Event-based sensor data exchange and fusion in the Internet of Things environments

• Published in: Journal of parallel and distributed computing Vol. 118; pp. 328 - 343
• Main Authors: Esposito, Christian, Castiglione, Aniello, Palmieri, Francesco, Ficco, Massimo, Dobre, Ciprian, Iordache, George V., Pop, Florin
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier Inc 01.08.2018
• Subjects: Automatic schema matching; Beaconing; Publish/subscribe service; Sensor data fusion; Theory of evidence; Trust management; Theory of evidence; Beaconing; Automatic schema matching; Sensor data fusion; Publish/subscribe service; Trust management
• ISSN: 0743-7315; 1096-0848
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jpdc.2017.12.010

Internet of Things (IoT) is a promising technology for improving our lives and society by integrating smart devices in our environment and paving the way for novel ICT application, spanning from smart cities to energy efficiency and home automation. However, such a vision encompasses the availability of thousands of smart devices, or even more, that continuously exchange a huge volume of data among each other and with cloud-based services, raising a big data problem. Such a problem can be approached by properly applying data fusion practices within an IoT infrastructure. Due to the characteristics and peculiarities of the communications among smart devices within the IoT, an event-based data fusion is needed, where devices exchange notifications of events among each others. Such data fusion should be focused on special devices where notification heterogeneity, and data source trust issues have to be faced with. Accordingly, the contribution of this work is proposing (i) a novel broker-less event-based communication protocol specifically tailored to sensors with constrained resources, (ii) a solution for flexible event-based communications among heterogeneous data sources, and (iii) an approach based on the theory of evidence for data fusion processes that depend on the matching and trust degree of the data to be fused. •A event-based data fusion, where heterogeneous devices exchange notifications of events among each other.•A solution for stream processing.•A new approach for sensor communications integrated it in the publish/subscribe service that we have designed and simulated within the context of a sensing infrastructure.