Project: Hacia la continuidad de servicios emergentes a partir de objetos inteligentes basados en IOT (PERSEIDES)



In Greek mythology, the Perseides, ''those born of Perseus and Andromeda'', are the members of the House of Perseus. After the Greek Dark Ages, tradition recalled that Perseus and his descendants the Perseides had ruled Tiryns in Mycenaean times. This period of Greek history is the historical setting of much ancient Greek literature and myth, including the epics of Homer. In the same way that the PERSEIDES give rise to a new era of knowledge, with the project we propose the global challenge of leveraging the current research on IoT data management for smart city applications, and evolve to a new stage where techniques coming from the EDISON project based on deep learning and fuzzy logic can be used for better fitting user needs and IoT service provision. PERSEIDES is based on the Context Awareness paradigm to support continuity of user smart city services by including heterogeneous communication technologies and fog/MEC computing. PERSEIDES deals mostly with the challenge ''(7) economy and digital society'' of the Spanish Government Plan of Scientific-technical Research and Innovation 2013-2016. To cover this challenge the project aims at integrating citizens in the new context of smart cities and, in general, in stationary and moving smart spaces. For this to be done, new systems and devices will be prepared to use ambient intelligence techniques to perceive and take advantage of the user context and, hence, provide novel services. Moreover, this digital inclusion of citizens will be performed through a proper security framework adapted to IoT-powered environments. PERSEIDES also deals with the challenge ''(4) intelligent, sustainable and integrated transport'' because of that objective of offering seamless service access across smart spaces by using smart transportation and IoV, especially covering green transport means. The challenge ''(8) security, protection and defense'' is also considered in PERSEIDES, given the cybersecurity issues to be solved by the cryptography and privacy preservation proposal included in the project, which are adapted to IoT devices and cloud entities of the architecture. European's Horizon 2020 research framework motivates research on the project topic in its call ''smart cities and communities'', strengthening the development of more sustainable integrated solutions to improve urban life, including higher energy efficiency, better transport solutions and intelligent use of ICT. In a transversal way, the project topic expands across several LEIT-ICT challenges (smart systems integration, cyber-physical systems, smart networks or data analytics) and brings together different generic ICT technologies (sensor/actuation, wireless networks, low-power and distributed computing, and adaptive and cognitive systems) and their stakeholder constituencies. Their applicability across multiple application domains in the form of common smart spaces (e.g. smart farms or smart buildings) and the emergent ones with moving requirements (e.g. regular vehicles or green transport means) bridges the gap to applications-specific developments under the H2020 Societal Challenges.

Objectives -

The global challenges of PERSEIDES will be reached through the following objectives:

O1:  Expand EDISON platform solution with MEC and fog functions to support schemes of distributed computing on the basis of smart services and applications. The design will necessarily make use of virtualization technologies for accomplishing this goal.

O2: Heterogeneous end-devices integration. Developing a common platform for hosting different-nature end-nodes and RATs within the RAN. That platform should present the correspondent APIs for permitting the interoperation among the different technologies, legacy systems and communication protocols within the deployed ecosystem. This objective includes the development of network-slicing and RAN resource management.

O3: Adaptation of well-aligned CA and DM technologies to perceive and adapt contextual changes in MEC and fog architectures for service adaptation. Extension of the context concept beyond the physical environment towards other aspects related to the communication and processing capabilities of different entities of interest (vehicles, smartphones) inherent to such architectures.

O4: Seamless and hybrid indoor/outdoor positioning system, based on middleware to be used by personal devices as a monolithic resource dealing with an extensible number of communication technologies and algorithms, and including the infrastructure support for locating users. Error estimates will allow the selection of the most convenient positioning source at each moment.

O5:  Seamless IoT connectivity on board traditional and green transportation means. Exploit the notion of the transport mean as a new smart space through two main technological enablers: seamless connectivity and IoT sensing/actuation considering IoV networking.

O6:  Interoperable and semantics-aware identification and access control. To provide interoperable security and privacy by linking existing access control approaches to semantic models based on the use of OMA NGSI.

O7:  Citizens' empowerment for managing personal data disclosure. To provide a policy-based approach based on existing standards, and integration with consent mechanisms to manage how user data is exchanged, and under which circumstances.

O8:  Fog assistance for distributing cryptographic processing. To design schemes to enable end devices to offload cryptographic processing in a secure and trustworthy manner.

O9:  Design and build an experimental platform to test continuous services opportunistically provided across a set of smart spaces, and specifically to considerate the provision of services when moving between indoor and outdoor smart spaces while offering a context of trusting edge/fog computing.


The PERSEIDES challenges in the areas of distributed computing and the need for continuous and seamless access to smart services on the move, were particularly identified in the development of the EDISON project, while the lines in data mining for context awareness and security/privacy greatly extend the work carried out in frames of this concluding project. In order to reach the previous objectives, PERSEIDES bets on an overall architecture to provide novel services across different smart spaces, as depicted in Figure 1. In this architecture, the above objectives are stamped as technological enablers from both vertical (from users/sensors to cloud/services) and horizontal perspectives (across smart spaces). The four main research pillars of the proposal are mapped into the work packages 1 to 4 detailed in the next part, where all the objectives are developed in detail. The outcomes of the EDISON project are reflected in the integration of the intelligent data analytics framework (in grey) to be improved in PERSEIDES and installed now in a distributed manner at the fog, edge and cloud elements of the architecture. Dotted layers will be used especially at cloud level. In general, the final aim of the system is to take advantage of distributed computing to offer next generation services to itinerary users on the basis of multi-level context determination and a holistic security approach. The final scenario envisaged in the project considers an integrated demonstrator where users move between smart spaces like smart buildings or open Smart City environments, and maintain seamless access to contextual services. It should be noted that the integrated use case and partial smart space deployments are supported by the availability of data either from the different projects where UMU is involved and also due to the EPOs that will support the project, like Tranvía de Murcia, Estrella Levante, Duvanet, OdinS, or the local administration of Murcia. In the same way, new final applications to be developed in PERSEIDES will count the EPOs to assure their usefulness and study their future transference to the market.