With the trend going on in ubiquitous computing, everything is going to be connected to the Internet and its data will be used for various progressive purposes, creating not only information from it, but also, knowledge and even wisdom. Internet of Things (IoT) becoming so pervasive that it is becoming important to integrate it with cloud computing because of the amount of data IoT's could generate and their requirement to have the privilege of virtual resources utilization and storage capacity, but also, to make it possible to create more usefulness from the data generated by IoT's and develop smart applications for the users. This IoT and cloud computing integration is referred to as Cloud of Things in this paper. IoT's and cloud computing integration is not that simple and bears some key issues. Those key issues along with their respective potential solutions have been highlighted in this paper.

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are the key components of the emerging Internet-of-Things (IoT) paradigm. They are now ubiquitous and used in a plurality of application domains. WSNs are still domain specific and usually deployed to support a specific application. However, as WSNs' nodes are becoming more and more powerful, it is getting more and more pertinent to research how multiple applications could share a very same WSN infrastructure. Virtualization is a technology that can potentially enable this sharing. This paper is a survey on WSN virtualization. It provides a comprehensive review of the state-of-the-art and an in-depth discussion of the research issues. We introduce the basics of WSN virtualization and motivate its pertinence with carefully selected scenarios. Existing works are presented in detail and critically evaluated using a set of requirements derived from the scenarios. The pertinent research projects are also reviewed. Several research issues are also discussed with hints on how they could be tackled.

WSNs have become pervasive and are used in many applications and services. Usually, deployments of WSNs are task-oriented and domain-specific, thereby precluding reuse when other applications and services are contemplated. This inevitably leads to the proliferation of redundant WSN deployments. Virtualization is a technology that can aid in tackling this issue, as it enables the sharing of resources/infrastructure by multiple independent entities. In this article we critically review the state of the art and propose a novel architecture for WSN virtualization. The proposed architecture has four layers (physical layer, virtual sensor layer, virtual sensor access layer, and overlay layer) and relies on a constrained application protocol. We illustrate its potential by using it in a scenario where a single WSN is shared by multiple applications, one of which is a fire monitoring application. We present the proof-of-concept prototype we have built along with the performance measurements, and discuss future research directions.

The advent of the Internet-of-Things (IoT) paradigm has brought opportunities to solve many real-world problems. Energy management, for example, has attracted huge interest from academia, industries, governments, and regulatory bodies. It involves collecting energy usage data, analyzing it, and optimizing the energy consumption by applying control strategies. However, in industrial environments, performing such optimization is not trivial. The changes in business rules, process control, and customer requirements make it much more challenging. In this paper, a semantic rules engine (SRE) for industrial gateways is presented that allows implementing dynamic and flexible rule-based control strategies. It is simple, expressive, and allows managing rules on-the-fly without causing any service interruption. Additionally, it can handle semantic queries and provide results by inferring additional knowledge from previously defined concepts in ontologies. SRE has been validated and tested on different hardware platforms and in commercial products. Performance evaluations are also presented to validate its conformance to the customer requirements.