A Scalable Cloud-Sensor Architecture for the Internet of Things

Recent advances in IoT and pervasive and ubiquitous computing provide a glimpse into our future and reveal exciting visions of many “smart” things: smart cities, smart homes, smart cars, all in addition to smart spaces such as malls, workplaces, hotels, schools, and much more. Driven by a technological revolution offering “low-power many things and wireless almost everything”, we could, in only a decade, envision and prototype impressive smart space systems that improve quality of life, enhance awareness of resources and the environment, and enrich users’ experience. But prototyping is one thing; actual large-scale deployments are another. The massive scale of sensors and devices that will be deployed in highly populated smart cities of the future will be mind-boggling. Without an ecosystem and a scalable architecture in place, it will be difficult to manage or program such an expanding and massive IoT.

In this talk, I will begin by raising the point about how we can estimate the Value of the IoT as we once estimated the value of the network. I will then introduce the Cloud-Edge-Beneath (CEB) architecture and present its salient scalability features. I will also discuss CEB’s bi-directional waterfall optimization framework and show how it leads to “sentience-efficiency” – a new paradigm for realizing aggressive energy-efficiency. I will then present an event-driven programming model based on CEB and show how this model and CEB when combined foster a much-needed IoT programmability ecosystem. Finally, I will present a validation study demonstrating CEB’s scaling behavior in face of IoT expansions (sensors and applications) and under dynamically increasing loads.

Speaker Details

Sumi Helal is Professor in the CISE Department at the University of Florida, and Director of its Mobile and Pervasive Computing Laboratory. He is co-founder and Director of the Gator Tech Smart House, a large project that aims to identify key barriers and corresponding technological solutions to make the Smart Home concept a common place (creating the “Smart Home in a Box” concept). He has recently been awarded a Finland Distinguished Professorship – FiDiPro (2011-2014) and a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies at the University of Bologna, Italy. His active areas of research focus on pervasive and ubiquitous systems and their human-centric applications. Specifically he and his research team investigate middleware, programming models and methodologies, and architectural issues to define and support the entire lifecycle of smart spaces including city-scale deployments. More recently, he and his students have been exploring architectural and ecosystem issues surrounding the emerging IoT. From 2001-2207, Professor Helal served as Director of Technology Development of the University of Florida Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center (RERC) on Aging and Independence. He is co-founder of the IEEE Pervasive Computing magazine and has served on its editorial board since 2002. He recently served as IEEE Pervasive Computing’s Associate Editor-in-Chief. He currently serves as the Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Computer, the Computer Society’s flagship and premier publication. He founded two startups: Phoneomena, Inc. (2002-2007) and Pervasa, Inc., (2006-2011) and is inventor or co-inventor on 9 published US patents. Professor Helal is a Fellow of the IEEE.