The Internet of Things is evolving around a plethora of vertical platforms, each specifically suited to a given scenario and often adopting proprietary communications, device and resource control protocols. The emerging need for crossdomain IoT applications and services highlights the necessity of interoperability across IoT platforms for a unified and secure sharing of and access to sensing/actuating resources. This position paper describes the current state of the IoT landscape, the opportunities that appear towards its sustainable evolution as well as the challenges that need to be addressed. In this context, the vision and objectives of the H2020 symbIoTe project are also presented; symbIoTe aims at the interoperability of IoT platforms by offering a flexible interoperability framework that will allow i) vertical IoT platforms to cooperate, ii) collaborative IoT platforms to form IoT-platform federations for exchange of resources and iii) independent developers to create innovative and cross-domain applications.

This paper proposes Adaptive Multi-Path routing (AMP) as a simple algorithm for dynamic traffic engineering within autonomous systems. In contrast to related multipath routing proposals, AMP does not employ a global perspective of the network in each node. It restricts available information to a local scope, which opens the potential of reducing signaling overhead and memory consumption in routers. Having implemented AMP in ns-2, the algorithm is compared to standard routing strategies for a realistic simulation scenario. The results demonstrate the stability of AMP as well as the significant performance gains achieved.

We present the TOTEM open source Traffic Engineering (TE) toolbox and a set of TE methods that we have designed and/or integrated. These methods cover intra-domain and inter-domain TE, IP-based and MPLS-based TE. They are suitable for network optimisation, better routing of traffic for providing QoS, load balancing, protection and restoration in case of failure, etc. The toolbox is designed to be deployed as an on-line tool in an operational network, or used off-line as an optimisation tool or as a traffic engineering simulator. q

The efficient management of natural and man-made disasters typically represents a major information exchange and coordination challenge, as in most countries a number of organizations are involved in all phases of the disaster management cycle. In this article, the authors introduce the approach of the Austrian national project INKA, which aims at improving civil-military interoperability between the Austrian Armed Forces and the corresponding federal state level institutions through the introduction of IT-supported information exchange without media discontinuities. Apart from providing a comprehensive overview of their interdisciplinary research methodology, the authors present a number of important results which are based on a detailed qualitative assessment of stakeholder requirements. Furthermore, they provide first insights into designing a valuable IT-platform for civil-military interoperability in Austria.

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Abstract-Fueled by its recent success in provisioning on-site wireless Internet access, Wi-Fi is currently perceived as the best positioned technology for pervasive mobile macro network offloading. However, the broad transitions of multiple collocated operators towards this new paradigm may result in fierce competition for the common unlicensed spectrum at hand. In this light, our paper game-theoretically dissects market convergence scenarios by assessing the competition between providers in terms of network performance, capacity constraints, cost reductions, and revenue prospects. We will closely compare the prospects and strategic positioning of fixed line operators offering Wi-Fi services with respect to competing mobile network operators utilizing unlicensed spectrum. Our results highlight important dependencies upon inter-operator collaboration models, and more importantly, upon the ratio between backhaul and Wi-Fi access bit-rates. Furthermore, our investigation of medium-to long-term convergence scenarios indicates that a rethinking of control measures targeting the large-scale monetization of unlicensed spectrum may be required, as otherwise the used free bands may become subject to tragedy-of-commons type of problems.

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The rapidly increasing interest that the Internet of Things (IoT) has received both in academia and industry over the past few years has already resulted in a huge number of IoT platforms which, however, typically are conceived as individual vertically integrated systems without supporting inter-platform collaboration and interaction. In this paper, we present the technoeconomic approach of the EU project symbIoTe (Symbiosis of smart objects across IoT environments) which aims at designing a sustainable IoT ecosystem that will enable the inclusion of existing individual IoT platforms ("islands") into federative structures via the use of a novel set of inter-system interfaces. The objective of symbIoTe is thereby to accomplish the two key criteria for the successful evolution of large ecosystems, i.e., backward compatibility and incremental deployability. In other words, the symbIoTe interfaces are designed to serve as stable evolutionary kernels which will enable diversity and dynamics, both in the space of applications and IoT platforms. Furthermore, we expect the symbIoTe interfaces and their corresponding logic to also play an important role in the next generation of the Internet of Things which will be comprised of things as actors in addition to the small devices addressed in the present things as sensors/actuators paradigm.