=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-2247/poster12
|storemode=property
|title=Heimdall - Internet of Things (IoT) Platform for Data Retrieval
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2247/poster12.pdf
|volume=Vol-2247
|authors=Gabriel Martins de Oliveira Costa,Marcos Araujo,Tiago Cruz de França,Claudio Miceli de Farias
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/vldb/CostaAFF18
}}
==Heimdall - Internet of Things (IoT) Platform for Data Retrieval ==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2247/poster12.pdf
Heimdall: a plataform to empower common IoT
services into a smart ecosystem
Gabriel Martins1 , Marcos Vinicius Monteiro Araujo1 , Tiago C. de França2 , and
Claudio M. de Farias1
1
Federal University of Rio de Janeiro
2
Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro
{gmoc, marcos.araujo}@labnet.nce.ufrj.br,
{cmicelifarias,tcruz.franca}@gmail.com
Abstract. The emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm
fuel the discussion of how urban environments will benefit from applica-
tions of the IoT domain, to name a few, smart grids, smart vertical farm
and healthcare applications. Domains likewise vertical smart farm are
envisioned to share the same space as people and machines even if hu-
midity and temperature conditions required to grow plants are not ideal
to systems room, nor to workplaces, which make the design of these envi-
ronments even more challenging. Under this point of view more complex
concepts such as smart ecosystems (smart cities, smart agriculture and
Industry 4.0) flourished. There is still a lack of IoT solutions to integrate
services rising new and customized applications. Heimdall is a microser-
vices platform that aim to provide comprehensive services allowing users
to storage and visualize data streams gathered by IoT systems. Built to
explore continuous integration tools, Heimdall is envision to run a flexi-
ble and powerful infrastructure able to provide elastic resource. In other
words, Heimdall is a solution to power smart ecosystems.
Keywords: smart ecosystem, smart environment, IoT microservices.
1 Introduction
The Internet of Things (IoT) is related to the interconnection of sensing and
actuating devices (named smart objects) with the Internet [1] [2]. Some concepts
benefit highly from the IoT perspective such as smart city in urban areas [5],
smart farming, smart agriculture and precision agriculture in countryside [7],
and industry 4.0 [4].
The Smart City concept support the ideal of a city where investments in hu-
man/social capital, technology and infrastructure fuel sustainable development,
enhanced quality of life and culture exchange built by independent and aware cit-
izens [6]. IoT systems for urban areas enhance the efficiency of the management
of key resources such as water and energy as well as urban mobility, accessibility
services, among others. From countryside areas, the management of farming cy-
cle supports proprietary systems that turn possible big stakeholders to become
Copyright held by the author(s)
2 Martins et al.
part of a highly integrated food supply chain or small urban collaborative sys-
tems of indoor urban production sites supported by a smart delivery system [7].
For the industry, IoT has a key role for a new revolution which is leading us to
the industry 4.0 [4]. Industry 4.0 concept foresee the possibility of elastic supply,
from which any product demand becomes feasible to attend. The objective is
manage real-time interactions between people, products and devices during the
production process [4]. In other words, factories may accept consumer orders,
directly produces and deliver it without the aid of separate sales and circulation
channels.
A common ground among these concepts is the aggregate value provided by
the collaboration of connected small world composed of smart objects working
collaboratively to enhance the quality of human lives [3]. With emergence of
new and easier to use products the demand for more complex smart objects
interactions grow. Over this viewpoint, despite of the existence of a reference
architecture and solution addressing the interoperability issue, IoT interactions
afford little dynamism when compared to social networks. The Social IoT (SIoT)
proposal is the adoption of human relationship patterns to enable smart objects
to build relationships molding smart environment into social networks [14]. The
desired result is able to unfold and exploit synergies that favors the creation of
ecosystems composed of smart objects enabling them to interact dynamically in
a way that both the smart objects and its users can benefit mutually.
Indeed, city, countryside and industry demand different solutions of IoT.
These solutions should work together in the interest of collaborating as part of
an ecosystems. Therefore, it will possible to reach more complex and suitable
IoT services. However, there is still a lack of scalable easy to use platform as an
environment to support the design of IoT solutions and also aim the creation of
smart objects ecosystems able to make feasible the aforementioned abstraction.
This paper provides a holistic view over the enable technologies of the above
mentioned scenario and the thought behind Heimdall, a Microservices platform
envisioned to support the creation of IoT ecosystems in a scalable, reusable and
flexible way. The Heimdall proposition is then a reference to platform to support
IoT ecosystems. This paper is organized as follow. Section 2 provides a overview
on enable technologies. Section 3 discuss existing cloud related products. In
Section 4 we present the thought behind Heimdall, section 5 provides future
works and a final remarks.
2 Enabling Technologies
Over the last decade a series of cutting edge technologies have been aggregated to
the IoT spectrum. This section present a rapid overview on enabling technologies
of the IoT paradigm. These technologies are commonly clustered into two main
groups (i) smart objects (e.g. sensors, actuators and embedded communication
hardware) and (ii) analytics solutions (on demand storage and data analytics
technologies over a cloud computing infrastructure).
Heimdall: a plataform to empower IoT ecosystem 3
2.1 Smart Objects Solutions
Under the things oriented point of view RFID, NFC tags, wireless sensor net-
works (WSN) and mobile technologies are among the most promising technolo-
gies to enable the data acquisition and networking layer of the IoT [1] [2]. RFID
and NFC are technology that allows the identification of anything that they at-
tached. NFC technology connects mobile devices through a wireless link that can
send small amounts of data. The applications of the NFC technologies include
their use as a secret digital token to unlock booked rooms, start a car, enable
payments, and so on [10].
WSNs are composed of large number of low cost, low power miniature devices
communicating in a wireless multihop fashion. WSNs are able to collect, process
environmental data and act based on sensed behavior. WSNs (wireless sensor
network) are usually featured as fit-for-purpose network designed to attend the
requirements of previously known application. Due to its versatile feature, WSNs
are envisioned to play an essential role making critical infrastructure components
responsible to acquire and semantically improve data, as well as, it provide in-
teroperability with other technologies.
Through the usage of participatory and opportunistic sensing strategies com-
bined with infrastructure-based transmission or opportunistic transmission tech-
nologies, the Crowd Sensing paradigm appears as a powerful approach to em-
body human participation into the IoT paradigm[11][12]. Participatory sens-
ing presume the proactive participation of humans that consciously decide to
share its information meeting the applications requests. The opportunistic sens-
ing run in the background exploiting the sensor units of the mobile devices to
collect data without active involvement of users. Regarding transmission tech-
nologies, infrastructure-based transmission the reports are sent with the aid of
an enterprise network infrastructure (3G and 4G technologies). In Opportunis-
tic transmission scenario data is conveyed through intermittent connections with
short-range radio communications (wifi and bluetooth technologies). Therefore,
crowdsensing consists in the acquisition of information regarding human activity
from agents that are widely spread through the monitored environment. Thus
enabling access to data that is essential to the recognition of patterns in the
human use of smart environments [11] [12].
2.2 Analytics Solutions
Decision making is a process supported by a multifaceted spectrum of technolo-
gies and processes. Thus, Society and organizations are manage by planning.
From the massive amount of unstructured and heterogeneous data collected
about people, actions, sensors and the web arises the challenge to efficiently
manage, analyze and visualize it. A consequence of this are dramatic impacts of
societal and organizational decision making. According to [13], the Cloud Com-
puting paradigm provides fundamental support to address the challenges with
shared computing resources including computing, storage, networking and an-
alytical software; the application of these resources has fostered impressive Big
4 Martins et al.
Data advancement. Over the years some approaches for a IoT Cloud based plat-
form were made. With focus in providing a service able to extract aggregated
value from IoT based solutions Amazon created a set of cloud based products.
Among them, AWS IoT Core is a platform that provides interfaces to aid final
users manage its IoT devices. The main objective is to allow secure connec-
tion of IoT devices and Cloud Computing applications. Amazon FreeRTOS is
an operating system for microcontrollers. AWS FreeRTOS aim to facilitate the
programing, deployment, connecting and management of small low-end edge de-
vices. AWS IoT 1-Click is a service made over lambda architecture that enable
low-end devices to perform simple tasks. Empowered with publisher-subscribe
protocols Google Cloud IoT is a set of integrated services that encompass se-
cure exchange and storage of IoT data into the Google Cloud environment with
the objective to use Google Big Query to perform data analytics. Dweet is an
online news and social networking service for IoT on which devices post chunks
of information in a publisher-subscribe manner. The platform provides a simple
web api that enable the user to visualize its things posted information as short
messages.
3 The Heimdall Platform
The emergence of IoT Ecosystem is envisioned to transform the environment
and the way society organizes itself [6]. From the emergence of interconnected
small environment with sensor-enabled connected devices and built in learning
capabilities enables the recognition on how people interact with surrounding en-
vironment and how everyday activities are perform are inexorable. Nevertheless,
to make feasible such scenario key challenges are yet to be overcome. One of then
concern how everyday objects became components of a more complex and more
powerful network of systems, a network of smart environment (smart objects as
part of an Ecosystem) in order to contribute to increase quality of life.
Heimdall is envision as a Ecosystem that reunites favorable conditions for the
SIoT paradigm flourish. Inspired by biological systems, Figure 1 shows how abet
the development of a community made up of organisms interacting and collabo-
rating in a common environment. In biology, an ecosystem is a unit flooded by
different organisms that share the same habitat resources [15]. With the objec-
tive of making these integration feasible, Heimdall proposes that the ecosystem
environment must be a series of microservices which constitute a series of compo-
nents that promote flexible and scalable cloud solutions. Such organisms interact
and collaborate with each other according to their interest to reach individual or
collective objectives. Analogously, Heimdall represent the things (the IoT smart
objects) as resources which are Heimdall organisms. The things can be a stan-
dalone sensor, a WSN, and IoT system for a smart home and so on. To enhance
the IoT services, the interaction and collaboration have an important role, be-
cause better results (services in IoT context) are obtained in network than by
an individual or a small group [14]. Then, Heimdall adopts the SIoT paradigm
as the model for interactions among smart objects, because social networks pro-
Heimdall: a plataform to empower IoT ecosystem 5
Fig. 1. Heimdall Platform
vides dynamic, robust and flexible models of interactions that can provides a
new level of network for objects. Contrary to social network that motivated web
applications (called social media) to support human interactions, in the IoT con-
text the objects where connected first in the Internet, some service where made
and then the SIoT proposes is adopt humans interactions models to enhance the
interactions, collaboration and services provided by IoT.
The Heimdall platform is the habitat that will favor the creation of these
ecosystems and benefits that services as data collector, database, data visualiza-
tion, data fusion and others, can be provided, shared and improved progressively.
Heimdall microservices are images that can be instantiated to compose a resource
in Heimdall. Therefore, a repository service to registry and search microservice
should be available. Then, the resources can interact with any other resource
though the adoption of specialized communication microservices. As an example
of microservice benefits, as the SIoT solutions are being made available, they
can also be improved, adapted and shared as microservices. We should point
out that this example also motivated the enhance of SIoT, since give human
interaction skill to objects are a complex task that requires hard work.
4 Final Considerations
This paper depict some motivations and challenges related to IoT ecosystem and
how IoT services could be enhanced when they share a common environment
that provide them which interact and collaborating. A microservice platform
to support IoT ecosystem (named Heimdall) was also presented and its key
aspect was described. Heimdall is a reference microservices platform to support
IoT ecosystems in a scalable, reusable and flexible way. At the same time, a
platform as Heimdall allows users focus manly on the IoT solutions on the level
of devices, since they will just need instantiate microservice Heimdall’s images.
We aim contributing to fuel the development of complex Smart Concepts (smart
6 Martins et al.
ecosystems), in turn, the unfolding the full potential of the SIoT paradigm. As
future works we intend to explore the depicted challenges.
As threats to the validity of Heimdall the scarcity of SIoT concrete and good
enough solutions and the need of the creation of diverse microservice images use-
ful are important to highlight. As future work we hope to improve the Heimdall
repository and turns it available. To do this, we have to define some constraints
about basic features and interfaces for all new image before they are inserted in
the repository. Besides, nowadays the instantiation of images are made through
service that requires an expertise. So, an easy to use interface will be created to
any user to be able to instantiate microservice images.
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