An Evaluation Process for IoT Platforms in Time-Sensitive Domains.

Determining the temporal behavior of an IoT platform is of utmost importance as IoT systems are time-sensitive. IoT platforms play a central role in the operation of an IoT system, impacting the overall performance. As a result, initiating an IoT project without the exhaustive knowledge of such a core software piece may lead to a failed project if the finished systems do not meet the needed temporal response and scalability levels. Despite this fact, existing works on IoT software systems focus on the design and implementation of a particular system, providing a final evaluation as the validation. This is a risky approach as an incorrect decision on the core IoT platform may involve great monetary loss if the final evaluation proves that the system does not meet the expected validation criteria. To overcome this, we provide an evaluation process to determine the temporal behavior of IoT platforms to support early design decisions with respect to the appropriateness of the particular platform in its application as an IoT project. The process defines the steps towards the early evaluation of IoT platforms, ranging from the identification of the potential software items and the determination of the validation criteria to running the experiments and obtaining results. The process is exemplified on an exhaustive evaluation of a particular mainstream IoT platform for the case of a medical system for patient monitoring. In this time-sensitive scenario, results report the temporal behavior of the platform regarding the validation parameters expressed at the initial steps.

Flexible IoT Agriculture Systems for Irrigation Control Based on Software Services.

IoT technology applied to agriculture has produced a number of contributions in the recent years. Such solutions are, most of the time, fully tailored to a particular functional target and focus extensively on sensor-hardware development and customization. As a result, software-centered solutions for IoT system development are infrequent. This is not suitable, as the software is the bottleneck in modern computer systems, being the main source of performance loss, errors, and even cyber attacks. This paper takes a software-centric perspective to model and design IoT systems in a flexible manner. We contribute a software framework that supports the design of the IoT systems' software based on software services in a client-server model with REST interactions; and it is exemplified on the domain of efficient irrigation in agriculture. We decompose the services' design into the set of constituent functions and operations both at client and server sides. As a result, we provide a simple and novel view on the design of IoT systems in agriculture from a sofware perspective: we contribute simple design structure based on the identification of the front-end software services, their internal software functions and operations, and their interconnections as software services. We have implemented the software framework on an IoT irrigation use case that monitors the conditions of the field and processes the sampled data, detecting alarms when needed. We demonstrate that the temporal overhead of our solution is bounded and suitable for the target domain, reaching a response time of roughly 11 s for bursts of 3000 requests.

Improving Security of Web Servers in Critical IoT Systems through Self-Monitoring of Vulnerabilities.

IoT (Internet of Things) systems are complex ones that may comprise large numbers of sensing and actuating devices; and servers that store data and further configure the operation of such devices. Usually, these systems involve real-time operation as they are closely bound to particular physical processes. This real-time operation is often threatened by the security solutions that are put in place to alleviate the ever growing attack surface in IoT. This paper focuses on critical IoT domains where less attention has been paid to the web security aspects. The main reason is that, up to quite recently, web technologies have been considered unreliable and had to be avoided by design in critical systems. In this work, we focus on the server side and on how attacks propagate from server to client as vulnerabilities and from client to unprotected servers; we describe the concerns and vulnerabilities introduced by the intensive usage of web interfaces in IoT from the server templating engines perspective. In this context, we propose an approach to perform self monitoring on the server side, propagating the self monitoring to the IoT system devices; the aim is to provide rapid detection of security vulnerabilities with a low overhead that is transparent to the server normal operation. This approach improves the control over the vulnerability detection. We show a set of experiments that validate the feasibility of our approach.

On Line Service Composition in the Integrated Clinical Environment for eHealth and Medical Systems.

Medical and eHealth systems are progressively realized in the context of standardized architectures that support safety and ease the integration of the heterogeneous (and often proprietary) medical devices and sensors. The Integrated Clinical Environment (ICE) architecture appeared recently with the goal of becoming a common framework for defining the structure of the medical applications as concerns the safe integration of medical devices and sensors. ICE is simply a high level architecture that defines the functional blocks that should be part of a medical system to support interoperability. As a result, the underlying communication backbone is broadly undefined as concerns the enabling software technology (including the middleware) and associated algorithms that meet the ICE requirements of the flexible integration of medical devices and services. Supporting the on line composition of services in a medical system is also not part of ICE; however, supporting this behavior would enable flexible orchestration of functions (e.g., addition and/or removal of services and medical equipment) on the fly. iLandis one of the few software technologies that supports on line service composition and reconfiguration, ensuring time-bounded transitions across different service orchestrations; it supports the design, deployment and on line reconfiguration of applications, which this paper applies to service-based eHealth domains. This paper designs the integration between ICE architecture and iLand middleware to enhance the capabilities of ICE with on line service composition and the time-bounded reconfiguration of medical systems based on distributed services. A prototype implementation of a service-based eHealth system for the remote monitoring of patients is described; it validates the enhanced capacity of ICE to support dynamic reconfiguration of the application services. Results show that the temporal cost of the on line reconfiguration of the eHealth application is bounded, achieving a low overhead resulting from the addition of ICE compliance.