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.

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Nowadays, a paradigm shift is under way in the world of Digital Broadcast TV. This change, similar to that of the mobile market, promises a future where modern TV sets and settop boxes will become the merging point of TV and computers. The 'Connected TV' will allow users to access content available either from the broadcast channels or the Internet. There are already some independent attempts in realizing this concept as well as standardization efforts that aim at closing the gap between different implementations. However, more focus is placed on the integration of Internet content while the traditional broadcast part is neglected. In this work, we outline the current status and propose a framework for creating a true hybrid solution, where end users can enrich broadcast content with Internet-based enhancements so that they can enjoy improved and personalized viewing experience. In fact, this approach allows for content composition, by merging the base (broadcast) content with addon (Internet) content. This will further facilitate the opening of the TV market, the emergence of new business models and the offering of more advanced and personalized services.

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Mobile users' Quality-of-Experience (QoE) is degrading as network usage increases while Internet Service Providers (ISP) face increased inter-domain traffic. This paper presents a network traffic management mechanism, named RB-HORST, addressing these inefficiencies. RB-HORST exploits home routers by using them as caches and forming an overlay network between them to transfer content. To shift traffic from peak hours, RB-HORST employs predictions based on social network properties and based on similarity in the overlay network. To further improve user QoE, home routers allow trusted mobile devices to offload their mobile connection to the local WiFi. Simulation results show that an overlay is imperative for the success of the proposed caching mechanism. Especially ISPs with a large number of customers can benefit if only every thousandth user shares its router, reducing inter-domain traffic by half and superseding an ISP operated cache. The presented implementation proves that the concept is technically feasible and can be deployed and run on constrained devices.

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.