Architectural and application solutions for the cloud Internet of Things

The aim of my thesis is to present Lysis, a cloud platform for distributed applications of the Internet of Things. The main features that have been incorporated into its design are as follows: each object is an independent social agent; the PaaS (Platform as a Service) is fully exploited; re-usability at different layers is considered; the data is under the control of users. The first feature has been introduced by adopting the social IoT concept, according to which objects are capable of establishing social relationships in an autonomous way with respect to their owners. This provides the benefits of improving the network scalability and information discovery efficiency. The major components of PaaS services are used for an easy management and development of applications by both users and programmers. The reusability allows the programmers to generate templates of objects and services available to the whole Lysis community. The data generated by the devices is stored at the object owners cloud spaces. As SIoT implementation, in Lysis, the devices need to discover each other in order to create new relationships. To this, three solutions are proposed: the first one relies on the channel scanning; the second one assumes that channel scanning is not possible and makes use of the device localization features; the third one is similar to the second one, but the already existing objects social network is exploited. To show the effectiveness of Lysis platform, I exploited its feature in a Mobile CrowdSensing (MCS) scenario. MCS is defined as a pervasive sensing paradigm where mobile devices gather data with the aim of performing a specific application. I propose a new algorithm to address the resource management issue so that MCS tasks are fairly assigned to the objects, with the objectives of maximizing the lifetime of the task groups. In a further step, I propose an integration of vehicles networks to SIoT leading to the new paradigm of the Social Internet of Vehicles. As regard to this, I show results of software simulations analyzing realistic vehicular mobility trace in order to study the characteristics of the resulting social network structure. Additionally, I present an implementation of a SIoV-enabled system and its integration to Lysis platform. Finally, I investigate the issues related to the portability of Lysis architecture on edge cloud infrastructures. In fact, objects might be located far from the datacenter hosting the conventional cloud, resulting in long delays and inefficient use of communication resources. This thesis investigates how to address these issues by exploiting the computing resources at the edge of the network to host the virtual objects of the SIoT and provides early experimental results. Additionally, a solution is presented that integrates the SIoT concept in the architecture proposed within the INPUT project. More specifically the feature is exploited of the INPUT project, which allows for running the virtual representation of a smart/social object in the access router that is nearest to the physical object. In this way, it is expected that delay will decrease and efficiency in the usage of network resources will increase.