@article {Dautov201829822, title = {Data Processing in Cyber-Physical-Social Systems Through Edge Computing}, journal = {IEEE Access - IEEE}, volume = {6}, year = {2018}, note = {cited By 0}, pages = {29822-29835}, publisher = {Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.}, abstract = {

Cloud and Fog computing have established a convenient and widely adopted approach for computation offloading, where raw data generated by edge devices in the Internet of Things (IoT) context is collected and processed remotely. This vertical offloading pattern, however, typically does not take into account increasingly pressing time constraints of the emerging IoT scenarios, in which numerous data sources, including human agents (i.e., Social IoT), continuously generate large amounts of data to be processed in a timely manner. Big data solutions could be applied in this respect, provided that networking issues and limitations related to connectivity of edge devices are properly addressed. Although edge devices are traditionally considered to be resource-constrained, main limitations refer to energy, networking, and memory capacities, whereas their ever-growing processing capabilities are already sufficient to be effectively involved in actual (big data) processing. In this context, the role of human agents is no longer limited to passive data generation, but can also include their voluntary involvement in relatively complex computations. This way, users can share their personal computational resources (i.e., mobile phones) to support collaborative data processing, thereby turning the existing IoT into a global cyber-physical-social system (CPSS). To this extent, this paper proposes a novel IoT/CPSS data processing pattern based on the stream processing technology, aiming to distribute the workload among a cluster of edge devices, involving mobile nodes shared by contributors on a voluntary basis, and paving the way for cluster computing at the edge. Experiments on an intelligent surveillance system deployed on an edge device cluster demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach, illustrating how its distributed in-memory data processing architecture can be effective. {\textcopyright} 2013 IEEE.

}, keywords = {Apache NiFi, Big Data, Cameras, Cellular telephone systems, cloud computing, Cluster computing, Computer architecture, Cyber physical social systems, Cyber Physical System, Edge computing, Fog computing, Horizontal and Vertical Offloading, Internet of Things, Media streaming, Network security, Servers, Stream processing, Streaming media}, issn = {21693536}, doi = {10.1109/ACCESS.2018.2839915}, url = {https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?eid=2-s2.0-85047619039\&doi=10.1109\%2fACCESS.2018.2839915\&partnerID=40\&md5=48b52a73084c2f6396c4ce1dd6a690f4}, author = {Rustem Dautov and Salvatore Distefano and Dario Bruneo and Francesco Longo and Giovanni Merlino and Antonio Puliafito} } @article {Bruneo2018267, title = {Integrating IoT and cloud in a smart city context: The $\#$SmartME case study}, journal = {International Journal of Computer Applications in Technology - Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.}, volume = {57}, number = {4}, year = {2018}, note = {cited By 0}, pages = {267-280}, publisher = {Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.}, abstract = {

$\#$SmartME is a crowdfounding project that aims at exploring the possible synergies between the cloud computing and the Internet of Things paradigms. The project{\textquoteright}s main aim is to morph Messina into a smart city. In this direction, the Stack4Things framework has been implemented, extending OpenStack towards the management of Internet of Things resources. This paper summarises the first two years of the $\#$SmartME project and presents technical details about Stack4Things with specific reference to the underlying technologies and to the web portals that are used for administration and semantically-enabled data retrieval. Copyright {\textcopyright} 2018 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.

}, keywords = {Data retrieval, Iaas clouds, Internet of Things, Learning systems, OpenStack, Portals, Semantic Web, Smart city, Technical details}, issn = {09528091}, doi = {10.1504/IJCAT.2018.093528}, url = {https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?eid=2-s2.0-85050816820\&doi=10.1504\%2fIJCAT.2018.093528\&partnerID=40\&md5=2a625990009cbd28073e018e196de63f}, author = {Dario Bruneo and Francesco Longo and Giovanni Merlino and Antonio Puliafito and Nidhi Kushwaha} } @article {Dautov20181475, title = {Metropolitan intelligent surveillance systems for urban areas by harnessing IoT and edge computing paradigms}, journal = {Software - Practice and Experience - John Wiley \& Sons, Ltd.}, volume = {48}, number = {8}, year = {2018}, note = {cited By 0}, pages = {1475-1492}, publisher = {John Wiley and Sons Ltd}, abstract = {

Recent technological advances led to the rapid and uncontrolled proliferation of intelligent surveillance systems (ISSs), serving to supervise urban areas. Driven by pressing public safety and security requirements, modern cities are being transformed into tangled cyber-physical environments, consisting of numerous heterogeneous ISSs under different administrative domains with low or no capabilities for reuse and interaction. This isolated pattern renders itself unsustainable in city-wide scenarios that typically require to aggregate, manage, and process multiple video streams continuously generated by distributed ISS sources. A coordinated approach is therefore required to enable an interoperable ISS for metropolitan areas, facilitating technological sustainability to prevent network bandwidth saturation. To meet these requirements, this paper combines several approaches and technologies, namely the Internet of Things, cloud computing, edge computing and big data, into a common framework to enable a unified approach to implementing an ISS at an urban scale, thus paving the way for the metropolitan intelligent surveillance system (MISS). The proposed solution aims to push data management and processing tasks as close to data sources as possible, thus increasing performance and security levels that are usually critical to surveillance systems. To demonstrate the feasibility and the effectiveness of this approach, the paper presents a case study based on a distributed ISS scenario in a crowded urban area, implemented on clustered edge devices that are able to off-load tasks in a {\textquotedblleft}horizontal{\textquotedblright} manner in the context of the developed MISS framework. As demonstrated by the initial experiments, the MISS prototype is able to obtain face recognition results 8 times faster compared with the traditional off-loading pattern, where processing tasks are pushed {\textquotedblleft}vertically{\textquotedblright} to the cloud. Copyright {\textcopyright} 2018 John Wiley \& Sons, Ltd.

}, keywords = {Big Data, cloud computing, Distributed Smart Cameras, Edge computing, Face recognition, Information management, Intelligent surveillance systems, Internet of Things, monitoring, Multiple video streams, Network security, Public safety and securities, Security systems, Smart city, Stack4Things, Stream processing, Surveillance systems, Technological advances}, issn = {00380644}, doi = {10.1002/spe.2586}, url = {https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?eid=2-s2.0-85049578094\&doi=10.1002\%2fspe.2586\&partnerID=40\&md5=25de910451975bb24c9cfbdf6ca69066}, author = {Rustem Dautov and Salvatore Distefano and Dario Bruneo and Francesco Longo and Giovanni Merlino and Antonio Puliafito and Rajkumar Buyya} } @proceedings {Bruneo2017, title = {Head in a Cloud: An approach for Arduino YUN virtualization}, journal = {GIoTS 2017 - Global Internet of Things Summit, Proceedings}, year = {2017}, note = {cited By 0; Conference of 2017 Global Internet of Things Summit, GIoTS 2017 ; Conference Date: 6 June 2017 Through 9 June 2017; Conference Code:130055}, publisher = {Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.}, address = {Geneva; Switzerland; 6-9 June 2017}, abstract = {

Smart boards are triggering the IoT revolution, allowing to make common objects and things smart through their network, storage and processing capabilities. Arduino boards have a prominent role in this revolution, due to their customizability and programming freedom. From a different perspective, another strategic development for the IoT is towards Cloud, allowing to properly manage things and data ubiquitously, on demand, as services. Pushing in this direction, we can pave the way to the Cloud of Things, where real things, rather than the data they produce, can be provided to third parties, by adopting a {\textquoteright}device-centric{\textquoteright} approach. To this purpose, virtualization of physical resources becomes an essential step and core mechanism. In this paper we focus on smart board virtualization, implementing a flexible solution for Arduino boards based on Stack4Things, allowing to create, multiplex, migrate and deploy virtual boards in IoT-Cloud contexts. The results obtained by a preliminary implementation and experiments on the $\#$SmartME testbed are shown in the paper to demonstrate the feasibility and the effectiveness of the proposed solution. {\textcopyright} 2017 IEEE.

}, keywords = {Arduino YUN, Clouds, Computer operating systems, Core mechanisms, Customizability, Digital storage, GPIO pins, Internet of Things, Physical resources, Processing capability, Stack4Things, Strategic development, Virtual reality, Virtualization}, isbn = {9781509058730}, doi = {10.1109/GIOTS.2017.8016263}, url = {https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?eid=2-s2.0-85029291785\&doi=10.1109\%2fGIOTS.2017.8016263\&partnerID=40\&md5=4a8eed3e1348ab91166e648151d625c0}, author = {Dario Bruneo and Salvatore Distefano and Francesco Longo and Giovanni Merlino and Antonio Puliafito and Angelo Zaia} } @article {Distefano2017382, title = {Hospitalized Patient Monitoring and Early Treatment Using IoT and Cloud}, journal = {BioNanoScience}, volume = {7}, number = {2}, year = {2017}, note = {cited By 0}, pages = {382-385}, publisher = {Springer New York LLC}, abstract = {

The adoption of Internet of Things devices and, more in general, embedded systems, endowed with sensors and actuators, keeps rising globally, and the scope of their involvement broadens, for instance in e-Health applications. This work describes our integration of IoT paradigms and resource ecosystems with a tailored Cloud-oriented device-centric environment, by focusing on an e-Health scenario, featuring monitoring and early treatment of hospitalized patients, by focusing on Cloud-enabled event detection coupled with coordinated reaction. {\textcopyright} 2016, Springer Science+Business Media New York.

}, keywords = {Clouds, Coordinated reactions, Coordination reactions, E health, e-Health applications, Early treatment, embedded systems, Event detection, Health, Internet of Things, OpenStack, Patient monitoring, Patient treatment, sensors and actuators}, issn = {21911630}, doi = {10.1007/s12668-016-0335-5}, url = {https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?eid=2-s2.0-85019076002\&doi=10.1007\%2fs12668-016-0335-5\&partnerID=40\&md5=cd98d3d0b82a5392d0f5191656dee389}, author = {Salvatore Distefano and Dario Bruneo and Francesco Longo and Giovanni Merlino and Antonio Puliafito} } @article {Distefano2017439, title = {Personalized Health Tracking with Edge Computing Technologies}, journal = {BioNanoScience}, volume = {7}, number = {2}, year = {2017}, note = {cited By 0}, pages = {439-441}, publisher = {Springer New York LLC}, abstract = {

The health monitoring component is the essential block, a pillar of several e-health systems. Plenty of health tracking applications and specific technologies such as smart devices, wearables, and data management systems are available. To be effective, promptly reacting to issues, a health monitoring service must ensure short delays in data sensing, collection, and processing activities. This is an open problem that distributed computing paradigms, such as Internet of Things (IoT), Cloud, and Edge computing, could address. The solution proposed in this paper is based on Stack4Things, an IoT-Cloud framework to manage edge nodes such as mobiles, smart objects, network devices, workstations, as a whole, a computing infrastructure allowing to provide resources on-demand, as services, to end users. Through Stack4Things facilities, the health tracking system can locate the closer computing resource to offload processing and thus reducing latency per the Edge computing paradigm. {\textcopyright} 2016, Springer Science+Business Media New York.

}, keywords = {Clouds, Computing infrastructures, Data management system, Distributed computer systems, Edge computing, Health, Health monitoring, Health tracking systems, human, human computer interaction, Information management, Internet, Internet of Things, Internet of Things (IOT), monitoring, Stack4Things, Tracking application, Wearable technology}, issn = {21911630}, doi = {10.1007/s12668-016-0388-5}, url = {https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?eid=2-s2.0-85019121810\&doi=10.1007\%2fs12668-016-0388-5\&partnerID=40\&md5=e5aa843f2f869945fe04d5f62c97a6c5}, author = {Salvatore Distefano and Dario Bruneo and Francesco Longo and Giovanni Merlino and Antonio Puliafito} } @proceedings {Dautov2018792, title = {Pushing intelligence to the edge with a stream processing architecture}, journal = {Proceedings - 2017 IEEE International Conference on Internet of Things, IEEE Green Computing and Communications, IEEE Cyber, Physical and Social Computing, IEEE Smart Data, iThings-GreenCom-CPSCom-SmartData 2017}, year = {2017}, note = {cited By 3; Conference of Joint 10th IEEE International Conference on Internet of Things, iThings 2017, 13th IEEE International Conference on Green Computing and Communications, GreenCom 2017, 10th IEEE International Conference on Cyber, Physical and Social Computing, CPSCom 2017 and the 3rd IEEE International Conference on Smart Data, Smart Data 2017 ; Conference Date: 21 June 2017 Through 23 June 2017; Conference Code:134517}, pages = {792-799}, publisher = {Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.}, address = {Exeter, UK - 21-23 June 2017}, abstract = {

The cloud computing paradigm underpins the Internet of Things (IoT) by offering a seemingly infinite pool of resources for processing/storing extreme amounts of data generated by complex IoT systems. The cloud has established a convenient and widely adopted approach, where raw data are vertically offloaded to cloud servers from resource-constrained edge devices, which are only seen as simple data generators, not capable of performing more sophisticated processing activities. However, there are more and more emerging scenarios, where the amount of data to be transferred over the network to the cloud is associated with increased network latency, making the results of the computation obsolete. As various categories of edge devices are becoming more and more powerful in terms of hardware resources - specifically, CPU and memory - the established way of off-loading computation to the cloud is not always seen as the most convenient approach. Accordingly, this paper presents a Stream Processing architecture for spreading workload among a local cluster of edge devices to process data in parallel, thus achieving faster execution and response times. The experimental results suggest that such a distributed in-memory approach to data processing at the very edge of a computational network has a potential to address a wide range of IoT-related scenarios. {\textcopyright} 2017 IEEE.

}, keywords = {Apache NiFi, cloud computing, Cluster computing, Computational networks, Data handling, Edge computing, Green Computing, Hardware resources, Horizontal offloading, Internet of thing (IOT), Internet of Things, Memory architecture, Network architecture, Network latencies, Processing activity, Stream processing}, isbn = {9781538630655}, doi = {10.1109/iThings-GreenCom-CPSCom-SmartData.2017.121}, url = {https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?eid=2-s2.0-85047094836\&doi=10.1109\%2fiThings-GreenCom-CPSCom-SmartData.2017.121\&partnerID=40\&md5=4e5a4b0eaffa179565af183066520cdf}, author = {Rustem Dautov and Salvatore Distefano and Dario Bruneo and Francesco Longo and Giovanni Merlino and Antonio Puliafito} } @article {Longo201753, title = {Stack4Things: a sensing-and-actuation-as-a-service framework for IoT and cloud integration}, journal = {Annales des Telecommunications/Annals of Telecommunications - Institut Mines-T{\'e}l{\'e}com and Springer-Verlag France}, volume = {72}, number = {1-2}, year = {2017}, note = {cited By 0}, pages = {53-70}, publisher = {Springer-Verlag France}, abstract = {

With the increasing adoption of embedded smart devices and their involvement in different application fields, complexity may quickly grow, thus making vertical ad hoc solutions ineffective. Recently, the Internet of Things (IoT) and Cloud integration seems to be one of the winning solutions in order to opportunely manage the proliferation of both data and devices. In this paper, following the idea to reuse as much tooling as possible, we propose, with regards to infrastructure management, to adopt a widely used and competitive framework for Infrastructure-as-a-Service such as OpenStack. Therefore, we describe approaches and architectures so far preliminary implemented for enabling Cloud-mediated interactions with droves of sensor- and actuator-hosting nodes by presenting Stack4Things, a framework for Sensing-and-Actuation-as-a-Service (SAaaS). In particular, starting from a detailed requirement analysis, in this work, we focus on the subsystems of Stack4Things devoted to resource control and management as well as on those related to the management and collection of sensing data. Several use cases are presented justifying how our proposed framework can be viewed as a concrete step toward the complete fulfillment of the SAaaS vision. {\textcopyright} 2016, Institut Mines-T{\'e}l{\'e}com and Springer-Verlag France.

}, keywords = {Clouds, Information management, Infrastructure as a service (IaaS), Infrastructure managements, Internet of thing (IOT), Internet of Things, Mediated interaction, OpenStack, Requirement analysis, SAaaS, WAMP, WebSocket}, issn = {00034347}, doi = {10.1007/s12243-016-0528-5}, url = {https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?eid=2-s2.0-84976292948\&doi=10.1007\%2fs12243-016-0528-5\&partnerID=40\&md5=f334f652432ae0993795644204689e9c}, author = {Francesco Longo and Dario Bruneo and Salvatore Distefano and Giovanni Merlino and Antonio Puliafito} } @proceedings {Dautov2017, title = {Towards a global intelligent surveillance system}, journal = {11th International Conference on Distributed Smart Cameras, ICDSC 2017}, year = {2017}, note = {cited By 2; Conference of 11th International Conference on Distributed Smart Cameras, ICDSC 2017 ; Conference Date: 5 September 2017 Through 7 September 2017; Conference Code:132201}, publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery}, address = {Stanford, USA - 05-07 September 2017}, abstract = {

Recent technological advances have led to the rapid development of Intelligent Surveillance Systems (ISSs), ubiquitously present in modern urban spaces are constantly generating streams of raw data. As most of the actual Internet traffic is nowadays constituted by visual data streams, often originated by ISSs, it is important to properly manage these avalanches of data so as to support sustainability of this technological trend, which will very likely saturate the current network bandwidth in few years. This paper aims to combine existing technologies and paradigms from the Internet of Things, Cloud, Edge Computing and Big Data into a common framework to enable a shared approach for ISSs at a wide geographical scale, thus envisioning a Global ISS. The proposed solution is based on the idea of pushing data processing tasks as close to data sources as possible, thus increasing security and performance levels, usually critical to surveillance systems. To demonstrate the feasibility and the effectiveness of the proposed approach, the paper presents a case study based on a distributed ISS scenario in a crowded area, implemented on clustered edge devices able to offload tasks in a {\textquoteright}horizontal{\textquoteright} manner. {\textcopyright} 2017 Association for Computing Machinery.

}, keywords = {Big Data, Clouds, Edge, Geographical scale, Information management, Intelligent surveillance systems, Internet of Things, monitoring, Network security, Security and performance, Security systems, Stream processing, Surveillance systems, Technological advances, Technological trends}, doi = {10.1145/3131885.3131918}, url = {https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?eid=2-s2.0-85047726635\&doi=10.1145\%2f3131885.3131918\&partnerID=40\&md5=a84eba85cc0facc8c5bb0cd664d7d5f0}, author = {Rustem Dautov and Salvatore Distefano and Giovanni Merlino and Dario Bruneo and Francesco Longo and Antonio Puliafito} } @proceedings {Bruneo2017135, title = {User-space network tunneling under a mobile platform: A case study for android environments}, journal = {ADHOC-NOW 2017: Ad-hoc, Mobile, and Wireless Networks}, year = {2017}, note = {cited By 0; Conference of 16th International Conference on Ad-Hoc Networks and Wireless, ADHOC-NOW 2017 ; Conference Date: 20 September 2017 Through 22 September 2017; Conference Code:198729}, pages = {135-143}, publisher = {Springer Verlag}, address = {Messina; Italy; 20-22 September 2017}, abstract = {

The IoT ecosystem is taking the whole ICT world by storm and, in particular for currently hot topics such as Smart Cities, it is becoming one of the key enablers for innovative applications and services. When talking about end users, or even citizens, mobiles enter the picture as the ultimate personal gadget, as well as relevant outlets for most of the duties (sensing, networking, edge computing) IoT devices are typically envisioned in the first place. Smartphones, tablets and similar accessories are even more powerful in terms of hardware capabilities (and function diversity) than typical embedded systems for IoT, but it is typically the software platform (e.g., the OS and SDK) which limits choices for the sake of security and control on the user experience. Even a relatively open environment, such as Android, exhibits these limits, in stark contrast to the otherwise very powerful and feature-complete functionalities the underlying system (i.e., Linux) natively supports. In this work the authors describe a fully user-friendly and platform-compliant approach to let users break free from some of these limitations, in particular with regard to network virtualisation, for the purpose of extending an IoT-ready Smart City use case to mobiles. {\textcopyright} Springer International Publishing AG 2017.

}, keywords = {Ad hoc networks, Android (operating system), Clouds, Computer operating systems, Distributed computer systems, embedded systems, Internet of Things, Mobile ad hoc networks, Network virtualisation, network virtualization, Open environment, OpenStack, Reverse tunneling, Smart city, Software platforms, Stack4Things, Underlying systems, Virtual reality, Virtualization, Wireless ad hoc networks}, isbn = {9783319679099}, issn = {03029743}, doi = {10.1007/978-3-319-67910-5_11}, url = {https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?eid=2-s2.0-85030154981\&doi=10.1007\%2f978-3-319-67910-5_11\&partnerID=40\&md5=e898f7c0ffad87eadbefa74a8a7a8940}, author = {Dario Bruneo and Salvatore Distefano and Kostya Esmukov and Francesco Longo and Giovanni Merlino and Antonio Puliafito} } @proceedings {Bruneo2016, title = {An IoT Testbed for the Software Defined City Vision: The $\#$SmartMe Project}, journal = {2016 IEEE International Conference on Smart Computing, SMARTCOMP 2016}, year = {2016}, note = {cited By 2; Conference of 2nd IEEE International Conference on Smart Computing, SMARTCOMP 2016 ; Conference Date: 18 May 2016 Through 20 May 2016; Conference Code:122466}, publisher = {Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.}, address = {St. Louis; United States; 18-20 May 2016}, abstract = {

To kickstart the process of morphing Messina into a {\guillemotleft}smart{\guillemotright} city, an explicit mission for the crowdfunded $\#$SmartME project, it is essential to set up an infrastructure of smart devices embedding sensors and actuators, to be scattered all over the urban area. An horizontal framework coupled with the Fog computing approach, by moving logic toward the {\guillemotleft}extreme{\guillemotright} edge of the Internet where data needs to be quickly elaborated, decisions made, and actions performed, is a suitable solution for data- intensive services with time-bound constraints as those usually required by citizens. This is especially true in the context of IoT and Smart City where thousands of smart objects, vehicles, mobiles, people interact to provide innovative services. We thus designed Stack4Things as an OpenStack-based framework spanning the Infrastructure-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service layers. We present some of the core Stack4Things functionalities implementing a Fog computing approach towards a run- time {\guillemotleft}rewireable{\guillemotright} Smart City paradigm, by outlining node management and contextualization mechanisms, also describing its usage in terms of already supported and developed verticals, as well as a specific example related to environmental data collection through $\#$SmartME. {\textcopyright} 2016 IEEE.

}, keywords = {$\#$SmartME, Arduino, Clouds, Computation theory, IaaS, Infrastructure as a service (IaaS), Internet of Things, OpenStack, Platform as a Service (PaaS), smart cities, Stack4Things}, isbn = {9781509008988}, doi = {10.1109/SMARTCOMP.2016.7501678}, url = {https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?eid=2-s2.0-84979570937\&doi=10.1109\%2fSMARTCOMP.2016.7501678\&partnerID=40\&md5=c7d8b8c0b0cd880d9c781770a5721acc}, author = {Dario Bruneo and Salvatore Distefano and Francesco Longo and Giovanni Merlino} } @proceedings {Bruneo2017222, title = {IoT-cloud authorization and delegation mechanisms for ubiquitous sensing and actuation}, journal = {2016 IEEE 3rd World Forum on Internet of Things, WF-IoT 2016}, year = {2016}, note = {cited By 0; Conference of 3rd IEEE World Forum on Internet of Things, WF-IoT 2016 ; Conference Date: 12 December 2016 Through 14 December 2016; Conference Code:126414}, pages = {222-227}, publisher = {Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.}, address = {Reston; United States; 12-14 December 2016}, abstract = {

In the roadmap for the implementation of ubiquitous computing, ubiquitous sensing and actuation is a milestone still to be reached. It refers to providing sensing and actuation facilities anytime and everywhere. This does not just imply to interconnect sensors and actuators through the Internet, but also and mainly to provide this facilities. IoT-Cloud computing paradigms such as the sensing and actuation as a service one could be a proper way to address this problem. In past work we developed an SAaaS framework extending OpenStack with specific functionalities for resource constrained nodes, Stack4Things. In this paper we focus on access control, authorization and delegation mechanisms which are basic mechanisms for the implementation of the UbSA vision. Thus starting from Stack4Things, we describe how we adapted and extended mechanisms provided by OpenStack, with specific regard to Keystone, with new functionalities for delegation and access control. A use case in the smart city scenario of $\#$SmartME describes the proposed solution in practice. {\textcopyright} 2016 IEEE.

}, keywords = {Access control, Arches, Basic mechanism, cloud computing, Delegation, Delegation mechanisms, Interconnect sensors, Internet of Things, Keystone, OpenStack, Platform as a Service (PaaS), Resource constrained nodes, Sensing and Actuation as a Service, Smart city, Ubiquitous computing}, isbn = {9781509041305}, doi = {10.1109/WF-IoT.2016.7845494}, url = {https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?eid=2-s2.0-85015210244\&doi=10.1109\%2fWF-IoT.2016.7845494\&partnerID=40\&md5=055a280adfbce85756d94736e2b82c55}, author = {Dario Bruneo and Salvatore Distefano and Francesco Longo and Giovanni Merlino and Antonio Puliafito} } @proceedings {Merlino2017213, title = {Quantitative evaluation of Cloud-based network virtualization mechanisms for IoT}, journal = {ValueTools 2016 - 10th EAI International Conference on Performance Evaluation Methodologies and Tools}, year = {2016}, note = {cited By 0; Conference of 10th EAI International Conference on Performance Evaluation Methodologies and Tools, ValueTools 2016 ; Conference Date: 25 October 2016 Through 28 October 2016; Conference Code:127816}, pages = {213-216}, publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery}, address = {Taormina; Italy; 25-28 October 2016}, abstract = {

Integration of the Internet of Things (IoT) with the Cloud may lead to a range of different architectures and solutions. Our efforts in this domain are mainly geared towards making IoT systems available as service-oriented infrastructure. Under Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) scenarios, network virtualization is a core building block of any solution, even more so for IoT-focused Cloud providers. Enabling mechanisms are required to support virtualization of the networking facilities for IoT resources that are managed by the Cloud. This work describes an approach to network virtualization based on popular off-the-shelf tools and protocols in place of application-specific logic, acting as a blueprint in the design of the Stack4Things architecture, an OpenStack-derived framework to provide IaaS-like services from a pool of IoT devices. We quantitatively evaluate the underlying mechanisms demonstrating that the proposed approach exhibits mostly comparable performance with respect to standard technologies for virtual private networks, or at least good enough for the kind of underlying hardware, e.g., smart boards, whilst still representing a more flexible solution. Copyright {\textcopyright} 2016 EAI.

}, keywords = {Application specific, Clouds, Distributed computer systems, Infrastructure as a service (IaaS), Internet of thing (IOT), Internet of Things, Network architecture, network virtualization, OpenStack, Performance evaluation, Platform as a Service (PaaS), Quantitative evaluation, Reverse tunneling, Service-oriented infrastructures, Virtual private networks, Virtual reality, Virtualization}, isbn = {9781631901416}, doi = {10.4108/eai.25-10-2016.2266600}, url = {https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?eid=2-s2.0-85021354856\&doi=10.4108\%2feai.25-10-2016.2266600\&partnerID=40\&md5=61d1e54a06f72746e6e5bd90c920b1c0}, author = {Giovanni Merlino and Francesco Longo and Salvatore Distefano and Dario Bruneo and Antonio Puliafito} } @proceedings {Distefano2017, title = {A Stack4Things-based platform for mobile crowdsensing services}, journal = {Proceedings of the 2016 ITU Kaleidoscope Academic Conference: ICTs for a Sustainable World, ITU WT 2016}, year = {2016}, note = {cited By 0; Conference of 2016 ITU Kaleidoscope Academic Conference, ITU WT 2016 ; Conference Date: 14 November 2016 Through 16 November 2016; Conference Code:125881}, publisher = {Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.}, address = {Bangkok; Thailand; 14-16 November 2016}, abstract = {

As mobiles grow pervasive in people{\textquoteright}s lives and expand their reach, Mobile CrowdSensing (MCS) and similar paradigms are going to play an ever more prominent role. There is a pressing need then to ease developers and service providers in embracing the opportunity, and that means offering a platform for such efforts. This in turn means providing a solid foundational architecture with abstractions and sound layering for MCS application designs to be mapped over it. This should base on a flexible infrastructure able to provide resources to MCS applications according to their requirements, hopefully on-demand. A service-oriented/Cloud model can perfectly fill this gap. This paper is a first step in this direction, proposing to adopt Stack4Things (S4T), an OpenStack-based platform for managing sensing and IoT nodes, for runtime customization of resources and their functions to support MCS services and applications. This implies developing and extending the S4T platform further to the specific requirements coming from off-the-shelf, e.g., Android-based, mobiles, as well as describing an example S4T-powered MCS application, Pothole Detection Mapping, to highlight the role of the platform. {\textcopyright} 2016 International Telecommunication Union.

}, keywords = {Android, Android (operating system), Application design, Clouds, Internet of Things, Mobile Crowdsensing, On demands, OpenStack, Platform as a Service (PaaS), Service Oriented, Service provider, Services and applications}, isbn = {9789261204310}, doi = {10.1109/ITU-WT.2016.7805722}, url = {https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?eid=2-s2.0-85014231645\&doi=10.1109\%2fITU-WT.2016.7805722\&partnerID=40\&md5=ea474a8f0a90e12de36e3ae371c16d9b}, author = {Salvatore Distefano and Antonio Puliafito and Giovanni Merlino and Francesco Longo and Dario Bruneo} } @proceedings {Merlino2015199, title = {Cloud-based network virtualization: An IoT use case}, journal = {Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social-Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, LNICST}, volume = {155}, year = {2015}, note = {cited By 2; Conference of 7th International Conference on Ad Hoc Networks, AdHocHets 2015 ; Conference Date: 1 September 2015 Through 2 September 2015; Conference Code:139059}, pages = {199-210}, publisher = {Springer Verlag}, address = {San Remo (Italy)}, abstract = {

In light of an overarching scheme about extending the capabilities of Internet of things (IoT) with Cloud-enabled mechanisms, network virtualization is a key enabler of infrastructure-oriented IoT solutions. In particular, without network virtualization infrastructure cannot really be considered flexible enough to meet emerging requirements, and even administrative duties, such as management, maintenance and large-scale automation, would turn out to be brittle and addressed by special casing, leading to loss of generality and a variety of corner cases. We propose a Cloud-based network virtualization approach for IoT, based on the Open- Stack IaaS framework, where its networking subsystem, Neutron, gets extended to accomodate virtual networks and arbitrary topologies among virtualmachines and globally dispersed smart objects, whichever the setup and constraints of the underlying physical networks. This work outlines a motivating use case for our approach, and the ensuing discussion is provided to frame the benefits of the underlying design. {\textcopyright} Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering 2015.

}, keywords = {Ad hoc networks, Arbitrary topology, Clouds, Internet of Things, Internet of Things (IOT), IoT, network virtualization, OpenStack, Telecommunication networks, Underlying physical networks, Virtual networks, Virtual reality, WebSocket}, isbn = {9783319250663}, issn = {18678211}, doi = {10.1007/978-3-319-25067-0_16}, url = {https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?eid=2-s2.0-84947982973\&doi=10.1007\%2f978-3-319-25067-0_16\&partnerID=40\&md5=f749a4988e888d00cbdabf0649881264}, author = {Giovanni Merlino and Dario Bruneo and Francesco Longo and Salvatore Distefano and Antonio Puliafito} } @proceedings {Merlino2015268, title = {Enabling mechanisms for Cloud-based network virtualization in IoT}, journal = {IEEE World Forum on Internet of Things, WF-IoT 2015 - Proceedings}, year = {2015}, note = {cited By 3; Conference of 2nd IEEE World Forum on Internet of Things, WF-IoT 2015 ; Conference Date: 14 December 2015 Through 16 December 2015; Conference Code:119271}, pages = {268-273}, publisher = {Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.}, address = {Milan (Italy)}, abstract = {

As part of a wider effort in integrating Internet of things (IoT) with the Cloud under the guise of infrastructure to be provided as-a-Service, network virtualization plays an essential role, both as an enabler of Infrastructure-as-a-Service scenarios and as a basic building block of the solution for the IoT-focused Cloud provider. Virtualization of the networking facilities for Cloud-managed IoT resources needs mechanisms to deal with the inherent complexity. This work outlines an implementation-agnostic approach to such a problem, reflected in our evolving Stack4Things architecture, derived from OpenStack, and implemented starting from such codebase, by leveraging also a choice of modern tooling and protocols. A specific use case and the discussion that follows are provided to frame the benefits of this strategy. {\textcopyright} 2015 IEEE.

}, keywords = {Basic building block, Cloud providers, Clouds, Complex networks, Infrastructure as a service (IaaS), Inherent complexity, Internet, Internet of Things, Internet of Things (IOT), Network architecture, network virtualization, OpenStack, Virtual reality, Virtualizations, WebSocket}, isbn = {9781509003655}, doi = {10.1109/WF-IoT.2015.7389064}, url = {https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?eid=2-s2.0-84964453184\&doi=10.1109\%2fWF-IoT.2015.7389064\&partnerID=40\&md5=555a2a5aad4f3af24fac04fc0e4a8280}, author = {Giovanni Merlino and Dario Bruneo and Salvatore Distefano and Francesco Longo and Antonio Puliafito} } @proceedings {Merlino2015909, title = {Software defined cities: A novel paradigm for smart cities through IoT clouds}, journal = {Proceedings - 2015 IEEE 12th International Conference on Ubiquitous Intelligence and Computing, 2015 IEEE 12th International Conference on Advanced and Trusted Computing, 2015 IEEE 15th International Conference on Scalable Computing and Communications, 20}, year = {2015}, note = {cited By 1; Conference of Proceedings - 2015 IEEE 12th International Conference on Ubiquitous Intelligence and Computing, 2015 IEEE 12th International Conference on Advanced and Trusted Computing, 2015 IEEE 15th International Conference on Scalable Computing and Communications, 2015 IEEE International Conference on Cloud and Big Data Computing, 2015 IEEE International Conference on Internet of People and Associated Symposia/Workshops, UIC-ATC-ScalCom-CBDCom-IoP 2015 ; Conference Date: 10 August 2015 Through 14 August 2015; Conference Code:122811}, pages = {909-916}, publisher = {Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.}, address = {Beijing (China)}, abstract = {

A Smart City represents an improvement of today cities that strategically exploits many smart factors to increase the city sustainable growth and strengthen city functions, while ensuring citizen quality of life and health. Cities can be perceived as an ecosystem of "things" which citizens daily interact with: street furniture, public buildings, transportation, monuments, public lighting as well as personal smartphones. Thanks to recent advances in ICT such things can be considered always interconnected also providing sensing and actuating facilities according to the Internet of Things and Cyber Physical Systems models. Creating smart services that exploit such a complex infrastructure is a fundamental and current challenge. To this end, aim of this paper is the design and implementation of the Software Defined Cities approach: a Cloud-based infrastructure that, starting from the well known concept of Software Defined paradigms, is able to transform this complex ecosystem in a simple and "programmable" environment where municipalities, companies, scientists, and citizens can easily collaborate in developing innovative smart services. The overall architecture is presented focusing on both the function virtualization and infrastructure aspects also giving details about the software stacks used (e.g., Open Stack) while a use case is laid out to demonstrate the advantages of the proposed approach. {\textcopyright} 2015 IEEE.

}, keywords = {Big Data, Clouds, Complex ecosystems, Complex infrastructures, Cyber physical systems (CPSs), Design and implementations, Ecology, Ecosystems, embedded systems, Internet, Internet of Things, Sensing and actuating, smart cities, Sustainable development, Sustainable growth, Trusted Computing, Ubiquitous computing, Virtual reality, Virtualizations}, isbn = {9781467372114}, doi = {10.1109/UIC-ATC-ScalCom-CBDCom-IoP.2015.174}, url = {https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?eid=2-s2.0-84983438378\&doi=10.1109\%2fUIC-ATC-ScalCom-CBDCom-IoP.2015.174\&partnerID=40\&md5=790a6042e6e80594e42b64695d6b014e}, author = {Giovanni Merlino and Dario Bruneo and Francesco Longo and Antonio Puliafito and Salvatore Distefano} } @proceedings {Longo2015204, title = {Stack4Things: An OpenStack-Based Framework for IoT}, journal = {Proceedings - 2015 International Conference on Future Internet of Things and Cloud, FiCloud 2015 and 2015 International Conference on Open and Big Data, OBD 2015}, year = {2015}, note = {cited By 2; Conference of 3rd International Conference on Future Internet of Things and Cloud, FiCloud 2015 ; Conference Date: 24 August 2015 Through 26 August 2015; Conference Code:117067}, pages = {204-211}, publisher = {Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.}, address = {Rome (Italy)}, abstract = {

In the wake of the massive adoption of embedded systems, mobiles, and other smart devices, as the scope of their involvement keeps broadening, complexity may quickly become overwhelming and vertical ad-hoc solutions will not cut it anymore. We propose to reuse as much tooling as possible, taking into account suitable options with regard to infrastructure management, then piggybacking as much advanced functionalities as possible in such kind of environment. In this sense, a widely used and competitive framework for Infrastructure-as-a-Service such as OpenStack, with its breadth in terms of feature coverage and expanded scope, looks like fitting the bill. This work therefore describes the approach and the solutions so far preliminary implemented for enabling Cloud-mediated interactions with droves of sensor-and actuator-hosting nodes by proposing Stack4Things, a framework for Sensing-and-Actuation-as-a-Service. In particular, we focused on describing the subsystem of Stack4Things devoted to resource control and management, highlighting relevant requirements and justifying how our proposed framework addresses them, while also opening up possibilities for a range of future extensions towards complete fulfillment of the Sensing-and-Actuation-as-a-Service vision. {\textcopyright} 2015 IEEE.

}, keywords = {Big Data, Clouds, embedded systems, Infrastructure as a service (IaaS), Infrastructure managements, Internet, Internet of Things, Mediated interaction, OpenStack, Resource control, SAaaS, Sensor and actuators, WAMP, Web Socket}, isbn = {9781467381031}, doi = {10.1109/FiCloud.2015.97}, url = {https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?eid=2-s2.0-84959059371\&doi=10.1109\%2fFiCloud.2015.97\&partnerID=40\&md5=e702319ada1b2cdde5d5d2061ec278f7}, author = {Francesco Longo and Dario Bruneo and Salvatore Distefano and Giovanni Merlino and Antonio Puliafito} } @article {Longo20152506, title = {Variable operating conditions in distributed systems: Modeling and evaluation}, journal = {Concurrency Computation Practice and Experience}, volume = {27}, number = {10}, year = {2015}, note = {cited By 1}, pages = {2506-2530}, publisher = {John Wiley and Sons Ltd}, abstract = {

SummaryPerformance and dependability evaluation plays a key role in the design of a broad range of systems, especially when strict requirements need to be met. This is particularly challenging in distributed contexts, where several components may interact among themselves by influencing each other. In this paper, we present an analytical method that allows the study of a class of systems where different operating conditions alternate by changing the stochastic behavior of the system components but still preserving the continuity of the performance and dependability quantities to investigate. The proposed solution technique, based on phase type distributions, Kronecker algebra, and ad-hoc fitting algorithms, can be applied for the analytical evaluation of a wide class of distributed systems. Examples are provided to show the usefulness and the applicability of the methodology, characterizing and investigating different performance and dependability aspects of three distributed computing systems, that is, a connection-oriented network, an Internet of Things application, and an Infrastructure-as-a-Service Cloud. Copyright {\textcopyright} 2014 John Wiley \& Sons, Ltd.

}, keywords = {Algebra, cloud computing, Conservative systems, Dependability, Distributed computer systems, Internet, Internet of Things, Kronecker algebra, Markov processes, Non-Markovian, Performance, phase type distributions, Stochastic systems}, issn = {15320626}, doi = {10.1002/cpe.3419}, url = {http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?eid=2-s2.0-84932604392\&partnerID=40\&md5=b8f197a50fa177e85f0c1ac2a93fe392}, author = {Francesco Longo and Dario Bruneo and Salvatore Distefano and Marco Scarpa} } @proceedings {Merlino201521, title = {Stack4Things: Integrating IoT with OpenStack in a Smart City context}, journal = {Proceedings of the 2014 International Conference on Smart Computing Workshops (SMARTCOMP Workshops)}, year = {2014}, note = {cited By 1; Conference of 2014 International Conference on Smart Computing Workshops, SMARTCOMP Workshops 2014 ; Conference Date: 5 November 2014; Conference Code:111083}, pages = {21-28}, publisher = {IEEE Computer Society}, address = {Hong Kong, China, 5 November 2014}, abstract = {

As the adoption of embedded systems, mobiles and other smart devices keeps rising, and the scope of their involvement broadens, for instance in the enablement of Smart City-like scenarios, a pressing need emerges to tame such complexity and reuse as much tooling as possible without resorting to vertical ad-hoc solutions, while at the same time taking into account valid options with regards to infrastructure management, and other more advanced functionalities. In this sense, a widely used and competitive framework for Infrastructure as a Service such as OpenStack, with its breadth in terms of feature coverage and expanded scope, looks like fitting the bill. This work thus describes rationale, efforts, and results so far achieved, for an integration of IoT paradigms and resource ecosystems with such a kind of Cloud-oriented environment, by focusing on a Smart City scenario, and featuring data collection and visualization as example use cases of such integration. {\textcopyright} 2014 IEEE.

}, keywords = {AMQP, Ceilometer, CEP, Clouds, CoAP, data visualization, embedded systems, IaaS, Infrastructure as a service (IaaS), Internet of Things, IoT, Meteorological instruments, MOM, OpenStack, REST, smart cities}, isbn = {9781479964475}, doi = {10.1109/SMARTCOMP-W.2014.7046678}, url = {http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?eid=2-s2.0-84925651440\&partnerID=40\&md5=d36947c633a2c7b011bffa40aa32db9f}, author = {Giovanni Merlino and Dario Bruneo and Salvatore Distefano and Francesco Longo and Antonio Puliafito} }