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Cloud based Smart City hubs are an attractive approach to addressing some of the complex issues faced when deploying PaaS infrastructure for Smart Cities. In this paper we introduce the general notion of IoT hubs and then discuss our work to generalize our IoT hub as a Smart City PaaS. We briefly describe our approach and discuss our experiences deploying two cloud-based Smart City hubs, one in the UK and the other in Canada.

Toward reducing barriers for developing applications for the Internet of Things, researchers have connected things to the web enabling the development of IoT mashups. While establishing a Web of Things for mashup development has been an important step forward, we believe that web-centric IoT toolkits have the potential to increase the use of Internet-enabled things further by increasing the pool of developers and applications that can take advantage of the connected physical world. In this paper we derive several key requirements for IoT mashup toolkits based on existing systems, past research and our experience with an IoT mashup toolkit called the Web of Things Toolkit (WoTKit). Unlike other systems, the WoTKit aims to address key requirements for IoT mashup developers in one system. From this experience we derive key lessons learned for the community toward improving toolkits for developing IoT mashups.I.

Several web-based platforms have emerged to ease the development of interactive or near real-time IoT applications by providing a way to connect things and services together and process the data they emit using a data flow paradigm. While these platforms have been found to be useful on their own, many IoT scenarios require the coordination of computing resources across the network: on servers, gateways and devices themselves. To address this, we explore how to extend existing IoT data flow platforms to create a system suitable for execution on a range of run time environments, toward supporting distributed IoT programs that can be partitioned between servers, gateways and devices. Eventually we aim to automate the distribution of data flows using appropriate distribution mechanism, and optimization heuristics based on participating resource capabilities and constraints imposed by the developer.

Interoperability in the Internet of Things is critical for emerging services and applications. In this paper we advocate the use of IoT 'hubs' to aggregate things using web protocols, and suggest a staged approach to interoperability. In the context of a UK government funded project involving 8 IoT projects to address cross-domain IoT interoperability, we introduce the HyperCat IoT catalogue specification. We then describe the tools and techniques we developed to adapt an existing data portal and IoT platform to this specification, and provide an IoT hub focused on the highways industry called 'Smart Streets'. Based on our experience developing this large scale IoT hub, we outline lessons learned which we hope will contribute to ongoing efforts to create an interoperable global IoT ecosystem.

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Technology advancement has pushed computation to the network edge, paving the way for a class of IoT applications that leverage CPU, storage and communications in edge devices. Building these new IoT applications is not an easy task however. Two key challenges include: supporting the dynamic nature of the edge network and the context-dependent characteristics of application logic. In this paper we report our experience in building an edge computing platform that uses a distributed data flow programming model based on the popular open source Node-RED tool. We describe some of the challenges we faced as well as some novel solutions that were implemented in our platform. A new approach in applying the concept of exogenous coordination is also presented and shown to be necessary in building large scale IoT applications across the edge, fog and cloud.

Large screen displays are being increasingly deployed in public areas for advertising, entertainment, and information display. Recently we have witnessed increasing interest in supporting interaction with such displays using personal mobile devices. To enable the rapid development of public large screen interactive applications, we have designed and developed the MAGIC Broker. The MAGIC Broker provides a set of abstractions and a simple RESTful web services protocol to easily program interactive public large screen display applications with a focus on mobile device interactions. We have carried out a preliminary evaluation of the MAGIC Broker via the development of a number of prototypes and believe our toolkit is a valid first step in developing a generic support infrastructure to empower developers of interactive large screen display applications.