privacy requirements of appliances such as mobile handsets, personal computers, servers for customers, enterprises and governments is mandatory to prevent from theft of sensitive data and to preserve their integrity. Nowadays, with the rising of the Cloud Computing approach in business fields, security and privacy are even more critical. The aim of this article is then to propose a way to build a secure and trustable Cloud. The idea is to spread and embed Secure Elements (SE) on each level of the Cloud in order to make a wide trusted infrastructure which complies with access control and isolation policies. This article presents therefore this new approach of trusted Cloud infrastructure based on a Network of Secure Elements (NoSE), and it illustrates this approach through different use cases.
In this paper we discuss the Global Virtualization Architecture (GVA) that enables communications between network entities according to the way they refer to each other rather than understanding the constraints of particular networks. Our approach is to instantiate a virtual network that is based on identities of network entities and their demands on security and network capabilities. An entity may be physical e.g. a human user, a device, or any thing, or abstract, such as a computer program, service, group, or role. Each entity is identified by a set of attributes so that connections can be 1 to 1, 1 to many, or many to many. We call this a Virtual Group Network (VGN). VGNs are independent of location and device, and their properties may change with time as entities move.
Maintaining a viable balance between development costs and market coverage has turned out to be a challenging issue when developing mobile software applications. The diversity of devices running third-party developed software applications is rapidly expanding from PC, to mobile, home entertainment systems, and even the automotive industry. With the help of Web technology and the Internet infrastructure, ubiquitous applications have become a reality. Nevertheless, the variety of presentation and interaction modalities still limit the number of targetable devices. In this chapter we present webinos, a multi-device application platform founded on the Future Internet infrastructure. Hereto we describe webinos’ model-based user interface framework as a means to support context-aware adaptiveness for applications that are executed in such ubiquitous computing environments.
With the evolution of the Internet, a huge number of real-time applications, like Voice over IP, has started to use IP as primary transmission medium. These services require high availability, which is not amongst the main features of today’s heterogeneous Internet where failures occur frequently. Unfortunately, the primary fast resilience scheme implemented in IP routers, Loop-Free Alternates (LFA), usually does not provide full protection against failures. Consequently, there has been a growing interest in LFA-based network optimization methods, aimed at tuning some aspect of the underlying IP topology to maximize the ratio of failure cases covered by LFA. The main goal of this chapter is to give a comprehensive overview of LFA and survey the related LFA network optimization methods, pointing out that these optimization tools can turn LFA into an easy-to-deploy yet highly effective IP fast resilience scheme.
IoT6 aims at exploiting the potential of IPv6 and related standards to overcome current shortcomings and fragmentation of the Internet of Things. The main objectives of the project are to research, design and develop a highly scalable IPv6-based Service-Oriented Architecture to achieve interoperability, mobility, cloud computing integration and intelligence distribution among heterogeneous smart things components, applications and services.
The paper addresses an analysis of OSGi in the context of building modular middlewares for the Internet of Things. The Internet of Things (IoT) is an emerging approach to development of intelligent infrastructures combining various devices through the network. OSGi is a framework providing a number of specific mechanisms intended for building modular, fine-grained and loosely-coupled Java applications. Although a number of works have been devoted to OSGi, and several OSGi-based middlewares have been designed for the IoT, they do not thoroughly utilize mechanisms of OSGi. In this paper rich OSGi functions are analysed in terms of development middlewares for the IoT. An example implementation of the system illustrates the presented considerations.
The VISCERAL project is building a cloud-based evaluation framework for evaluating machine learning and information retrieval algorithms on large amounts of data. Instead of downloading data and running evaluations locally, the data will be centrally available on the cloud and algorithms to be evaluated will be programmed in computing instances on the cloud, effectively bringing the algorithms to the data. This approach allows evaluations to be performed on Terabytes of data without needing to consider the logistics of moving the data or storing the data on local infrastructure. After discussing the challenges of benchmarking on big data, the design of the VISCERAL system is presented, concentrating on the components for coordinating the participants in the benchmark and managing the ground truth creation. The first two benchmarks run on the VISCERAL framework will be on segmentation and retrieval of 3D medical images.
Reducing the network energy waste is one of the key challenges of the Future Internet. Many Internet-based applications require preserving network connectivity for getting incoming remote service requests or confirming their availability and presence to remote peers by sending periodic keep-alive or heart-beating messages. Billions of dollars of electricity is wasted every year to keep idle or unused network hosts fully powered-up only to maintain the network connectivity. This paper describes a new approach to design and implement the cooperative Network Connectivity Proxy (NCP) for reducing energy waste in the ever-growing future Internet. The NCP is implemented using Universal Plug and Play (UPnP), that uses a set of protocols to allow seamless discovery and interaction between the network hosts and the NCP. The NCP allows all registered network hosts to transition into the low power sleep modes and maintains the network connectivity on their behalf. It handles basic network presence and management protocols like ICMP, DHCP, ARP etc on behalf of the sleeping network hosts and wakes them up only when their resources are required. Depending on the network hosts time usage model, the NCP can provide about 60 to 70
IoT6 is a research project on the future Internet of Things. It aims at exploiting the potential of IPv6 and related standards to overcome current shortcomings and fragmentation of the Internet of Things. The main challenges and objectives of IoT6 are to research, design and develop a highly scalable IPv6-based Service-Oriented Architecture to achieve interoperability, mobility, cloud computing integration and intelligence distribution among heterogeneous smart things components, applications and services. The present article starts by a short introduction on IPv6 capabilities for the Internet of Things and information on the current deployment of IPv6 in the world. It continues with a presentation of the IoT6 architecture model and its concept of service discovery. Finally, it illustrates the potential of such IPv6-based architecture by presenting the integration of building automation components using legacy protocols.
The integration of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) in the Future Internet has opened new opportunities for novel applications that meet the needs of modern societies. Virtualisation of the available resources and the services offered by WSNs enables their efficient sharing between diverse applications reducing costs. Responding to this challenge, the VITRO project has designed a WSN virtualization architecture that targets to decouple the physical sensor infrastructure from the applications running on top of it. In the concept of Virtual Sensor Network platform, the WSNs are capable of collaborating among each other (even if they belong to different administrator domains or comprise of heterogeneous platforms) to flexibly support service composition and fuel novel application development. To meet the diverse Quality of Service (QoS) requirements imposed by the different applications running on top of the same infrastructure, VITRO has designed, implemented and integrated a routing solution that enables the establishment of different routing paths per application, based on different routing criteria in order to optimize the performance aspect(s) of interest to each application. In this paper, we demonstrate how the VITRO routing solution could be employed in various use cases including smart homes/buildings, smart cities, smart business environments and security-related applications. We evaluate the achieved performance using computer simulation results and provide guidelines for prospective users.
To determine actual attitudes and practices of those in the Future Internet industry towards user involvement, delegates at the 2012 FIA participated in a focus group and a survey. Continuous user involvement is highly valued and expected to maximise the societal benefits of FI applications. However, just over half of the FI projects apply a user-centred approach, and a large number of survey respondents admitted to being not very knowledgeable about standard user-centred design tools or techniques.
Sustaining European experimental facilities for Future Internet re- search is a significant challenge for testbed providers, funding bodies, and cus- tomers who depend on their long-term availability. To date, sustainability plans for experimental facilities have been dominated by abstract notions of business value and unclear business models. We argue that this fails to recognise that cost accountability is the critical element necessary to drive efficiency, irrespec- tive of whether revenue is provided from public or commercial sources. Only through cost accountability can facilities make operational management deci- sions that are aligned with performance metrics and assess the financial viabil- ity of business plans. In this paper we demonstrate how cost modelling and usage accounting can be used to support operational and sustainability decisions for a federated cloud experimentation facility.
The FLAMINGO project will strongly integrate the research of leading European research groups in the area of network and service management, strengthen the European and worldwide research in this area, and bridge the gap between scientific research and industrial application.
The SmartSantander project has deployed during the past two years a unique in the world city-scale experimental research facility in support of typical applications and services for a smart city. This facility is sufficiently large, open and flexible to enable horizontal and vertical federation with other experimental facilities, and to stimulate the development of new applications by end-users. Besides, it provides support to the experimental advanced research on IoT technologies, and allows a realistic assessment on new services by means of users' acceptability tests. The facility already counts with more than 10,000 IoT devices (March 2013), and by the end of 2013 it will comprise of more than 12,000. The core of the facility is being installed in the city of Santander (Spain), the capital of the region of Cantabria situated on the north coast of Spain, and its surroundings. Besides Santander, other deployments have been placed in Lübeck (Germany), Guilford (UK) and Belgrade (Serbia). SmartSantander will enable the Future Internet of Things to become a reality.
This work presents a Cognitive Management framework for empowering the Internet of Things (IoT). This framework has the ability to dynamically adapt its behaviour, through self-management functionality, taking into account information and knowledge (obtained through machine learning) on the situation (e.g., internal status and status of environment), as well as policies (designating objectives, constraints, rules, etc.). Cognitive technologies constitute a unique and efficient approach for addressing the technological heterogeneity of the IoT and obtaining situation awareness, reliability and efficiency. The paper also presents a first indicative implementation of the proposed framework, comprising real sensors and actuators. The preliminary results of this work demonstrate high potential towards self-reconfigurable IoT.
Cloud computing market is in rapid expansion due to the opportunities to dynamically allocate a large amount of resources when needed and to pay only for their effective usage. However, many challenges, in terms of interoperability, performance guarantee, and dependability, should still be addressed to make cloud computing the right solution for companies. In this chapter we first discuss these challenges and then we present three components developed in the framework of the Contrail project: Contrail federation; SLA manager; and Virtual Execution Platform (VEP). These components provide solutions to guarantee interoperability in a cloud federation and to deploy distributed applications over a federation of heterogeneous cloud providers. The key to success of our solutions is the possibility to negotiate performance and security guarantees for an application and then map them on the physical resources.
