Visiting Dizmo in Winterthur

After the nice Hackathon at the IoT 2014 conference Dizmo invitited me this week to their office in Winterthur, Switzerland to discuss potential cooperations and the combination of IoTSyS and Dizmo.

Thesis written and now under review

The PhD thesis "A communication stack and integration middleware for the Internet of Thing" is written and now under review by the PhD examiners.

IoTSyS at IoT 2014 Conference hosted at MIT Media Lab in Boston

In the beginning of October a very productive presentation of thesis results and the IoTSyS open source project at the IoT 2014 conference at the MIT in Boston was done.

Before the official conference start I participated in the IoT hackathon and linked IoTSyS to Dizmo, a very innovative IoT user control interface.

A short demo video illustrates the interface to Dizmo based interface to IoTSyS: http://youtu.be/jNaxPe05Y6g

Dizmo liked the result so much that I received as special Hackathon price the 21" multi-touch monitor.

Afer the nice hackathon the main conference started on Monday, where I presented my full paper in the first technical session right after the keynote:

The relevance and impact of IPv6 multicasting for Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks based on 6LoWPAN and Constrained RESTful Environments
Jung, Markus (Vienna University of Technology, Austria); Raich, Philipp (Vienna University of Technology, Austria); Kastner, Wolfgang (TU Vienna (Wien), Austria)

Big and interested audience with a lots of questions.

Monday afternoon Luyu Zhou presented the paper about IoTSyS for the demo session:

IoTSyS: an integration middleware for the Internet of Things    Markus Jung, Jomy Chelakal, Jürgen Schober, Wolfgang Kastner, Luyu Zhou, Nam Ky Giang (Institute of Computer Aided Automation Vienna University of Technology, Austria; Management Information System University of Technology of Troyes, France; Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering University of British Columbia Vancouver, Canada)

The actual demo session took place at Wednesday afternoon and was a great opportunity to show IoTSyS in action.

Finally, there was also some time left for sight seeing and a weekend trip to New York.

Visit of Anouk Wipprecht at Automation Systems Group

Thanks to the publicity of the IPSO challenge Anouk Wipprecht made a visit at our lab last week to get insights into our Internet of Things activities and the www.iotsys.org project. Was a pleasure to have her here! She also presented her amazing work on fashiontech (http://www.anoukwipprecht.nl/). Hope we can cooperate in future. 

Paper accepted at the 4th International Conference on the Internet of Things (IoT 2014) taking place October 6–8, 2014 at Cambridge, MA, USA

My paper titled "The relevance and impact of IPv6 multicasting for Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks based on 6LoWPAN and Constrained RESTful Environments" was accpeted at the 4th International Conference on the Internet of Things (IoT 2014) taking place October 6–8, 2014 at Cambridge, MA, USA. It will be hosted by the MIT Media Lab, so I am already excited to go to this innovative and prestigious place.

The paper contains the simulation results of the IoTSyS stack and the evaluation of the IPv6 multicasting effect on the sensor network that is used by the IoTSyS group communication mechanism.

Different communication topologies have been evaluated regarding the effect on latency and memory size.

IoTSyS participated in the IoT challenge hosted by the IPSO alliance in Chicago at Sensor Expo 2014

IoTSyS made it to the finals of the IoT challenge. It was a very nice event in Chicago and very strong competitors. Several start-ups presented very innovative Internet of Things products and other universities (e.g. MIT) also participated. IoTSyS closely missed a top 3 place and was ranked number 4 of 10, which was a very nice result taking into account the strong competitors. The innovative concept of the project received a very positive response, main criticism point was the lacking market readiness as product.

The competition take place in parallel to the conference and all top 10 finalists had about 6 minutes to present the project and prototype to a selected experts commitee.

IoTSyS was demonstrated with a mobile IoT demo suitcase consisting of a home and building automation system based on heterogeneous technologies in a box + IPv6 enabled smart objects.

What made the event more a success, was the opportunity to present the project at the IoT pavilion at the sensor expo of the IPSO alliance with a table dedicated to IoTSyS.

The reach out was tremendous and several interested expo attendees stopped by and showed real interest in the project. So it was definitely a great opportunity to promote the open source project to a very high quality audience.
Finally, there was also some time left for sightseeing in Chicago :)

IoTSyS project is IPSO IoT Challenge 2014 semi-finalist

IoTSyS made it to the semi-finals of the IPSO IoT Challenge 2014. The judgement will take place at the 24nd of June at the Sensors Expo in Chicago. This will be a good opportunity to present the project results to the public.

See the press release for more details:
http://www.marketwired.com/press-release/IPSO-Alliance-Announces-Semi-Finalists-in-IoT-Competition-1904513.htm

Demonstration video of research prototype

There is now a short demonstration video about the research prototype available.

Paper presentation at IEEE International World Forum on Internet of Things in Seoul, South Korea, March 6-8

The paper presentation at the IEEE International World Forum on Internet of Things was a good opportunity to present first research results. I presented my work in a short paper session with an additional poster session and interesting discussions arise within the scientific community.

Conference Venue

Poster session

Poster session

Beside the conference visit, I had also the opportunity to visit the smart city district Songdo, Incheon. It shows how the buzzword "smart city" can become implemented and reality. More than 1.000 sensors and more than 100 cameras allow to address different domains (traffic, safety, security, environmental, ...). An impressive public control center allows to manage the public domain of the smart city district.

Songdo Smart City District - Incheon, South Korea

Songdo - Smart City Control Center

Songdo - Smart City Control Center

Cisco - Smart City Control Center Show Case

Finally, there was also some time left to explore the interesting cultural aspects of Korea.

Korea National Museum

Korean Tombs + Temples

Group communication with OBIX for the Internet of Things and a scripting-free control logic editor: paper accepted at WF-IoT2014

Based on the communication stack presented in the previous post it is possible to design a process data exchange that can be compared to KNX in which a group communication is used to denote a shared network variable that allows a group of devices to exchange process data. By doing so it is possible to create a simple control logic editor that wires together the basic data points of OBIX objects which represent physical devices or control logic objects.

Group communication and scripting-free control logic editor with IoTSyS

Details on the group communication approach can be found within the paper:

Markus Jung and Wolfgang Kastner. Efficient group communication based on Web services for reliable control in wireless automation. In Proceedings of the 39th Annual Conference of the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society, Vienna, Austria, November 2013

The scripting-free control logic editor will be presented within a poster session at the upcoming IEEE World Forum on the Internet of Things, which will take place in Seoul, South Korea in March 2013. It is the first paper that emerged within the scholarsihp period and the support of the IPA is well-acknowledged in the last section of the paper:

Markus Jung, Esad Hajdarevic, Wolfgang Kastner, Antonio J. Jara. Short Paper: A Scripting-Free Control Logic Editor for the Internet of Things. In Proceedings of the IEEE World Forum on Internet of Things, Seoul, Rebublic of Korea, March 2014. To appear.

The prototype implementation of the group communication and the scripting-free control logic editor are provided already in the open source project.

Integration concept for heterogeneous home and building automation technologies

A variety of home and building automation technologies are currently in use in state of the art home and buildings and will be use for the next decades. The technologies are either scoped on certain domains of automation (e.g. lighting, shading, HVAC, security, safety, ...) or focus on specific geographically separated markets (e.g. Europe or North America).

Important technologies to be mentioned here are for example KNX, LonWorks, BACnet, ZigBee, Z-Wave or EnOcean.  KNX is an important European home and building automation standard that is mainly used in the field level of a automation control network and a huge variety of devices and products exists. On the same level LonWorks provides similar features but has a higher market share in the North American marekt. BACnet on the other hand is an open standard that is mainly used in the automation level of a control network and is mainly in use for commercial building automation technologies. ZigBee is an open wireless standard that mainly focuses on wireless sensor networks and home automation. Another wireless standard for home automation is EnOcean, which recently gains more importance, since it uses energy harvesting for collecting the required energy to operate the automation devices. Z-Wave is a popular but closed standard that operates in a similar environment like ZigBee.

The huge heterogeneity of technologies is an inhibitor for the successful deployment of home and building energy management systems, which are an essential component for optimizing the energy consumption of a building and further for future interaction patterns found in smart grids or smart cities. In this domain also new protocols emerge like for example (Wireless) MBus that can be used to communicate with smart meters.

All these technologies come with a different system stack. For example, custom physical, data link, network, transport, session and application layers. In order to make them interoperable gateways are required that map the different communication principles of the different layers. For the integration a mapping can be provided either for each possible communication pair, or a single integration technology is chosen to which all other technologies are mapped.

Integration approaches

The single technology integration approach is desirable since the complexity and the efforts can be reduced. The question is now which technology stack should be used for the integration. A strong trend in research and industry aims at using standard and mature Internet and IT technologies for the integration but also for new devices directly on the level of sensors and actuators.

So an integration based on an communication stack using IPv6 is desirable and for constrained wireless sensor networks 6LoWPAN can be an enabler to efficiently operate IPv6 even on most contrained wireless devices. Just a new application protocol would be not sufficient. Instead a complete system stack (so-called IoTSyS stack) is required that can be used to operate the Internet of Things and to provide interoperability amongst heterogeneous technologies. 

Integration challenge

For providing the upper layer technologies different protocols can be used and a communication based on Web service communication (HTTP + XML) is desirable due to the huge success within IT system integration. However, due to the resource demand (CPU, memorgy, bandwidth) these technologies are not suitable for a deployment in a constrained (wireless) control network with constrained nodes. Therefore, optimizations like the Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) and Efficient XML Interchange (EXI) can be used to optimize the resource demand of these technologies and to make a deployment feasible. Finally, the application layer semantics need to be mapped into the communication stack. For home and building automation technologies BACnet/WS, OASIS Open Building Information Exchange (OBIX) and OPC UA provide the required information models to provide a common view on building automation systems. Due to the RESTful design of OBIX, which fits very well to the mapping of data point oriented automation systems, OBIX is chosen for providing the application layer semantics.

The final system stack can be seen below.

IoTSyS system stack

Within the scope of the research activities and the thesis novel protocol bindings to CoAP/EXI have been contributed to the OASIS specification.

For the creation of a gateway software that maps the different technologies the Java platform is chosen and the OSGI runtime environment in order to use a component-oriented software design.

Integration gateway design

The gateway uses so call protocol-bundles or drivers for direct communication with bus systems. For this purpose, new drivers have been developed (e.g. W-MBus) or existing open source libraries (e.g. Calimero for KNX, BACnet4J for BACnet,...) have been reused. Then, a common object model based on OBIX is mapped to these technologies and provides the representation of the different systems for the Web service based communication interfaces and for internal services.

A proof of concept implementation for an integration gateway is provided at the project repository (http://code.google.com/p/iotsys).

More details about this approach can be found within the papers:

Markus Jung, Jürgen Weidinger, Christian Reinisch, Wolfgang Kastner, Cedric Crettaz, Alex Olivieri, and Yann Bocchi. A transparent IPv6 multi-protocol gateway to integrate Building Automation Systems in the Internet of Things. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Internet of Things (iThings 2012), Besancon, France, November 2012

Markus Jung, Jürgen Weidinger, and Wolfgang Kastner. A seamless integration of KNX into Constrained RESTful Environments. In Proceedings of the KNX Scientific, Las Palmas, Spain, November 2012

Markus Jung, Jürgen Weidinger, Wolfgang Kastner, and Alex Olivieri. Building automation and smart cities: An integration approach based on a service-oriented architecture. InProceedings of the 27th IEEE International Conference on Advanced Information Networking and Applications, Barcelona, Spain, March 2013.