Convergence of Utility Computing with the Internet-of-Things

Despite recent advances in the IoT area for developing control systems into the cloud, the proliferation of inter-connected entities and the collection of diverse information act as the big challenges in order to provide full control over IoT devices. Solutions to the problem of formulating and managing internet-connected objects in cloud environments i.e. environments comprising "entities" and resources (such as sensors, actuators and smart devices) in cloud infrastructures are still in their infancy. This paper formulates design principles for IoT cloud environments and introduces a framework for the converging utility-driven cloud-based computing models, with emerging Internet-of-Things (IoT) infrastructures and applications into the cloud. Following results from analyzing the state-of-the-art and efforts towards the convergence of cloud computing and IoT, this paper also presents the main building blocks of a framework, which emphasizes on-demand establishment of IoT services based on the automated formulation of societies of internet-connected objects. The framework leverages well-known technologies (i.e. Linked Sensor Data) and standards (notably the W3C Semantic Sensor Networks ontology and the IETF COAP protocol).