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Internet of things: from internet scale sensing to smart services

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Computing
DOI 10.1007/s00607-016-0510-0

Internet of things: from internet scale sensing

to smart services

Dimitrios Georgakopoulos1 · Prem Prakash Jayaraman2

Received: 1 July 2016 / Accepted: 7 July 2016

© Springer-Verlag Wien 2016

Abstract The internet of things (IoT) is the latest web evolution that incorporates bil-
lions of devices (such as cameras, sensors, RFIDs, smart phones, and wearables), that
are owned by different organizations and people who are deploying and using them
for their own purposes. Federations of such IoT devices (we refer to as IoT things) can
deliver the information needed to solve internet-scale problems that have been too dif-
ficult to obtain and harness before. To realize this unprecedented IoT potential, we need
to develop IoT solutions for discovering the IoT devices each application needs, col-
lecting and integrating their data, and distilling the high value information each applica-
tion needs. We also need to provide solutions that permit doing these tasks in real-time,
on the move, in the cloud, and securely. In this paper we present an overview of a collec-
tion of IoT solutions (which we have developed in partnerships with other prominent
IoT innovators and refer to them collectively as IoT platform) for addressing these tech-
nical challenges and help springboard IoT to its potential. We also describe a variety
of IoT applications that have utilized the proposed IoT platform to provide smart IoT
services in the areas of smart farming, smart grids, and smart manufacturing. Finally,
we discuss future research and a vision of the next generation IoT infrastructure.

Keywords Internet of things · Sensor discovery · Sensor integration · Real-time data

analysis · IoT applications

Mathematics Subject Classification 68U99

B Dimitrios Georgakopoulos
dgeorgakopoulos@swin.edu.au
Prem Prakash Jayaraman
prem.jayaraman@rmit.edu.au
1 Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia
2 RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia

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 D. Georgakopoulos, P. P. Jayaraman

1 Introduction

Recent advances in computing networking and the internet have resulted to the devel-
opment of millions of low-cost and yet very powerful internet-connected devices,
including cameras, sensors, RFIDs, smart phones, and wearables. Specific exam-
ples of such internet connected such devices that are depicted in Fig. 1 range from
smart wearable devices offering personalized monitoring and advice for improving
fitness and well-being, such as [1], to smart pills, such as the [2], that allow doc-
tors to monitor when their patients take medication and how much they take. Such
wearable internet-connected devices provide unprecedented opportunities for moni-
toring, understanding/diagnosing, and improving human condition and health. Similar
devices have been developed and they are currently being used to identify, track
from farm to fork, and control farm animals. For instance, all Australian cattle are
“equipped” with RFID tags that provide such information and are required by law.
Furthermore, a variety of smart farming projects, e.g., [3], are also experimenting with
virtual fencing devices to improve pasture utilization and prevent disease spreading by
keeping sick animals away from healthy ones. Smart meters are established internet-
connected devices that allow on demand reading and analysis of the power consumed
and generated by individual dwellings, as well as individual circuits and corresponding
appliances inside each dwelling, such as water heaters and solar panels. Data collected
from smart meters can be analyzed on demand by both customers and power distribu-
tors. Therefore, smart meters allow power distributors to compete not only on price but
also on power recommendation service offerings. For example, many cities around the
world mandate smart meters in every house and business (e.g., more than 2.75 million
smart meters are currently in use in Melbourne Australia). Demand side management
extends further the use of smart meters to the level of individual circuits and appliances

Fig. 1 Internet-connected devices with sensing and interaction capabilities

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Internet of things: from internet scale sensing to smart services

in the customer’s premises and introduces additional functionality for controlling (e.g.,
remotely turning on and off) such “managed” circuits/appliances to meet power con-
sumption target set by energy distributors and/or the customers themselves. Providing
demand side services involves customer recommendation and decision making that
consider the use of a variety of renewable and traditional power generation sources,
appliances, weather conditions, as well as occupancy patterns and living preferences
that are set by the customers via their smart phones and wearables. Internet-connected
devices also simplify everyday tasks such as shopping for food by providing timely
notifications when food is in short supply at home or it has expired (for instance, [4]
lets its owners know when they need to buy eggs). Smart cities, and in particular traffic
management and related services, is another area where internet-connected roadside
sensors and on board devices are currently used. For example, roadside sensors, such
as wireless MacID readers, are currently deployed in busy freeways for measuring the
speed of traffic by tracking the mobile phones of the car drivers. A multitude of OBD-
II devices are also being developed and used in vehicles to communicate information
to their drivers (e.g., the OBDLink MX WiFi [5] device plugs into the OBD-II port
of your car and turns your smartphone into a sophisticated scantool, trip computer,
and real-time car performance monitor that keeps track of your driving habits). The
use of these and many other similar internet-connected devices is limited only by the
imagination of application developers. Roadside assets deployed in the freeways may
also interact with intelligent driving systems, such as Volvo’s Autopilot [6] that cur-
rently uses a combination of on board cameras, radars and other sensors to provide
autonomous and semi-autonomous driving.
These are all examples of internet connected devices that actually comprise the
Internet of Things (IoT). There are currently billions of such IoT devices in use around
the word and their number, capabilities, and the scope of their use keeps growing and
changing rapidly. In particular, Gartner has recently forecasted [7] that $6.4 billion IoT
devices will be in use worldwide in 2016 (up 30 percent from 2015), and their number
will reach $20.8 billion by 2020 (i.e., in 2016, $5.5 million new IoT devices will get
connected every day). In addition, the IoT market will support service spending of
$235 billion in 2016 (up 22 percent from 2015). Form the perspective of hardware
spending, consumer applications will amount to $546 billion in 2016, while smart
services and other applications using connected things in the enterprise will bring
$868 billion in 2016. Gartner also projects that by 2020, these numbers will reach
$1,534 billion and $1,477 billion, respectively. Estimates from other sources are often
more ambitious, e.g., [8].
At this point, we can define IoT as the next evolution of the internet that (1) incor-
porates billions of internet-connected sensors, cameras, wearables, smart phones, and
other smart IoT devices, (which we are collectively referred to as IoT ‘things’ [9,10]),
and (2) IoT devices are capable of communicating and consulting with one another
without human intervention. IoT’s importance is much greater in many other aspects
including:

• IoT devices produce big data characterized by unprecedented volume, velocity and
heterogeneity and also provide functionality that must be harnessed to create novel
smart services and products that benefit enterprises, industries, and our society.

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 D. Georgakopoulos, P. P. Jayaraman

• Equally importantly, the IoT ecosystem is comprised of IoT devices, cloud ser-
vices, and data analysis services that are often owned, administered and operated by
independent providers. Therefore, IoT is actually a federated environment where
IoT things and data, cloud resources, and software (e.g., for data analysis, visu-
alization, and actuation) are components that are often provided by independent
providers and have diverse interfaces, as well as business, cost, and QoS models.

To further explain the federated nature of IoT consider a garden irrigation IoT service
that is designed to dynamically adjust irrigation patterns to save water while maxi-
mizing plant flowering. Such IoT service will clearly need to interact with the specific
irrigation system installed in each garden to read data from its moisture sensors and
trigger the irrigation on and off. However, even such a simple IoT service may also need
to fetch data from a weather station owned by a city council, take into account fertilizer
data provided by various vendors posted in third party websites, store historical garden
sensor data in pubic cloud for future analysis, and use a third-party data analytics ser-
vice to process current and historical sensor data and produce an optimal irrigation plan.
To realize it enormous potential, IoT must provide solutions that address such IoT
challenges and also do so in a seamless way from the perspective of both the IoT ser-
vice/product developers and the end users. IoT research problems and complementary
solution that have been developed to address the challenges we identified here are
discussed in more detail next in Sect. 2.

2 Research problems in IoT and related work

Earlier in this paper we described IoT as federated internet-based ecosystem that is

comprised of billions of diverse IoT devices and software services that are owned,
administered and operated by independent providers. Please note that such providers
have deployed their IoT devices for they own purposes (which may be are unknown
to others) but they have also made them accessible to other IoT applications. Any IoT
application that needs to use IoT devices and their data to provide an IoT service or
support an IoT product may have to perform all the following steps, which comprise
the core IoT application lifecycle:

1. Discover the IoT devices that can provide the data it needs,
2. Integrate these IoT devices and their data,
3. Analyze the integrated data as needed by target IoT service/product, and
4. Repeat all the above when any of the devices currently used by the target service
or product become unavailable or disappear (e.g., this may occur any time an
owner of an IoT devices has no longer use for this, or decides to block others from
accessing it), or when new, more suitable, IoT devices become available.

In addition to the core IoT application lifecycle, which is depicted by the three circles
and their loop in the middle of Fig. 2, IoT application development may also involve
performing (1–4) above securely, in the cloud, and on the move.
IoT security and privacy is a major concern that IoT applications need to address.
Using a public cloud to store and process IoT data permits IoT services and product

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Internet of things: from internet scale sensing to smart services

Fig. 2 IoT research problems and existing solutions

developers to use and sell services and products without the need to own and maintain
a server or a data center and do this anywhere. Wearables and smart phones, as well
as mobile sensors, are also common and essential component of IoT at the IoT device,
data and service layers.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows: In Sect. 3 we focus mainly on the core
IoT application lifecycle, and in particular the IoT software infrastructure (which we
refer to as IoT platform) that we propose for supporting IoT application development.
More specifically, in Sect. 3.1 we provide an overview of the Sematic Sensor Networks
(SSN) [11]—a semantic framework and ontology that was develop by W3C’s Seman-
tic Sensor Network Incubator Group [12] for describing sensor and their data. SSN
provides for data-driven IoT device discovery [13] and ontology-based integration of
their data. In Sect. 3.2, we introduce OpenIoT [14,15] that provides wrappers for the
integration of virtually any IoT device, and also uses SSN for integrating IoT device
data and storing them in the cloud. OpenIoT also supports SPARQL queries over the
integrated IoT data and provides interfaces for utilizing third-party data analysis and
visualization services. Section 3.3 describes SensorDB [16] a service for real-time IoT
data analysis that provides guaranteed response time.
Section 4 is dedicated to the description of three sample IoT services that have
been developed using the proposed SSN/OpenIoT/SensorDB stack we describe in
Sects. 3.1–3.3 that forms the IoT platform we propose for supporting the core IoT
application development lifecycle. In particular, in Sect. 4 we provide overviews of
IoT services we have developed for smart farming (Sect. 4.1), smart grids (Sect. 4.2)
and smart manufacturing (Sect. 4.3) and outline their deployment and impact in their
corresponding industries.
As we noted earlier this paper focuses mainly on the IoT platform for supporting the
core IoT application development lifecycle and also includes aspect of cloud comput-
ing for this. However, we also note (but do not discuss further) recent research outcomes
in IoT mobility, where we have developed solutions supporting the core IoT applica-
tion development lifecycles in smart phones, e.g., MOSDEN [18], and IoT security,
where we have recently developed efficient techniques for providing IoT data security
and privacy, e.g., the secure IoT [17] has been recently been implemented in OpenIoT.

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The relationships of all these research outcomes to the IoT problems/challenges we

identified earlier in this section are also depicted in Fig. 2.

3 Building an open IoT infrastructure

In this section, we focus mainly on the core IoT application lifecycle, and in particular
the IoT platform we have developed and successfully deployed for supporting IoT
application development.
Vertical integration currently exists in form of IoT devices and protocol silos that
work out-of-the-box in a single-vendor environment but do no interoperate with nearly
identical devices from other vendors. The horizontal diversity though challenging
supports more open suppliers. The IoT platform we describe next embraces horizontal
diversity and provides interoperability solutions via open standards.

3.1 Semantic sensor networks (SSN) for describing and discovering IoT devices
and their data

SSN [11] was developed by the W3C semantic sensor network incubator group (SSN-
XG) [12] and is used by the proposed IoT Platform to describe and discover IoT
devices and their data. The SSN ontology enables interoperability for IoT devices
by providing a standard machine readable interpretation of the device’s description
and data. Machine-interpretable semantics allows autonomous or semi-autonomous
systems to discover, collect, represent, process, reason, share and act on IoT devices
and their data. Using other semantic web concepts such as Linked Sensor Data [19,20]
along with SSN, IoT devices and their data can be interlinked with external sources
in the Web.
The SSN Ontology (available from http://purl.oclc.org/NET/ssnx/ssn), is organized
conceptually into ten modules as presented in Fig. 3. Each of these modules has one of
the following perspectives: (1) IoT sensor: the focus of this perspective is on what the
IoT device senses, how it senses this, and what is being sensed; (2) observation: the
focus is on what data are produced by the sensor; (3) system: the focus here is on the
system using the IoT device, and (4) feature: focuses on what data property is being
observed/measured. SSN also describes other relevant concepts such as Deployment
to manage the system deployment lifetime, Measuring Capability and Conditions
on the concepts of IoT sensor and ObservationValue that represents the observed
data form a such sensor. The SSN ontology provides means for extension to suit
various application requirements and examples of such extensions are presented in
[21,22].
For an SSN example considers Fig. 4 that illustrates a simplified representation
of a Vaisala Wind Sensor WM30 description using the SSN ontology (http://www.
vaisala.com/en/products/windsensors/Pages/WM30.aspx). By enabling an IoT plat-
form with a standard, machine readable way of describing IoT devices, the SSN
ontology provides the first building block towards the development of an open IoT
Platform. Another feature that makes the SSN sensor-independent is in its ability to
use semantic web concepts to discover IoT devices and their data. For example, using

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Internet of things: from internet scale sensing to smart services

Fig. 3 Semantic sensor network ontology overview (https://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/ssn/

XGR-ssn-20110628)

Fig. 4 Representation of an IoT weather sensor (vaisala) using SSN ontology

SPARQL we can fetch data from an IoT devices that observe WindSpeed and has a
measurement range between 0 and 355. Moreover, and IoT platform using SSN can
perform verification of new IoT devices against existing concepts and identify relation-
ships between such IoT devices their data and the application domain by semantically
comparing the data generated using the SSN and Linked data.

3.2 OpenIoT for integrating IoT data in the cloud and providing for analysis

The core of the proposed IoT Platform is based on the Open middleware for Inter-
net of Things (OpenIoT) [23]. This is a distributed cloud-based IoT data integration
platform that utilizes the SSN ontology we described in Sect. 3.1. OpenIoT pro-
vides infrastructure services for capturing IoT data from any IoT device, semantically

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 D. Georgakopoulos, P. P. Jayaraman

Fig. 5 OpenIoT architecture

annotating such data using SSN, dynamically linking the IoT data using linked
data and offers visual tools for IoT sensor/data discovery and exploration. It is
currently available as an open source project from https://github.com/OpenIotOrg/
openiot/. It has been widely adopted by the IoT open source community and used
to develop real-world application use-cases across many areas ranging from man-
ufacturing, to smart cities (air quality monitoring, smart campus), healthcare and
agriculture.
Figure 5 presents the architectural overview of the OpenIoT platform that is
logically separated into three planes, namely, the Physical plane, the Virtual plane
and the Application/utility plane. The physical plane comprises of XGSN [14],
an IoT data stream processing engine that uses the notion of wrapper to inte-
grate any underlying IoT device or sensor network. The XGSN component can be
distributed across physical locations allowing it to be located close to the source
IoT devices. In particular, XGSN could be running on a home or sensor network
gateway ingesting data into the OpenIoT virtual plane. XGSN is also responsible
for the SSN annotation of the incoming data as they are streamed from the IoT
devices.
OpenIoT’s virtual plane is comprised of the key components responsible for the
following functions: (1) a cloud-based triple store to store the sensor descriptions and
data; (2) ontologies (SSN and domain ontologies) to represent IoT devices and the
data; (3) application programmable interfaces (API) to support IoT device and data
discovery (Scheduler); (4) services to compose and store user queries; (5) services to
execute user composed queries (Service Delivery and Utility Manager); (6) services
to compute utility metrics, such as the cost of providing the sensor data for sensing as
a service, and (7) a service to manage the performance of each component’s execution
in the cloud (Monitoring).

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Internet of things: from internet scale sensing to smart services

Fig. 6 SensorDB lifecycle

The application/utility plane provides graphical tools that allow OpenIoT users to
discover IoT devices, and compose SPARQL queries. In addition this plane permits
integrating third party services for further IoT data analysis and visualization, e.g.,
to compute statistics and to visualize results as charts and maps. SensorDB is such
real-time data analysis service and is discussed next in Sect. 3.3.

3.3 SensorDB for instantaneous analysis of IoT data

The final component of the proposed IoT Platform for supporting the core IoT applica-
tion development lifecycle is SensorDB. While OpenIoT provides cloud-based storage
of IoT data and supports the formulation and execution of SPARQL queries over such
data, SensorDB [16] provides for further IoT data analysis and corresponding visu-
alizations. The key design goal of SensorDB is to provide sub-second responses to
non-SQL data aggregations with a guaranteed response time. In order to achieve its
design goal, SensorDB uses a novel approach to compute and maintain real-time sta-
tistics of IoT data streams. This enables instantaneous response to most common data
aggregations (e.g., statistical micro summaries).
The SensorDB data processing architecture (Fig. 6) involves four data driven stages
namely, data ingestion, data analysis to compute real-time data aggregations (such as,
statistical micro summaries), data storage in various in-memory and SSD data stores
designed for streaming data, and finally presentation and sharing of the data in real-
time.
SensorDB uses fixed-time data aggregation windows, e.g., 1-min, 15-min, 1-h,
1-day, 1-month, 1-year and “lifetime” windows, to maintain real-time aggregations
(e.g., statistical micro summaries) of IoT data in these time intervals. Each fixed-
time aggregation also stores computed micro summaries, such as the number of IoT
data points, the maximum, minimum, standard deviation and mean of the IoT data
points within each window. Other information SensorDB stores include (1) struc-
tural information, such as username, password, domain specific descriptions including
application service name and instance, IoT device locations etc.; (2) raw and aggregate
IoT data, and (3) non-SQL queues, caches and user session information. Typically,
IoT devices generate thousands to millions of data points. Based on our experience,
the patters, variations and aggregations (e.g., statistics) of data streams are often more
important than the individual IoT data points. Computing and interacting with data
aggregation helps establish the big data picture. For example, SensorDB continuously

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 D. Georgakopoulos, P. P. Jayaraman

Fig. 7 SensorDB architecture

computes the statistical features of each window (i.e., micro summaries) and the aggre-
gation windows are updated with every new incoming data point. Figure 7 presents
SensorDB stream level data processing model.
The unique feature of the SensorDB architecture is its elasticity and ability to scale
across multiple networked computing nodes. Each data processing component of in
SensorDB is a stateless worker thread and can run independently. SensorDB makes
extensive use of queuing and in-memory caching in order to compute and maintain real-
time micro summaries of IoT data streams. Depending on the application, SensorDB
can be configured to store specific fixed-aggregation window micro summaries in main
memory, SSD or HDD, e.g., the 1-min window aggregation/micro summary is stored
in main memory while the yearly window aggregation/micro-summary is stored in
SSDs. The real-time aggregation of IoT data allows users to quickly explore their data
and provide sub-second query response as compared to traditional SQL databases used
to store and manage IoT data.

4 Sample industry and government IoT solutions

In Sect. 3, we presented our the key elements of our open IoT Platform that addresses
the main challenges of the core IoT application lifecycle in Fig. 2, i.e., Discovery,
Integration and Analysis. In this section, we will present three concrete application
use cases in industrial and government domains, where the proposed IoT Platform has
been successfully deployed to develop smart IoT services.

4.1 Smart farming—recommending plants for increasing farm productivity

Agriculture contributes about 3 % to Australia’s GDP which accounts for approxi-

mately $50 billion each year. Plant performance under different local farm conditions
is a key factor in increasing farm productivity. The Grains Research and Development
Corporation (GRDC) of Australia trials plant varieties by planting up to 2 million plots

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Internet of things: from internet scale sensing to smart services

Fig. 8 Smart farming IoT devices deployed in remote fields

per crop across the country to find the best high yielding variety of plants that are best
suited to the local growing conditions. One of the biggest challenges in developing
and experimenting new with crops is real-time monitoring and analysis of crop data.
Experimental crops are planted in rural sites typically 400km away or more from any
major cities. Therefore, site visits are expensive and extremely time-consuming. This
traditional approach to harvest plant performance data for analysis took months each
year and was often erroneous due to changing weather conditions (e.g., solar radiation
data collected after a rain or during a cloudy sky are useless and can lead to costly
crop assessment errors).
The plant performance assessment service [24] we introduce in this section was
developed using the proposed IoT platform that enabled the monitor and assessment
of crop performance anywhere. More specifically, to support the collection of plant
performance data our partners deployed tens of thousands of sensor and other IoT
devices (e.g., whether stations) in thousands of remote plots. Some of the sensors we
deployed are depicted in Fig. 8 and include: canopy solar radiation sensors that capture
heat accumulation of plants, weather stations that provide high precision weather
reports, soil moisture sensors to study the activity of the root based on the level of
water in the soil, and imaging sensors to study the shape of the leafs. The sensor
and manually gathered data collected by our plant performance assessment service
that was developed using our IoT Platform are being used by plant biologists and
growers to study crop performance under different farm conditions (e.g. soil, soil
humidity, fertilization, rain and weather conditions) and plants (genomics, phenomics,
accumulated solar radiation). Less than 1 % of the collected data could be used in such
data analysis as local weather conditions make a lot of such data useless for assessing

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 D. Georgakopoulos, P. P. Jayaraman

Fig. 9 Smart farming—data analysis visualization

plant performance. For example, a light rain in the morning or overcast conditions
make solar radiation data reading useless as rain or clouds cooling the pant leaves do
not reflect the actual heat accumulation of the plant leaves.
As mentioned earlier, one of the key challenges in developing this service was to
provide for rapid ingestion, as well as real-time collection, analysis and sharing of plant
performance data. The SensorDB platform was used as the platform for rapid analysis
of these IoT data [16] while the XGSN component of the OpenIoT was deployed as a
distributed data ingestion platform. Figure 9 illustrates sample real-time data analysis
and visualization results of the IoT data captured, analyzed and visualized by our IoT
Platform. Such data analysis results were provided to growers via data visualization
portal developed in HTML5.
The plant performance assessment service has delivered the following benefits: (1)
the time to analyze the data from remote fields was reduced from months to millisecond
(near real-time); (2) a variety of growers, scientists and farmers were able to deploy
and connect their IoT devices to the IoT platform with minimal or no help from
us. Approximately 60K such devices where connected and fed our IoT platform for
months during each crop. This flexibility to accommodate bring-your-own-IoT device
allowed the service to grow to the largest such system in the world.

4.2 Smart grids—combining renewables and demand side management for

virtual power plants

The smart grid area includes an array of services that are depicted in Fig. 10 that
was originated in Nature Magazine in 2008. The first IoT services we developed in
this area using the proposed IoT Platform were for Demand Side Management. These

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Internet of things: from internet scale sensing to smart services

Fig. 10 Smart Grid IoT—demand side management and hybrid power stations

services involve using smart meters at the circuit and appliance level in each customer
dwelling to rapidly measure end control energy consumption at the customer’s premise.
Measuring energy consumption at the circuit/appliance level involves installing circuit-
and appliance-specific smart meters (as depicted in the before and after snapshots of
switch board at the upper half of Fig. 11). Such smart meters communicate with a
local router via ZigBee, WiFi, or Ethernet. This router then sends such local energy
consumption measurements to the energy consumption data ingestion service at the
energy distributor’s data center that serves thousands or millions of customers. The
energy distributor then computes energy consumption across customers and also across
circuits/appliance types and compares them to its targets.
The bottom half of Fig. 11 depicts combined energy consumption computed by
an energy distributor as the red graph in the middle. The top blue and bottom green
consumption graphs are different targets set by the distributor considering the use of
different energy generation assets, such as having one generator on line versus two
generators on line. The final step of demand site management involves switching off
circuits/appliances at the customer premises to reduce consumption at the customer
side in order to meet the distributors targets set (e.g., the top blue or bottom green
graphs in Fig. 11). Of course cutting power to specific circuits at the customer premises
requires obtaining customer approval and providing benefits (e.g., reduced rates) to
customers for allowing this. While providing such customer benefits adds cost to
the distributor, demand side management can lower costs further by reducing the
energy the distributor needs to buy from an energy generation company. Of course,
if the energy cost more to buy that the customer pays, demand side management
makes money. Otherwise is losses money. Therefore, the main benefit of demand
side management is in reducing energy consumption (and related cost in purchasing

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 D. Georgakopoulos, P. P. Jayaraman

• Two tariffs:
• Light & Power (L&P)
• Hydro Heat (HH)
• Control DR capacity
• AC 1
Before
• AC 2
• Water heater
• Meter HH load
• Meter L&P load and
control stove relay
• Disable stove After

Fig. 11 Demand side management site instrumentation and targets

energy or generating energy) at times of high energy demand (e.g., in a hot day when
air conditioning demand exceed contracted power purchasing caps), which is when
the distributor cost of buying energy is much higher that the price the customers are
paying for.
The same principles apply to hybrid energy generation plans that generate energy
by combining wind turbines, solar panels, batteries for green energy storage, and
traditional diesel generators. The power generator goal here is generating and selling
as much energy possible from renewables and/or filling available batteries with such
energy. Demand side management comes in the generation picture at the point when
the energy generated from renewables and that stored in batteries is not sufficient to
meet demand.
Figure 12 shows the main control panel of a Virtual Power Stations we helped
develop in Australia using the proposed IoT Platform. Smart meters at the cir-
cuit/appliance level are described using SSN. The smart meters and their energy
consumption data in each customer premise are integrated in OpenIoT. SensorDB
is used to accumulate consumption across thousands of customers, compare the cur-
rent consumption to targets, and determine that energy needs to be managed (i.e., cut)
at the customer side. This information is then passed to an OpenIoT demand side
management service (which is implemented by a web service) that distributes demand

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Internet of things: from internet scale sensing to smart services

Fig. 12 King Island’s advanced

hybrid station

side cuts to the smart meters at the customer premises. The same cycle is repeated
next. The main control panel of this Virtual Power station, which is depicted in Fig.
12 is implements by a visualization web service that is available for viewing 24 × 7
at the web site of King Island’s Advanced Hybrid Station [25].

4.3 Smart manufacturing—monitoring and improving productivity and safety

Our experience in the developing IoT services for smart manufacturing includes the
food processing and mining sectors, where we developed IoT services for monitoring
and improving productivity and safety. Our approach and outcomes in these areas
correlate with other efforts by various consortiums around the world aiming to develop
an open, standard driven, smart manufacturing factory, e.g., as envisioned by the fourth
industrial revolution [26,27]. Generally, plant production processes are mapped to key
performance indicators (KPIs) with major drivers for such businesses being cost and
quality. KPIs are met by designing and implementing appropriate production processes
for plant operations that specify the tasks/activities that need to be performed many
of which are manual or involve different islands of automations), the input and output
products for each task (e.g., products and waste), the resources that are used (e.g.,
labor, machines, water, energy), and the roles plant personnel can play in performing
a task (e.g., only personnel trained to perform a specialized task is given the job of
completing the task).
In order to address these challenges, we developed a real-time KPI monitoring and
assessment service that monitors and helps assesses the plant’s production process
from the perspectives of productivity, product quality and safety. This IoT Platform-
based service takes advantage of ubiquitous and low cost IoT devices that are deployed
to collect higher fidelity data unobtrusively, reliably and continuously. This KPI ser-
vice performs real-time computation, visualization, and prediction of plant KPIs, as
well as real-time delivery of personalized KPIs updates to management and supervi-
sors via any device. For example, the KPI service can combine real-time production

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Fig. 13 Smart manufacturing—IoT solution for monitoring and improving productivity

data with employee data and graphically display performance KPIs tailored to the
role and responsibilities of any employee. This information can help workers, and
management to instantaneously assess and respond to customer and production KPIs
e.g., by making informed decisions for improving productivity, product quality and
safety dynamically or by improving/adjusting the plant’s production process. Figure
13 presents the workflow of the IoT solution developed for monitoring and improving
plant productivity. The KPI Service enables instant identification of good and bad
production activities/results and provides ways to respond to changes quickly, such
speeding or slowing the production speed (increase/decrease) to meet daily targets.
Another IoT service we have developed involves improving safety in the mining
industry is called PPEofThings [28]. PPEofThings makes uses of wearable IoT devices
and data analytics to deliver real-time safety alters in highly hazardous environments.
In this particular application, we developed a proof-of-concept using wearable IoT
devices embedded to the personal protective equipment of the mine worker to contin-
uously monitors for safety hazards. SSN was used to describe the IoT devices, while
OpenIoT and SensorDB were used for IoT data integration and real-time analysis. For
example, this safety service is able to detect if protective equipment (e.g. glasses) is
worn in the correct position by the worker when working underground in the mine
performing or walking by specific hazardous activities (e.g. angle grinding).
These and other IoT solutions for smart manufacturing can provide several major
benefits that include: (1) overall increase in equipment effectiveness, (2) improve-
ment in quality of finished product, 3) overall improvement in plant efficiency, (3)
better use of critical human resources, (4) improved process efficiency and continuous
optimization, (5) reduced inventory or material holding costs, (6) enable flow of data
freely between sites, applications and across company boundaries, (7) ability to per-
form real-time analysis and prediction over data captured from variety of IoT devices
and systems, (8) enhance the safety of workers performing manual tasks, (9) open

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application interface for individual customer requirements, and (10) opportunities for
completely new business models.

5 Conclusions

In this paper we introduced an IoT platform capable of integrating virtually any IoT
device, storing IoT data in the cloud, and performing real-time IoT analysis using
a novel approach based on elastically computing data-driven micro summaries. We
also presented three IoT applications in the area of smart agriculture, smart grids, and
smart manufacturing. For each of these applications we presented their real-world
drivers and outlined the IoT services we developed to address them using our IoT
platform. Finally, we discussed the impact of these solutions in terms of the concrete
benefits they provide. Further research in the IoT platform area includes developing
comprehensive IoT privacy and security solutions, as well a platform mobility solutions
based on our existing research outcomes in these areas. Longer term research plans
involve eliminating entirely the need for an IoT platform by replacing it by collection
of internet-based IoT infrastructure services for semantic description, discovery and
integration of IoT devices; services providing IoT device wrapping; IoT cloud service
recommendation services driven by user-provided requirements; and real time data
analysis workflows based on elastic data driven micro summaries. We also plan to
continue the development of large-scale smart IoT services with focus on industrial
and social objectives, as such IoT application development will continue to inform us
of the needs for IoT research and technology.

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