C-BRAIN-2018-2019-2: Unified Communications and Contextualization in IoT (thesis proposal rehearsal)

Presenter: Daniel Maniglia Silva, NEMPS PhD Student, Jr researcher

TITLE: Unified Communications and Contextualization in IoT (thesis proposal rehearsal)

ABSTRACT:

The generic IoT definition concerns “a global infrastructure for the
information society, enabling services by interconnecting (physical and
virtual) things based on existing and evolving interoperable information
and communication technologies”. Nevertheless, today IoT still concerns
the network of everyday objects that can collect and transmit data via a
network, often the internet. One of the major limitations to the evolution
of the concept is the fact that the transmission over IoT is not trivial, due
not only to a large number of devices, as well as due to the heterogeneity
of hardware and software involved. Hence, the natural evolution of IoT
requires an adequate interconnection of three different aspects: i) smart
cyber-physical systems; ii) contextualization derived from data analytics
and predictive analysis; iii) smart connectivity. By smart connectivity
it is meant that the notion of connectivity does not imply that devices
need to be always connected to the internet. For instance, specific sets
of devices can connect opportunistically, derived from local connectivity
opportunities, not necessarily implying internet connectivity.
The notion of unified communications is therefore a key point in IoT.
Today, it is still being worked mostly from a TCP/IP perspective where
overlay models and protocols assist, via brokers, in delivering information
across heterogeneous environments.
Another trend being explored concerns information Centric Network-
ing. Here, the intention is that the end-points of the communication get
access to named content without direct mapping to transport sessions at
the origin.
Therefore, there is yet no standardized nor unified Information Com-
munication Technology (ICT) model, capable of sustaining not only mil-
lions of heterogeneous devices, as well as: bi-directional communication
towards people and devices.
Despite the complexity derived from such heterogeneity and the lack
of a unified communication system, there are aspects that can be worked
upon. One of such aspects is to take into consideration, at a network
1level, context that surrounds users and that can assist in better defining
opportunities for data transmission over time, and space, i.e., contextual
awareness at the network layers. Such opportunities may be better ad-
dressed, for instance, if routing metrics take into consideration levels of
contextual awareness derived from usage (applications) as well as from
the neighborhood (network).
Such contextual awareness can assist in better distribution of caching;
more relevant naming aggregation, as well as in a more efficient data
transmission in the context of large-scale scenarios.
This thesis proposal is expected to be focused in such aspects, namely:
how can contextualization be used to assist and acelerate de understanding
of alternative unified communication models for IoT.