The rapid evolution of the Internet of Things (IoT) is making way for the development of several IoT applications that require minimal or no human involvement in the data collection, transformation, knowledge extraction, and decision-making (actuation) process. To ensure that such IoT applications (we term them autonomic) function as expected, it is necessary to measure and evaluate their quality, which is challenging in the absence of any human involvement or feedback. Existing Quality of Experience (QoE) literature and most QoE definitions focuses on evaluating application quality from the lens of human receiving application services. However, in autonomic IoT applications, poor quality of decisions and resulting actions can degrade the application quality leading to economic and social losses. In this paper, we present a vision, survey and future directions for QoE research in IoT. We review existing QoE definitions followed by a survey of techniques and approaches in the literature used to evaluate QoE in IoT. We identify and review the role of data from the perspective of IoT architectures, which is a critical factor when evaluating the QoE of IoT applications. We conclude the paper by identifying and presenting our vision for future research in evaluating the QoE of autonomic IoT applications.

Industry 4.0 applications help digital industrial transformation to be achieved through smart, data-driven solutions that improve production efficiency, product consistency, preventive maintenance, and the logistics of industrial applications and related supply chains. To enable and accelerate digital industrial transformation, it is vital to support cost-efficient Industry 4.0 application development. However, the development of such Industry 4.0 applications is currently expensive due to the limitations of existing IoT platforms in representing complex industrial machines, the support of only production line-based application testing, and the lack of cost models for application cost/benefit analysis. In this paper, we propose the use of Cyber Twins (CTs), an extension of Digital Twins, to support cost-efficient Industry 4.0 application development. CTs provide semantic descriptions of the machines they represent and incorporate machine simulators that enable application testing without any production line risk and cost. This paper focuses on CT-based Industry 4.0 application development and the related cost models. Via a case study of a CT-based Industry 4.0 application from the dairy industry, the paper shows that CT-based Industry 4.0 applications can be developed with approximately 60% of the cost of IoT platform-based application development.

The rapid evolution of the Internet of Things (IoT) facilitates the development of IoT applications in domains such as manufacturing, smart cities, retail, agriculture, etc. Such IoT applications collect data, analyze, and extract insightful information to enable decision-making and actuation. There is an unprecedented growth of IoT applications that automate decision-making and actuation without requiring human intervention, which we term autonomic IoT applications. The increasing scale of such applications necessitates holistic measurement and evaluation of application quality. Existing literature has evaluated quality from an end-user perspective, which may be unsuitable when dealing with the complexity of modern IoT applications, especially when they are autonomic. In this paper, we refer to IoT application quality as the aggregate quantitative value of various IoT quality metrics measured at each stage of the autonomic IoT application life cycle. We present an in-depth survey of current state-of-the-art techniques and approaches for evaluating quality of IoT applications. In particular, we survey various definitions to identify the factors that contribute to understanding and evaluating quality in IoT. Furthermore, we present open issues and identify future research directions towards realizing fine-grained quality evaluation of IoT applications. We envision that the identified research directions will, in turn, enable real-time diagnostics of IoT applications and make them quality-aware. This survey can serve as the basis for designing and developing modern, resilient quality-aware autonomic IoT applications.

Motivated by the benefits of small-world networks, we propose a self-organization framework for wireless ad hoc networks. We investigate the use of directional beamforming for creating long-range short cuts between nodes. Using simulation results for randomized beamforming as a guideline, we identify crucial design issues for algorithm design. Our results show that, while significant path length reduction is achievable, this is accompanied by the problem of asymmetric paths between nodes. Subsequently, we propose a distributed algorithm for small-world creation that achieves path length reduction while maintaining connectivity. We define a new centrality measure that estimates the structural importance of nodes based on traffic flow in the network, which is used to identify the set of nodes that beamform. We show using simulations that this leads to a significant reduction in path length while maintaining connectivity.

The unprecedented growth of Internet of Things (IoT) is leading to its increased usage in various domains, such as manufacturing, health, and smart cities. A majority of IoT applications are autonomic, i.e., they operate under minimal/no human intervention, and make decisions/actuations based on machine-to-machine communication and data analytics. A key challenge in the development of such applications is the ability to measure their quality while they are working in a diverse and heterogeneous IoT ecosystem. In this paper, we propose an agent based Internet of Things-Quality Watch (IoT-QWatch) framework that provides the ability to measure IoT quality metrics at each stage of the autonomic IoT application life cycle running in the IoT ecosystem. We envision that IoT-QWatch will enable the development of a new generation of quality-aware autonomic IoT applications that are able to be resilient to the heterogeneous and uncertain nature of IoT ecosystems. We present architectural details and implementation of IoT-QWatch, and corresponding models used to measure IoT quality metrics at different stages. We conduct extensive experiments using a real-world IoT test bed from the domain of manufacturing to validate the efficacy of IoT-QWatch. Experimental outcomes provide promising results in realising IoT-QWatch in real-world deployment, while the framework itself offers significant extensibility to include new models for measuring IoT quality metrics.

The unprecedented growth of Internet of Things (IoT) underpinned by machine-to-machine communication, analytics and actuation is spearheading the development of IoT-based Smart Agriculture Applications (IoTSA). Various factors (e.g., location, communication protocols, weather) impact data availability in such IoT applications, which makes it necessary for the applications to understand metrics that define sensor data quality. Thus, awareness of sensor data quality is crucial to all IoTSAs. This paper proposes a conceptual framework for describing the quality metrics required to formulate a data quality model. To demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed data quality metrics and model, we apply them to a dairy farm application (an instance of IoTSA). Our real-world experimental evaluations conclude that the proposed model: (i) can be employed by IoTSAs to adapt to different factors that may impact the quality of decision making (actuation) and (ii) aids in developing data quality aware IoTSA and beyond.