Scalable Cloud-Sensor Architecture for Smart City Deployments

Sumi Helal

University of Florida

Recent advances in mobile and pervasive computing provide a glimpse into our future and reveal exciting visions of many “smarts”: smart homes, smart cities, workplaces, hotels, schools, hospitals, and much more. Driven by a technological revolution offering extremely low-power, wirelessly connected internet of things (IoT), we can now envision and prototype impressive systems and applications to improve health and quality of life, assist the elderly and the disabled, enhance awareness of resources and the environment, enable resource sustainability, and enrich user experience.

Today, as we begin to understand many of the complex interplays between technology, users, real-world applications, and theory, we are better positioned to move beyond envisioning and prototyping, to advance critical ecosystem enablers for programming massive IoT deployments. Such an ecosystem is necessary for the realization of smart city concepts, and for the anticipated disruptive transformations of many industries, including healthcare, eldercare, transportation, consumer electronics, energy, and facilities and assets management.

In this talk, I will start by raising the thought of how can we begin to estimate the Value of any IoT deployment as we once estimated the value of the network. I will then introduce the Cloud-Edge-Beneath (CEB) architecture and present its salient scalability features. I will also present CEB’s bi-directional waterfall optimization framework and show how it is based on novel optimization principles, including “sentience-efficiency”. I will then present an event-driven programming model based on CEB and show how the model and CEB combined foster a much-needed IoT programmability ecosystem. Finally, I will present a validation study demonstrating CEB’s scaling behavior in face of IoT expansions (in terms of devices (horizontal growth) as well as applications (vertical growth)) and under dynamically increasing loads.

Biography - Sumi Helal (sumi.helal@gmail.com)isProfessor in the CISE Department at the University of Florida, and Director of its Mobile and Pervasive Computing Laboratory. He is co-founder and Director of the Gator Tech Smart House, a real-world deployment project that aims to identify key barriers and corresponding technological solutions to make the Smart Home concept a common place (creating the “Smart Home in a Box” concept). He has recently been awarded a Finland Distinguished Professorship - FiDiPro (2011-2014). His active areas of research focus on pervasive and ubiquitous systems and their human-centric applications. Specifically he and his research team investigate middleware, programming models, and architectural issues to define and support the entire lifecycle of smart spaces including city-scale deployments. More recently, he and his students have been exploring architectural and ecosystem issues surrounding the emerging IoT. Specifically, he is pursuing novel programming models and ecosystem enablers for the IoT. From 2001-2007, Professor Helal served as Director of Technology Development of the University of Florida Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center (RERC) on Aging and Independence. He is co-founder of the IEEE Pervasive Computing magazine and has served on its editorial board since 2002. He currently serves as the Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Computer, the Computer Society’s flagship and premier publication. He founded or co-founded three startups: Phoneomena, Inc. (2002-2007, mobile middleware company), Pervasa, Inc., (2006-2011, sensor and device integration middleware company) and Spaceify Oy (2015, smart space middleware company). He is inventor or co-inventor on 9 published US patents. Professor Helal is a Fellow of the IEEE.