NSERC Strategic Grant
IBM Canada
Bell Canada
Tillsonburg Hydro
“Middleware Framework and Programming
Infrastructure for IoT Services”
K. Kontogiannis (PI)
Dept. of Computer Science
Western University,
The Internet of Things (IoT)
refers to a system of massively interconnected devices, and software
applications referred to as "things" or "resources". These
"things" can be considered as basic units that interact with their environment
and are capable of providing services, data or,
control elements to other interconnected "things" or to back-end
software applications. In this respect, IoT emerges as the major architecture
for achieving Machine to Machine (M2M) communication and realizing the
Cyber-Physical systems (CPS). However, in order to design, implement, test,
deploy, and manage large IoT systems we require complex, yet efficient, infrastructures
and platforms so that software engineers can program and connect devices,
applications, and data in a secure, resilient, fault tolerant way, meeting at
the same time high performance and scalability targets.
To date, research in IoT
infrastructures is focusing mostly on connectivity and data transfer issues
between IoT devices (mostly sensors for the time being) with back-end
cloud-hosted application logic. However, the next major challenge the IoT
community will face in the years to come, and towards what is referred to as
the Universal IoT era, is to devise appropriate modeling and runtime
infrastructure support so that autonomous machine-to-machine communication and
collaborative processing can be achieved. In this project, we investigate novel
requirements models to specify systems that interact heavily with the physical
world, propose new programming models and abstractions so that the
implementation of such systems can be better facilitated, design novel
middleware platforms that allow for dynamic management and optimal provision of
services and resources for the system to maintain its QoS requirements as the
operating environment changes, and finally propose security design patterns in
order to safeguard large IoT systems.
The project provides
technological competitiveness built in Canada, generates R&D activity between
industry and academia, and helps attracting and retain talented HQPs.