Lessons from SmartCampus: External Experimenting with User-Centric Internet-of-Things Testbed

Abstract

© 2014 Springer Science+Business Media New YorkCreating Internet-of-Things (IoT) solutions that can be deployed at scale requires adequate experimentation environments. In the area of experimentation, two trends can be observed. First, there is a shift from lab-based, controlled experiments to experimenting “in the wild”: researchers tend to augment the users’ natural environments and observe how people integrate a new solution into their everyday lives. Second, when a substantial investment in setting up an experimentation infrastructure has been made, it makes sense to open it to a wide community of researchers; the concept of Experimentation-as-a-Service (EaaS) is emerging along these lines. SmartCampus, an IoT testbed developed at the University of Surrey, fits the both trends very well. It involves real users in a natural setting, as IoT devices are deployed in the users’ offices. Further, several user-centric experiments conducted in the SmartCampus were driven by external researchers, i.e., people who do not belong to the team that developed the testbed. In this paper we report on lessons learned from such IoT experiments. After a brief overview of SmartCampus and the experiments themselves, we offer a simple experiment stakeholder model, which identifies key actors and interfaces between them. We then focus on issues related to the external experimenters who take advantage of the experimentation “service.” That focus is motivated by our realization that EaaS, while attractive in principle, gives rise to a number of non-trivial challenges

Federation of Internet of Things Testbeds for the Realization of a Semantically-Enabled Multi-Domain Data Marketplace

“…Thus, it is possible to widen the scope and complexity of the IoT applications supported as well as reuse the infrastructures and data streams provided and maximize their utilization. The SmartCampus facility [ 27 ] offers a testbed based on a three-tier architecture for executing user-centric experiments in an office environment, set up by external stakeholders. Although adopting the EaaS paradigm, the facility is highly domain specific in stark contrast to the FIESTA-IoT platform.…”

Towards a Simulator for Green Smart Campus Systems

“…Several technologies have been used to create smart campus solutions. Among them, the following stand out: Big Data [Hu and Yan 2016, Wei 2016; cloud computing Zhang 2015, Zhang andJiang 2018]; Internet of Things (IoT) [Arshad et al 2017, Guo and Zhang 2015, Ivanovski 2015, Majeed and Ali 2018; Internet and high performance computing [Nie 2013]; virtualization, mobile Internet, and social networks [Hu and Yan 2016]; sensors and common communication interfaces [Nati et al 2017]; 6LoWPAN (IPv6 over Low Power Wireless Personal Area Networks) [Luo 2018]; and RFID (Radio-Frequency Identification) [Kwok 2015].…”

IoT-Lite: a lightweight semantic model for the internet of things and its use with dynamic semantics

“…In this section, we exemplify the use of the proposed information model, IoT-Lite, using sensor information from the Surrey testbed [22] Figure 3 illustrates a sample describing the output of one of the temperature sensors in the testbed using the IoT-Lite ontology. This sensor is associated with the temperature of a room.…”