IV Unit – M2M and IoT Technology Fundamentals

¾ In addition, trust will be another major issue, as even if data is securely communicated or
verified, the level of trust based on them will impact the decision-making process and
risk analysis.
¾ Managing security and trust in the highly federated M2M-envisioned infrastructures
poses a significant challenge, especially for mission critical applications that also exercise
control.
¾ Privacy is also expected to be a significant issue in IoT infrastructures.
¾ Currently, a lot of emphasis is put on acquiring the data, and no real solutions exist for
large-scale systems to share data in a controlled way.
¾ Once data is shared, the originator has no more control over its lifetime.
¾ A typical example here constitutes the usage of private citizen data, which could be
controllably shared as wished; it should also be possible to (partially) revoke that right at
will.
¾ Data Science in the IoT era is a cross-discipline approach building on mathematics,
statistics, high-performance computing, modeling, machine learning, engineering, etc.
that will play a key role in understanding the data, assessing their information at large
scale, and hopefully enabling the better studying of complex systems of systems and their
emergent characteristics.

4.3.4 Conclusions

¾ Data and its management hold the key to unveiling the true power of M2M and IoT.
¾ To do so, however, we have to think and develop approaches that go beyond simple data
collection, and enable the management of their whole lifecycle at very large scale, while
in parallel considering the special needs and the usage requirements posed by specific
domains or applications.

4.4 Business processes in IoT

4.4.1 Introduction

¾ A business process refers to a series of activities, often a collection of interrelated processes

in a logical sequence, within an enterprise, leading to a specific result.
¾ There are several types of business processes such as management, operational, and
supporting, all of which aim at achieving a specific mission objective.
¾ As business processes usually span several systems and may get very complex, several
methods and techniques have been developed for their modeling, such as the Business
Process Model and Notation (BPMN), which graphically represents business processes in a
business process model.

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¾ Several key business processes in modern enterprise systems heavily rely on interaction with
real-world processes, largely for monitoring, but also for some control (management), in
order to take business-critical decisions and optimize actions across the enterprise.

¾ In Figure 5.6, the dramatic reduction of the data acquisition from the real world
¾ Initially all these interactions were human-based (e.g. via a keyboard) or human-assisted
(e.g. via a barcode scanner); however, with the prevalence of RFID, WSNs, and advanced
networked embedded devices, all information exchange between the real-world and
enterprise systems can be done automatically without any human intervention and at
blazing speeds.
¾ In the M2M era, connected devices can be clearly identified, and with the help of
services, this integration leads to active participation of the devices to the business
processes.
¾ Existing modeling tools are hardly designed to specify aspects of the real world in
modeling environments and capture their full characteristics. To this direction, the
existence of SOA-ready devices

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¾ (i.e. devices that offer their functionalities as a web service) simplifies the integration and
interaction as they can be considered as a traditional web service that runs on a specific
device.
¾ A layered approach for developing, deploying, and managing WSN applications that
natively interact with enterprise information systems such as a business process engine
and the processes running therein is proposed and assessed.
¾ M2M and IoT empower business processes to acquire very detailed data about the
operations, and be informed about the conditions in the real world in a very timely
manner.

4.4.2 IoT integration with enterprise systems

¾ M2M communication and the vision of the IoT pose a new era where billions of devices
will need to interact with each other and exchange information in order to fulfill their
purpose.

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¾ In Figure 5.7, cross-layer interaction and cooperation can be pursued:

• at the M2M level, where the machines cooperate with each other
(machine-focused interactions)

• at the machine-to-business (M2B) layer, where machines cooperate also

with network-based services, business systems (business service focus),
and applications.

¾ Several devices in the lowest layer. These can communicate with each other over short-
range protocols (e.g. over ZigBee, Bluetooth), or even longer distances (e.g. over Wi-Fi,
etc.).
¾ Some of them may host services (e.g. REST services), and even have dynamic discovery
capabilities based on the communication protocol or other capabilities (e.g. WS-Eventing
in DPWS).
¾ Some of them may be very resource constrained, which means that auxiliary gateways
could provide additional support such as mediation of communication, protocol
translation, etc.
¾ Independent of whether the devices are able to discover and interact with other devices
and systems directly or via the support of the infrastructure, the M2M interactions enable
them to empower several applications and interact with each other in order to fulfill their
goals.
¾ Promising real-world integration is done using a service-oriented approach by interacting
directly with the respective physical elements, for example, via web services running on
devices (if supported) or via more lightweight approaches such as REST.
¾ Many of the services that will interact with the devices are expected to be network
services available, for example, in the cloud.
¾ The main motivation for enterprise services is to take advantage of the cloud
characteristics such as virtualization, scalability, multi-tenancy, performance, lifecycle
¾ management, etc.
¾ A key motivator is the minimization of communication overhead with multiple endpoints
by, for example, transmission of data to a single or limited number of points in the
network, and letting the cloud do the load balancing and further mediation of
communication.
¾ Content Delivery Network (CDN) can be used in order to get access to the generated data
from locations that are far away from the M2M infrastructure (geographically, network-
wise, etc.).
¾ To this end, the data acquired by the device can be offered without overconsumption
¾ of the device’s resources, while in parallel, better control and management can be
applied.

4.4.3 Distributed business processes in IoT

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¾ In Figure 5.9, the integration of devices in business processes merely implies the
acquisition of data from the device layer, its transportation to the backend systems, its
assessment, and once a decision is made, potentially the control (management) of the
device, which adjusts its behavior.
¾ In future, due to the large scale of IoT, as well as the huge data that it will generate, such
approaches are not viable.
¾ Enterprise systems trying to process such a high rate of non- or minor-relevancy data will
be overloaded.

¾ The first step is to minimize communication with enterprise systems to only what is
relevant for business. With the increase
¾ in resources (e.g. computational capabilities) in the network, and especially on the
devices themselves (more memory, multi-core CPUs, etc.), it makes sense not to host the
intelligence and the computation required for it only on the enterprise side, but actually
distribute it on the network, and even on the edge nodes (i.e. the devices themselves), as
depicted on the right side of Figure 5.9.

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¾ Partially outsourcing functionality traditionally residing in backend systems to the

network itself and the edge nodes means we can realize distributed business processes
whose sub-processes may execute outside the enterprise system.
¾ As devices are capable of computing, they can either realize the task of processing and
evaluating business relevant information they generate by themselves or in clusters.
¾ Business processes can bind during execution of dynamic resources that they discover
locally, and integrate them to better achieve their goals.

4.4.4 Considerations

¾ Existing tools and approaches need to be extended to the make the business processes IoT
aware.
¾ Distributed execution of processes exists (e.g. in BPMN), additional work is needed to be
able to select the devices in which such processes execute and consider their
characteristics or dynamic resources, etc.
¾ The dynamic aspect is of key importance in the IoT, as this is mobile and availability is
not guaranteed, which means that availability in modeling time does not guarantee
availability at runtime and vice-versa.
¾ Scalability is an aspect that needs to be considered in the business process modeling and
execution.
¾ In addition, event-based interactions among the processes play a key role in IoT, as a
business process flow may be influenced by an event, or as its result, trigger a new event.

4.4.5 Conclusions

¾ Modern enterprises operate on a global scale and depend on complex business processes.
¾ Efficient information acquisition, evaluation, and interaction with the real world are of
key importance.
¾ The infrastructure envisioned is a heterogeneous one, where millions of devices are
interconnected, ready to receive instructions and create event notifications, and where the
most advanced ones depict self-behavior (e.g. self-management, self-healing,
selfoptimization, etc.) and collaborate.
¾ Business logic can now be intelligently distributed to several layers such as the network,
or even the device layer, creating new opportunities, but also challenges that need to be
assessed.
¾ Future Enterprise systems will be in position to better integrate state and events of the
physical world in a timely manner, and hence to lead to more diverse, highly dynamic,
and efficient business applications.

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