The deployment of pervasive and large-scale IoT systems and applications poses several problems, including interoperability and expenditure ones.
Interoperability problems arise because there is not, yet, a wide-scale consensus about which is the ultimate IoT standard for devices and/or data. Although there is an ongoing, valuable, global standardization effort, especially on the data access perspective, ranging from oneM2M, to FIWARE NGSIv2, to ETSI Context Information Management and NGSI-LD (just to name a few of the most relevant initiatives), many IoT systems use proprietary interfaces, still. Lack of interoperability leads to vendor lock-in, which, on the one hand, makes it costly for a service provider to switch between competing vendors and, on the other hand, limits the type (and potentially the number) of IoT devices that can be integrated in a production system to those provided by a specific vendor (or supporting a specific interface).
Expenditure problems arise because it is expensive to deploy and manage the high volume of sensors that is necessary to create pervasive and intelligent applications, such as smart city ones. The cloud computing paradigm gradually solved this issue for the generic ICT domain, by means of virtualization technologies for sharing computing, storage, and networking resources that are made available by the cloud provider. In the IoT domain, such a decoupling between infrastructure providers and infrastructure users doesn't exist, yet. An IoT service provider is usually also the owner of the supporting IoT infrastructure (i.e. the sensors, actuators, the dedicated wireless networks, the data brokers, etc...) leading to a so-called "IoT silo", just to emphasize the closed and application-specific behavior of the overall system. The deployment and management cost of a silo might discourage many service providers or private users even for small-scale applications, and large-scale systems would definitely be affordable to a small number of large corporations only. Fair competition is thus prevented and, even worse, the innovation pace, which is fast when thousands of small stakeholders take the field, is slowed down, instead.
The Fed4IoT project focuses strong solutions to the expenditure and interoperability issues, by introducing novel "IoT virtualization" technologies.
The project is organized in 5 work packages (WPs):
- WP1: Project Management, Dissemination and Exploitation
- WP2: Fed4IoT System
- WP3: Virtual IoT infrastructures
- WP4: IoT smart-city information/knowledge sharing
- WP5: Integration, deployment, validation and pilots
