Advances on Smart Object Management

Abstract

The first part of this issue features four papers that discuss advanced management techniques for Smart Objects. The socalled Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the cornerstones of the Future Internet. One illustrative example of the relevance of IoT in future network development is its growing adoption within the smart city paradigm, as a means to provide enhanced citizen services. In this sense, basic IoT technology is no longer at the purely academic research level, but is starting to be integrated to the the fabric of our daily activities. One of the elements that are required to support the successful deployment of this type of architectures is having the appropriate management mechanisms in place. The call for papers for this special issue was a result of a dedicated workshop on the management of smart objects. The workshop was collocated with the 4th International Conference on Mobile Networks and Management (MONAMI 2012), which was organized in close collaboration with the Technical University of Hamburg in September 2012 (see www.mon-ami.org/2012). The four papers which were accepted for publication in this special issue deal with management architecture alternatives, service development frameworks, security challenges, and the role that contextual information has in the Internet of Things. All in all, they provide a comprehensive outlook on some of the problems that need to be addressed for this type of deployments. It is worth highlighting that three of the works do really exemplify the need of real deployments and employ implementation over existing technologies to assess the feasibility of their proposed architectures, frameworks and techniques. In the first paper, JaeSeung Song et al. review some of the architectural choices for M2M networks. They start from the challenges that need to be addressed and discuss how the various standardization bodies (for instance, ETSI and 3GPP) are tackling them. They then present their approach for some of the technical functionalities required to control and manage M2M networks. Finally the authors describe a realization of a subset of the aforementioned techniques over a real testbed, using the service model proposed by the SENSEI European project. The authors use three performance indicators to assess the goodness of the techniques, namely the stability, the scalability and the robustness. The results, that are as well included within the CAMPUS 21 project, show that the proposed scheme can run on relatively low-memory devices, making it very attractive for realworld IoT deployments. One key success factor for IoT is the possibility to enable fast service creation, which is open to the general public, so that a user does not need to be an expert to be able to create his/her own service. In order to address these challenges, Sylvain Cherrier et al. propose, in the second paper of this special issue, a framework to deploy services to be used over IoT based on the composition of behaviours. They go beyond their previous proposal, D-Lite, which was based on Finite State Transducers, and propose a simpler way of modeling the interactions between IoT components. The BeC3 architecture also allows the exploitation of available modules and K. Pentikousis (*) European Center for Information and Communication Technologies (EICT), EUREF Campus Haus 13, Torgauer Strase 12-15, 10829 Berlin, Germany e-mail: k.pentikousis@eict.de