IoT as a Service

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IoT as a Service T.Reuban Gnana Asir

Wilson Anandaraj

Principal Product Manager, Video Business Unit, Nokia, Chennai, India

Director, IMS Business Unit, Nokia, Chennai, India

Dr. Hansa Lysander Manohar

K.Naga Sivaranjani

Associate Professor, College of Engineering Guindy, Anna University, Chennai, India

Senior Engineer, Video Business Unit Nokia, Chennai, India

information, media and services, through wired and wireless broadband connections. The Internet of Things makes use of synergies that are generated by the convergence of Customer, Business and Industrial Internet Consumer, Business and Industrial Internet. The convergence creates the open, global network connecting people, data and things. This convergence leverages the cloud to connect the intelligent things that sense and transmit a broad array of data, helping creating services that would not be obvious without this level of connectivity and artificial intelligence. Including India, huge investments are ongoing across the globe into IoT research, implementation in various forms as smart projects [3]

Abstract— The Internet of Things (IoT) is transforming the everyday physical objects that surround us into an ecosystem of information that will enrich our lives. From refrigerators to parking spaces to houses, the IoT is bringing more and more things into the digital fold every day, which will likely make the IoT a multi-trillion dollar industry in the near future. While the IoT represents the convergence of advances in miniaturization, wireless connectivity, increased data storage capacity and batteries, the IoT wouldn’t be possible without sensors. Sensors detect and measure changes in position, temperature, light, etc. and they are necessary to turn billions of objects into data-generating “things” that can report on their status, and in some cases, interact with their environment. Because sensor endpoints fundamentally enable the IoT, sensor investments are an early indicator of the IoT’s progress. One day we will see “IoT as a Service” technology offered and used the same way we use other “as a service” technologies.

The use of platforms is being driven by transformative technologies such as cloud, things and mobile. The Internet of Things and Services makes it possible to create networks incorporating the entire manufacturing process that converts factories into a smart environment. The cloud enables a global infrastructure to create new services, allowing anyone to create content and applications for global users. Network of things connect things globally and maintain their identity online. Mobile allows the connection to this global infrastructure anytime, anywhere. The result is a globally accessible network of things, users, and consumers who are available to create businesses, contribute content, generate and purchase new services [4]

Keywords— IoT, Cloud Systems, IaaS

I. INTRODUCTION The Internet of Things is emerging as the third wave in the development of internet. In 1990s, fixed internet wave connected 1 billion computers while 2000s mobile wave connected another 2 billion users, Now the IoT has the potential to connect ten times, as many as 28 billion ‘things’ to the internet by year 2020 [1], ranging from wearables, cars, home equipments, Industrial equipments, etc.

II. IOT ON THE CLOUD Cloud computing technologies have been intensively exploited in development and management of the largescale IoT systems, because theoretically, cloud offers unlimited storage, compute and network capabilities to integrate diverse types of IoT devices and provide an elastic runtime infrastructure for IoT systems. Self-service, utility oriented model of cloud computing can potentially offer fine grained IoT resources in a pay-as-you-go manner, reducing upfront costs and possibly creating cross-domain application opportunities and enabling new business and usage models of the IoT cloud systems. However, most of the contemporary approaches dealing with IoT cloud systems largely focus on data and device integration by utilizing cloud computing techniques to virtualize physical sensors

According to industry analyst firm IDC, the installed base for the Internet of Things will grow to approximately 212 billion devices by 2020, a number that includes 30 billion connected devices. IDC sees the growth driven largely by intelligent systems that will be installed and collecting data across both consumer and enterprise applications [2] These type of applications can involve the electric vehicle and the smart house, in which appliances and services that provide notifications, security, energy saving, automation, telecommunications, computers and entertainment will be integrated into a single eco system with a shared user interface. IoT is providing access to

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and actuators. Although, there are approaches providing support for provisioning and management of the virtual IoT infrastructure the convergence of IoT and cloud computing is still at an early stage.

Figure 1 gives high-level graphical overview of the main building blocks and enabling techniques, needed to support the main principles of Software Defined IoT Systems.

System designers and operations managers face numerous challenges to realize large-scale IoT cloud systems in practice, mainly because these systems impose diverse requirements in terms of granularity and flexibility of IoT resources consumption, custom provisioning of IoT capabilities such as communication protocols, elasticity concerns, and runtime governance. For example, modern large-scale IoT cloud systems heavily rely on the cloud and virtualized IoT resources and capabilities (e.g., to support complex, computationally expensive analytics), thus these resources need to be accessed, configured and operated in a unified manner, with a central point of management.

Software-defined IoT systems comprise a set of resource components, hosted in the cloud, which can be provisioned and controlled at runtime. The IoT resources (e.g., sensory data streams), their runtime environments (e.g., gateways) and capabilities (e.g., communication protocols, analytics and data point controllers) are described as software-defined IoT units. Software-defined IoT units are software-defined entities that are hosted in an IoT cloud platform and abstract accessing and operating underlying IoT resources and lower level functionality. Generally, software-defined IoT units are used to encapsulate the IoT resources and lower level functionality in the IoT cloud and abstract their provisioning and governance, at runtime. To this end, the software-defined IoT units expose well-defined API and they can be composed at different levels, creating virtual runtime topologies on which we can deploy and execute IoT cloud systems. Therefore, main principles of software-defined IoT systems include: • API Encapsulation – IoT resources and IoT capabilities are encapsulated in well-defined APIs, to provide a unified view on accessing functionality and configurations of IoT cloud systems. • Fine-grained consumption – The IoT resources and capabilities need to be accessible at different granularity levels to support agile utilization and self-service consumption. • Policy-based specification and configuration – The units are specified declaratively and their functionality is defined programmatically in software, using the welldefined API and available, familiar software libraries. • Automated provisioning – Main provisioning processes need to be automated in order to enable dynamic, ondemand configuring and operating software-defined IoT systems, on a large-scale (e.g, hundreds gateways). • Cost awareness – We need to be able to assign and control costs of delivered IoT resources and capabilities in order to enable their utility-oriented consumption. • Elasticity support – They should support elasticity governance, by exposing runtime control of elastic capabilities through well-defined API.. • Multi-layer management support – The multi layer management layers include: the application layer, the control layer and the resource layer [6]. The functions include support fault handling, configuration, accounting, performance and security management as described in ITUT M.3400

Further, the IoT systems are envisioned to run continuously, but they can be elastically scaled in/down in off-peek times, e.g., when a demand for certain data sources reduces. Due to the multiplicity of the involved stakeholders with diverse requirements and business models, the modern IoT cloud systems increasingly need to support different and customizable usage experiences. Therefore, to utilize the benefits of cloud computing, IoT cloud systems need to support virtualization of IoT resources and IoT capabilities (e.g., gateways, sensors, data streams and communication protocols) [5]. III. IOT CLOUD PLATFORM In addition to the DataCenters, the IoT platform comprises various other IoT Infrastructure, that includes Sensors, Actuators, Communication Brokers, Gateways. Most of these IoT Infrastructure are getting more software defined and software controlled ones, which fuels the IAAS Services.

These principles are enabled by the software defined IoT units and support for centrally managed configuration.

Figure.1. Software Defined IoT Cloud Systems

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WSN’s transmission protocols. Therefore, with the development of the Internet of Things, a new type of network equipment called the Internet of Things Gateway is invented, whose goal is to settle with the heterogeneity between various sensor networks and mobile communication networks or Internet, strengthen the management of the WSN and terminal nodes, and bridge traditional communication networks with sensor networks to make network communication easier and manage the devices of sensor networks.[7]

IV. IAAS PROTOTYPE Various aspects needs to be considered for IaaS deployment, which includes -

Number of input devices (sensors and gateways)

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Number of Output devices

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Amount of data consumption

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Frequency of data consumption

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Processing speed of middleware, backend servers

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Middleware: Global Sensor Network (GSN) is a middleware that enables users to more easily integrate with various different types of sensors. Primarily, GSN handles the thread management and data storage aspects of dealing with sensors. The users must create an XML file and a wrapper for each different sensor that they want to connect to the network [8]. The XML file tells GSN about the basics of the sensor: what kind of data (numerics, spatial) it will be giving to the system, any parameters (such as how often to ping the sensor to get data), and which wrapper or virtual sensor to use with the physical sensor. The wrapper tells GSN how to connect (e.g. which network protocol to use) to the sensor when it is first initialized, what to do in order to get data from the sensor, and what to do with the data when it is received from the sensor. These two things must be created for every new sensor that one wishes to connect to GSN. Currently, there is no easy way for users to create new XML files or wrappers, besides taking the existing ones and modifying them or writing them from scratch. Furthermore, while GSN stores the data from the sensors in an SQL database, it doesn’t do anything to the data other than display it on a local web application, and the only data displayed is the raw sensor data - with no interpretation

In this paper, we will see the prototype of the IaaS, with an example, leaving the calculations for deployment in later stage, as future work. Hence the prototype will deal with 4 main components namely, sensors, output device, middleware and back end servers, as shown in Figure 2. From customer premises perspective, we see Sensors & Gateways as input components and say, end user smart phones as output devices.

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Backend Servers : The backend servers are a combination of storage server, data interpreters, UI interfaces and few 3rd party applications enhancing the communication flow. Firebase is a cloud storage service that can be leveraged in order to enable the middleware to be decoupled and interface with 3rd party applications [9]. Since Firebase stores data in a JSON format, many applications can already interpret that format, but Firebase also allows developers to create listeners for specific sections of the JSON document that will fire when data is changed, added, removed or moved. This means that creating a mobile or web application that will interface is incredibly simple. Furthermore, since Firebase enables users to add authentication to their own personal Firebase, users can rest assured that their data is protected from malicious attackers.

Figure.2 IaaS Prototype -

Sensors and Gateways: Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) can realize the short distance communication among the objects by constructing wireless networks in ad-hoc manners. However, it’s difficult to connect the WSN and mobile communication networks or the Internet with each other because it lacks of uniform standardization in communication protocols and sensing technologies and the data from WSN cannot be transmitted in long distance with the limitation of

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The Data Interpreter pulls all of the sensor data down from Firebase, and then using the devices that were listed as being monitored by each sensor in the XML file, determines which sensors need to conclude that each device is on or off before the interpreter can actually determine that the device is on or off. It creates Firebase entries for each one of the devices that are listed as being monitored and uploads their initial state. Following that, no changes will be made unless the state of the device changes - whether the change is the device going from on to off, off to on, or simply changing location.

VI. CONCLUSION The building blocks of IaaS are stretchable, expandable and can be located anywhere based on the scope, volume and geographical situations. Thus we see, IoT can be served as a Service and can be operated as OPEX, rather than a capital investment, Based on the expansion requirements, the building blocks can aswell get expanded proportionally, leading to successful deployment of IaaS. It is also a good model, for service providers to enter into the IoT commercial market. Abbreviations and Acronyms GSN – Global Sensor Network IaaS – IoT as a Service IoT

– Internet of Things

JSON – Java Script Object Notation OPEX - Operational Expenditure XML – Extensible Markup Language WSN – Wireless Sensor Network. ACKNOWLEDGMENT We would like to thank Nokia, College of Engineering Guindy, for giving us such an opportunity to carry out this research work and also for providing us the requisite resources and infrastructure for carrying out the research. Figure.3 User-friendly output using web interface -

Output interface

REFERENCES

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[1]

This includes the web interfaces that display the data provided about the devices in a format that is easy for users to interpret in a short period of time. Furthermore, 3rd party applications like Jess Applications posts data to social forums like twitter will feed the output to end user. Hence the backend server upon coupling with such Apps, will act as output interface.

[2] [3]

[4] [5]

[6]

V. FUTUREWORK

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With additional efforts, the prototype needs to get converted into product, get demonstrated to meet the expectations of IoT. Each of these building blocks, also have quite some challenges and limitations, by its own unique strengths and restrictions, which needs to get tackled appropriately, based on testing and optimization. IaaS, upon leveraging the NFV and SDN technologies opens mammoth opportunities towards performance improvements.

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“The Internet of Things: Making sense of the next mega-trend” Goldman Sachs Global Investment Research, IoT Primer, Sept 2, 2014 IDC, Worldwide Internet of Things (IoT) 2013-2020 Forecast: Billions of Things, Trillions of Dollars, Doc # 243661, October 2013. T.Reuban Gnana Asir, Wilson Anandaraj, K.Naga Sivaranjani, “Internet of things and India’s Readiness”, International Conference on Computing Paradigms (ICCP2015) 24, 25 July, 2015, 274-279 Ovidiu Vermesan, Peter Friess, “Internet of Things – From Research and Innovation to Market Deployment. Stefan Nastic, Sanjin Sehic, D, et al, “Provisioning Software-defined IoT Cloud Systems”, International Conference on Future Internet of Things and Cloud, (2014) 288-295. “Y.3300 : Framework for Software Defined Networking”, https://www.itu.int/rec/T-REC-Y.3300/en Qian Zhu, Ruicong Wang, et al, “IOT Gateway: Bridging Wireless Sensor Networks into Internet of Things”, IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Embedded and Ubiquitous Computing, (2010) 347352 GSN Team, Global Sensors Networks, 2009. “Firebase documents,” https://www.firebase.com/docs/