Internet of Things
J.UCS Special Issue
Daqiang Zhang
(Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing, China
Institute Mines Telecom, SudParis, France
dqzhang@ieee.org)
Huansheng Ning
(Beihang University, Beijing, China
ninghuansheng@buaa.edu.cn)
Kevin S. Xu
(Changzhou University, Changzhou, China
jpuxsk@gmail.com)
Feiyu Lin
(Jönköping University, Jönköping, Sweden
feiyu.lin@gmail.com)
Laurence T. Yang
(St. Francis Xavier University, Vancouver, Canada
ltyang@gmail.com)
The Internet of Things refers to a networked interconnection of
everyday objects (including users), thus enabling objects not only for
beings to interact and cooperate with each other anytime and
anyplace. It extends the Internet into the physical world such that
objects can be managed remotely and act as physical access points to
Internet services. The Internet of Things transforms the manner we
perform everyday activities by real-time tracking physical
objects. Correspondingly, it opens up tremendous opportunities for
economy and individuals, accompanying immense technical challenges and
risks.
The Internet of Things systems find direct applicability in a wide
range of areas and disciplines. The two typical areas of the Internet
of Things are:
- wireless and mobile sensing, tracking and networking, enabling
distributed system of numerous sensors, actuators, mobile devices
and RFID to identify and manage things and satisfy application
requirements
- intelligent transport systems that embed communication and
computation capabilities with tracking and controlling vehicles in
physical world to handle various challenges imposed on efficient,
green and safe transportation
This special issue aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the
state-of-the-art development in technology, application, and
standardization in the field of Internet of Things, and presents an
insight of future research directions and challenges in the Internet
of Things. It also provides an opportunity for the researchers in IoT
to know their counterpart work, thus facilitating further
communication and cooperation. This special issue totally got 22
submissions, and only accepted 8 papers. The acceptance rate is around
36%. It initiated a three-round review process for each submission
lasting for seven months, in which each submission was reviewed by at
least three reviewers. The selected submissions cover a variety of
perspective about Internet of Things. Contributions of these
submissions are summarized as follows.
Huang et al. investigated the vehicular ad hoc networks and their
applications for Internet of Things. They took the movements and
behaviors of vehicles into consideration, and then extracted a
mobility model for vehicles from a large amount of real taxi GPS
traces data collected in metropolitan scenarios. With this mobility
model, the authors further reproduced the synthetic traces and
validated their usage in intelligent transport systems.
Lin et al. at Jönköping University, Sweden, regarded that
context-awareness was a key technique to enable Internet of Things to
serve users without their knowledge about underlying
technologies. They incorporated the context modeling and matching into
automatic ontology matching process, and proposed a context-based
ontology matching scheme. They demonstrated the efficiency of the
proposed scheme across a series of cases.
Ning et al. emphasized their work on the authentication problem in the
shift from the Unit Internet of Things to Ubiquitous Internet of
Things. They come up with an authentication scheme based on directed
paths (DPAS) to achieve confidentiality, integrity, anonymity and
forward security. DPAS consisted of a directed path descriptor,
cross-network authentication and the proof mapping. The experimental
results showed that DPAS was appropriate to applications in Internet
of Things, yet accompanying moderate communication overheads and
computation workloads.
Chen et al. at Waseda University, Japan, proposed a framework to
facilitate individualized learning through sharing successful learning
processes in Internet of Things. The proposed framework was built on
top of the dynamic Bayesian Networks that adapts to the targeted
student's requirements. It identified that most students exhibited
strong preference to some certain learning patterns in several
learning activities. With the findings, the authors infer the
students' goals, and reported a goal-driven navigation of
individualized learning process.
Predic and Stojanovic at University of Nis, Serbia, conducted a
research on the crucial traffic event detection in Internet of
Things. They firstly explored the usage of a great many of anonymous
mobile and embedded devices involved in the road navigation. Then,
they proposed a scheme using the acceleration sensors integrated into
mobile devices to detect crucial traffic events and disseminate the
events to other drivers with proactive traffic information systems in
an efficient and timely manner.
Xingang Liu et al. studied the intraframe video coding in wireless
multimedia services provided in Internet of Things. They put forward
an intra mode decision algorithm so as to reduce the computation
complexity of intraframe H.264/AVC encoders, which determined the
candidate modes and skipped the rest of modes according to the
smoothness and directional similarity of MB. Evaluation results showed
the 18% up to 70% improvement in computation complexity, compared with
the conventional methods.
Qiang Liu et al. proposed a network planning process for WiMAX-R
network, which could be regarded as a typical application of Internet
of Things. The proposed process consists of: WiMAX-R network
architecture analysis, railway communication applications QoS
parameters analysis, DL/UL link budget calculation, BS coverage
calculation, capacity planning and network simulation
validation. Simulations demonstrated that the proposed planning
process achieved good performance in WiMAX-R networks with respect to
QoS and communications.
Qian et al. identified the new challenges raised in Internet of Things
owing to the large-scale searching space, the movement of things, the
locality of searching behaviors and the cross-domain authentication
requirements. These challenges initiated five research thrusts -
architectural design, search locality, real-time, scalability and
divulging information. On top of these challenging issues, the authors
further reported their undertaking work - a security-enhanced search
engine for Internet of Things. For each identified challenge, they
introduced some mechanisms to ensure the solution to that
challenge. For example, they extended the Eliptic Curve Cryptography
to achieve security in cross-domain applications in Internet of
Things. Finally, the authors reported their preliminary experimental
results.
We would like to take this opportunity to thank the Editor-in-Chief
for making the possibility of this issue. We also thank Ms. Dana
Kaiser for her guidance in terms of camera ready preparation and the
review process. We would also like to thank the authors for their
excellent contributions. Finally, we express our deepest gratitude to
the invited reviewers for their valuable and timely reviews. With
their comments, we could make the selection and decision.
Daqiang Zhang, Nanjing, China
Huansheng Ning, Beijing, China
Kevin S. Xu, Changzhou, China
Feiyu Lin, Jönköping, Sweden
Laurence T. Yang, Vancouver, Canada
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