by Emmanuel Baccelli and Dave Raggett

Improvements in electronics are enabling widespread deployment of connected sensors and actuators (the Internet of Things) with predictions of tens of billions of smart objects by 2020 (Cisco 2011). This raises huge challenges for security, privacy and data handling, along with great opportunities across many application domains, e.g., home and building automation, retail, healthcare, electrical grids, transport, logistics, manufacturing, and environmental monitoring (IERC 2014).

by Thomas Watteyne, Xavier Vilajosana, and Pere Tuset

The OpenWSN project is an open-source implementation of a fully standards-based protocol stack for capillary networks, rooted in the new IEEE802.15.4e Time Synchronized Channel Hopping standard. IEEE802.15.4e, coupled with Internet of Things standards, such as 6LoWPAN, 6TiSCH, RPL and CoAP, enables ultra-low-power and highly reliable mesh networks, which are fully integrated into the Internet. OpenMote is an open-hardware platform designed to facilitate the prototyping and technology adoption of IEEE802.15.4e TSCH networks, and is fully supported by OpenWSN.

by Emmanuel Baccelli, Oliver Hahm, Hauke Petersen and Kaspar Schleiser

The Internet of Things (IoT) is expected to be the next ‘big thing’. To date, however, there is no de facto standard software platform to program memory and energy-constrained IoT devices [1]. We expect an evolution of IoT software platforms that can be roughly compared to the recent evolution of software platforms powering smartphones.

by Eric Fleury, Nathalie Mitton, Thomas Noël and Cedric Adjih

The universal proliferation of intelligent objects is making Internet of Things (IoT) a reality; to operate on a large scale it will critically rely on new, seamless, forms of communications. But how can innovations be validated in a controlled environment, before being massively deployed into the real world? FIT IoT-LAB addresses this challenge by offering a unique open first class service to all IoT developers, researchers, integrators and developers: a large-scale experimental testbed allowing design, development, deployment and testing of innovative IoT applications, in order to test the future and make it safe.

by Tuan Dang, Pascale Minet and Erwan Livolant

OCARI is a wireless sensor network designed to operate in industrial environments [1]. It is easy to deploy (i.e. ‘plug-and-play’), and is energy-efficient to support battery-operated nodes. OCARI nodes use commercial off-the shelf components. OCARI provides bounded medium access delays and the energy consumption of an OCARI network is predictable. In addition, the network is scalable (up to hundreds of sensor nodes) and able to support micro-mobility of nodes.

by Ludwig Seitz

The Internet of Things (IoT) has particular security and privacy problems. The Internet Engineering Task Force is designing authentication and authorization mechanisms for the most constrained devices which are part of the Internet of Things.

by Corinna Schmitt and Burkhard Stiller

There exists a multitude of implemented, as well as envisioned, use cases for the Internet of Things (IoT) and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). Some of these use cases would benefit from the collected data being globally accessible to: (a) authorized users only; and (b) data processing units through the Internet. Much of the data collected, such as location or personal identifiers, are of a highly sensitive nature. Even seemingly innocuous data (e.g., energy consumption) can lead to potential infringements of user privacy.

by Frank Alexander Kraemer and Peter Herrmann

Reactive Blocks is a toolkit to create, analyse and implement reactive applications. It helps developers to get concurrency issues right, reuse existing solutions, and brings model checking to the common programmer.

by Steven Pemberton

XForms is a language for describing interfaces to data, designed at W3C by researchers from industry and academia. It is a declarative language, meaning it describes what has to be done, but largely not how. The interface it describes does not have to run locally on the machine producing the data, but can be run remotely over the network. Since Internet of Things (IoT) computers typically have little memory and are low-powered, this makes XForms ideally suited for the task.

Home Automation Devices Belong to the IoT World

by Vittorio Miori and Dario Russo

We present a practical and scalable solution that aims to achieve the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm in complex contexts, such as the home automation market, in which problems are caused by the presence of proprietary and closed systems with no compatibility with Internet protocols.

by Benjamin Billet and Valérie Issarny

The Dioptase middleware provides developers with new methods for writing distributed applications for the Internet of Things (IoT). Dioptase leverages data streams as data model and continuous in-network processing as computation model, in order to deal with the challenging volume of data being continuously produced by the ‘Things’.

by Raphael Hiesgen, Dominik Charousset, Thomas C. Schmidt and Matthias Wählisch

The Internet of Things (IoT) enables a large number of devices to cooperate to achieve a common task. Each individual device is small and executes a confined software core. Collective intelligence is gained from distributed collaboration and Internet communication. Corresponding IoT solutions form large distributed software systems that pose professional requirements: scalability, reliability, security, portability and maintainability. The C++ Actor Framework CAF [1] contributes such a professional open source software layer for the IoT. Based on the actor model of Hewitt et al. [2], it aids programmers at a good level of abstraction without sacrificing performance.

by Josè Danado and Fabio Paternò

‘Puzzle’, a mobile end user development framework, allows the end user to opportunistically create, modify and execute applications for interacting with smart things, phone functions and web services. The framework simplifies development of such applications through an intuitive jigsaw metaphor that allows easy composition on touch-based devices. Users immediately identified the utility of this feature, and found it easy to envisage using the framework in various scenarios in their daily lives.

by Daniel Gaston, Christophe Joubert and Miguel Montesinos

Modern buildings are equipped with a variety of building automation technologies and sensors which are controlled, monitored and managed through heterogeneous information systems. To date, these systems show limited interoperability and tend to operate in isolation. The future will require a more comprehensive and efficient operation of buildings facilitated by way of integrated and smart cooperative management and automation systems. Web-based open-source technologies can create 3D virtual representations of the real-time geolocated activities within a building. Such a system can simplify both the maintenance and operation by facility managers and application services to building occupants.

by Dave Raggett

Advances in electronics and communication technologies are stimulating the growth of low cost connected sensors and actuators. There are many potential application areas, for instance: home automation, security, healthcare, smart grids, integrated transport systems, and next generation manufacturing. To date, research in the area of the Internet of Things (IoT) has largely focused on the sensors, actuators and the communication technologies needed for long battery life and efficient use of spectrum etc. rather than on what’s needed to encourage applications and services. Current IoT products exist in isolated silos. To fully realise the benefits, we will need scalable solutions for managing the vast of amounts of data, and open standards that enable open markets of connected services.

by Michele Girolami, Francesco Furfari and Stefano Chessa

Smart Environments, and in particular Smart Homes, have recently attracted the attention of many researchers and industrial vendors. The proliferation of low-power sensing devices requires integration gateways hiding the complexity of heterogeneous technologies. We propose a ZigBee integration gateway to access and integrate low-power ZigBee devices.

by Elias Z. Tragos, Vangelis Angelakis and Stefanos Papadakis

The Internet of Things (IoT) aims to interconnect large numbers of heterogeneous devices to provide advanced applications that can improve our quality of life. The efficient interconnectivity of IoT devices can be achieved with a hybrid Cloud Radio Access Network (Cloud-RAN) and Software Defined Radio (SDR) framework that can overcome the heterogeneity of devices by seamlessly adapting to their communication technology.

by Geoff Coulson, Andreas Mauthe and Markus Tauber

The world’s computing infrastructure is becoming increasingly differentiated into autonomous sub-systems (e.g., IoT installations, clouds, VANETs), and these are often composed to generate value-added functionality (systems of systems). But today, system composition is carried out in an ad-hoc, system-specific, manner, with many associated disadvantages. We need a generalized system-of-systems-oriented programming model that allows systems to be composed by application-domain ex-perts, not just systems programmers. Furthermore, composition should occur in a principled way that generates well-understood compositional semantics and behaviour.

by Carlo Vallati, Enzo Mingozzi and Giacomo Tanganelli

Recently proposed IoT platforms are typically based on centralized and cloud-centric infrastructures. The BETaaS project aims at designing a platform for the execution of M2M applications in a distributed runtime environment running close to the physical environment where sensors and actuators are deployed. The main goal is to move the intelligence to the edge in order to allow localized, content-centric, and timely processing of smart objects data. The platform facilitates the integration of existing IoT systems, while providing software developers with a high-level, content-centric abstraction to access smart objects’ resources.

y Heikki Ailisto, Nadine Pesonen, Pertti Raatikainen and Jonathan Ouoba

Internet of things (IoT) and the related Industrial Internet are recognized as one of the most significant technology-driven disruptions of the coming ten years. VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland has chosen IoT as a strategic area for research, development and innovation projects.

by Thomas Lidy, Alexander Schindler and Michela Magas

A new Horizon 2020 Innovation Action project fosters the uptake of music technology research and acts as an accelerator for bringing creative music tech ideas to market, while providing a mesh of technological ‘bricks’ to create an ‘Internet of Music Things’.

by Patrick Poullie, Thomas Bocek and Burkhard Stiller

NFC tags and transceivers are ubiquitous and well supported. Like many academic research groups, the Communication Systems Group CSG of the University of Zürich owns many physical devices, which are required for research and teaching. Traditionally, a printed, human-readable inventory and attached labels have been used to keep track of these devices. A new inventory approach was developed with the aim of simplifying the data acquisition using an NFC tag-based system supported by an Android application. This approach was implemented, tested, and used productively. However, due to technical difficulties - namely, a poor response of NFC tags on metallic material - the NFC-based inventory system did not simplify data acquisition and consequently, the NFC-based inventory system was changed back to the label-based system.

TrakChain Estimates Costs for Track and Trace in the Internet of (many) Things

by Miguel L. Pardal and José Alves Marques

The TrakChain assessment tools take a description of a physical supply chain – relevant locations, how many goods are received, how often, etc. – and estimate the performance of track and trace queries in a modelled traceability system, providing predictions of how much processing and storage will be required for the working system. The tools were developed at Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal and were evaluated using a Pharmaceuticals supply chain case study.