A middleware for collaboration between IoT platforms The Internet of Things (IoT) promises to dramatically change our everyday lives, yet it’s not always easy for developers to use available smart devices. Professor Ivana Podnar Zarko and Dr Sergios Soursos tell us about the symbIoTe project’s work in developing middleware that will both ease the development process and open up new commercial opportunities for IoT providers The development of the Internet of Things (IoT) promises to dramatically change the way we live and work, with closer interaction between systems and devices set to have a major impact on industry. Many companies have established Cloud and IoT platforms to ease the development of new applications, yet it is not always easy to share information between them. “Different protocols and standards need to be followed in order to make interaction possible. In the device layer, there are many network protocols and messaging protocols to send the data, which have to be supported by the gateways; then on the Cloud layer there are different platforms that can host data collection and decision-making processes,” says Dr Sergios Soursos. Based at Intracom Telecom in Greece, Dr Soursos is the coordinator of the symbIoTe project, an EC co-funded initiative which aims to help simplify the IoT application development process. “symbIoTe is looking to develop middleware that will allow IoT platforms to interoperate and collaborate, in order to share and exchange IoT resources to achieve common goals,” he explains. IoT platforms This work centres around developing software components that can enable interactions between these different platforms. The latest analysis shows that there are more than 300 IoT platforms on the market from various companies, yet it is not typically possible for them to interoperate.
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“Basically you have vendor lock-in of the platforms and devices. It’s not only the big players who are developing their own Cloud solutions either – there are also many IoT platforms which have been built, supported and provided by SMEs,” points out Professor Ivana Podnar Zarko, the project’s Technical Manager. This affects how people use IoT applications. “If you have one IoT solution at your home, you need to use the application which works for the devices within your home. Then when you go to work, to the office, you have another mobile IoT application which works there, and is specific for a particular
developers also need to identify the right resources. “If a mobile application developer wants to identify the right sensors, to integrate into the applications, then they need to find them first,” points out Professor Zarko. The project is developing a kind of search engine for sensors and actuators to work across these different platforms, which Professor Zarko says will help ease application development. “symbIoTe is going to provide services so that developers can easily find the right resources, and then integrate them into their applications,” she outlines. “But
We want to minimise the digital footprint of each platform, so as not to increase the costs of deployment. We want to make sure that newly deployed platforms can take advantage of the systems that already exist in the smart space purpose,” continues Professor Zarko. “We would like to have just one application that can talk to devices in various IoT environments. Through this approach, IoT platforms could offer application developers the opportunity to access, in the same way, their devices and their resources.” Researchers are developing components which act almost like a glue between the platforms, helping to support the development of innovative IoT applications. This is challenging work, as alongside the technical complexity of building a new application,
when you start integrating them, basically you are like an intermediary, as the application will get the data from the platform. The symbIoTe framework is not designed to store platform-specific data within its services, the aim is to be an intermediary, to help hook the applications to the right platforms.” This is designed to fit alongside the existing, hierarchical IoT stack, without necessarily disrupting the way platforms work. The goal is rather to make these platforms more cooperative in the way that they interact, which Dr Soursos says will lead to changes in applications.
EU Research
At a glance Full Project Title Symbiosis of smart objects across IoT environments (symbioTe) Project Objectives symbIoTe aims at establishing an interoperability middleware that will allow IoT platforms to open their resources for 3rd party applications and/or other IoT platforms to use. Based on this concept, symbIoTe will facilitate the federation of platforms, the roaming of smart devices and the creation of cross-domain IoT applications. Project Funding RIA - Research and Innovation action. H2020-ICT-2015 Project Partners https://www.symbiote-h2020.eu/index. php/consortium/
Figure 1. symbioTe concept “Imagine that you have a security system installed at your house, with motion sensors and so on. At the same time, you also have a platform that manages the energy consumption of your house, so you also have other types of sensors installed, then you may also have an entertainment system,” he outlines. There may be three different independent platforms relating to these systems, but they are typically colocated in the same space, and some of them may use the same types of sensors. “We want to minimise the digital footprint of each platform, so as not to increase the costs of deployment. We want to make sure that newly deployed platforms can take advantage of the systems that already exist in the smart space,” explains Dr Soursos. The end-user would not then require three different applications to interact with those systems. Ideally, they would need only one cross-domain app, managing security, entertainment, and energy for example. “Currently there are closed platforms that do not allow cooperation, which is what we are trying to address in symbIoTe,” says Dr Soursos. The project is taking a layered approach to this work, looking across the application, Cloud, smart space and device domains. “We have designed and we are implementing middleware between the application domain and the Cloud domain, which includes discovery, management and optimisation. This is a first level of interoperability across
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platforms,” continues Dr Soursos. “The next level is to make platforms federate, and the third level would be on the gateway, on the smart space domain, to take advantage of the co-location that I mentioned earlier. We aim to develop a demonstratable middleware and we already have some industrial partners in the project consortium, coming either from use-case perspective or from a more integration perspective.” There are a number of IoT platform providers in the consortium, reflecting the wider relevance of the project’s research, now partners are looking to explore the potential commercial benefits of the symbIoTe middleware. The project is keen to work with more companies, and Dr Soursos says a second open call will be launched in October 2017. “We invite SMEs, start-ups and companies to apply so as to make their IoT platforms symbIoTe compatible. This is another means of investigating potential commercial collaborations between both partners and external companies,” he outlines. Close collaboration between the academic and commercial sectors can also help ensure that new technologies are tailored to commercial needs, which is an important consideration in the project. “We are also looking to assess market needs, and the level of demand for the product that we are developing. Alongside looking at the implementation of the software, we’re also investigating the market potential, and trying to find the right business offerings,” says Professor Zarko.
Contact Details INTRACOM S.A. TELECOM SOLUTIONS 19.7 km Markopoulou Ave. Peania Athens, Greece, GR-19002 T: +30-210-66 71 043 E: souse@intracom-telecom.com W: https://www.symbiote-h2020.eu S. Soursos, I. Podnar Zarko, P. Zwickl, I. Gojmerac, G. Bianchi and G. Carrozzo, “Towards the Cross-Domain Interoperability of IoT Platforms,” in the Proceedings of the European Conference on Networks and Communications (EUCNC) 2016, 27-30 June, Athens, Greece. P. Reichl, I. Gojmerac, I. Podnar Zarko, S. Soursos, “Bridging IoT Islands: The symbIoTe Project”, e&i, vol. 133 no. 7, special issue on “Internet of Things - Quo Vadis”, Springer, November 2016.
Dr Ivana Podnar Zarko Dr Sergios Soursos
Dr Sergios Soursos is a Master R&D Engineer at Intracom Telecom, Greece, working on IoT interoperability and Network Management. His interests include management of overlay traffic, Cloud computing, informationcentric networking, smart grids and Big Data analytics. Dr Soursos holds a PhD on network economics from the Athens University of Economics and Business. Dr Ivana Podnar Zarko is an Associate Professor at the University of Zagreb, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, Croatia, where she leads the Internet of Things Laboratory. She is the Technical Manager of the H2020 project symbIoTe: Symbiosis of smart objects across IoT environments.
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