The world of connected devices has led to the rise of the Internet of Things paradigm, where applications rely on multiple devices, gathering and sharing data across highly heterogeneous networks. The variety of possible mechanisms, protocols, and hardware has become a hindrance in the development of architectures capable of addressing the most common IoT use cases, while abstracting services from the underlying communication subsystem. Moreover, the world is moving toward new strict requirements in terms of timeliness and low latency in combination with ultra-high availability and reliability. Thus, future IoT architectures will also have to support the requirements of these cyber-physical applications. In this regard, edge computing has been presented as one of the most promising solutions, relying on the cooperation of nodes by moving services directly to end devices and caching information locally. Therefore, in this article, we propose a modular and scalable architecture based on lightweight virtualization. The provided modularity, combined with the orchestration supplied by Docker, simplifies management and enables distributed deployments, creating a highly dynamic system. Moreover, characteristics such as fault tolerance and system availability are achieved by distributing the application logic across different layers, where failures of devices and micro-services can be masked by this natively redundant architecture, with minimal impact on the overall system performance. Experimental results have validated the implementation of the proposed architecture for on-demand services deployment across different architecture layers.

Industrial Internet of things (IIoTs) relies on different devices working together, gathering and sharing data using multiple communication protocols. This heterogeneity becomes a hindrance in the development of architectures that can support applications operating independently of the underlying protocols. Therefore in this paper, we proposed a modular and scalable architecture based on lightweight virtualization. The modularity provided by the proposed architecture combined with lightweight virtualization orchestration supplied by Docker simplifies management and enables distributed deployments. Availability and fault-tolerance characteristics are ensured by distributing the application logic across different devices where a single microservice or even device failure can have no effect on system performance. The proposed architecture is instantiated and tested on a simple time-dependent use case. The obtained results validates that the proposed architecture can be used to deploy services on demand at different architecture layers.

Future intelligent transportation systems (ITS) hold the promise of supporting the operation of safety-critical applications, such as cooperative self-driving cars. For that purpose, the communications among vehicles and with the road-side infrastructure will need to fulfil the strict real-time guarantees and challenging dependability requirements. These safety requisites are particularly important in wireless vehicular networks, where road traffic presents several threats to human life. This paper presents a systematic survey on fault tolerance techniques in the area of vehicular communications. The work provides a literature review of publications in journals and conferences proceedings, available through a set of different search databases (IEEE Xplore, Web of Science, Scopus and ScienceDirect). A systematic method, based on the preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses (PRISMA) Statement was conducted in order to identify the relevant papers for this survey. After that, the selected articles were analysed and categorised according to the type of redundancy, corresponding to three main groups (temporal, spatial and information redundancy). Finally, a comparison of the core features among the different solutions is presented, together with a brief discussion regarding the main drawbacks of the existing solutions, as well as the necessary steps to provide an integrated fault-tolerant approach to the future vehicular communications systems.

PASMO is a regional project aiming to bridge the gap between research and practice in the area of urban mobility support. It covers key access roads to the seaside villages of the Aveiro/Ilhavo region, in the center of Portugal, providing vehicular communications, regular WiFi access, and a myriad of useful mobility services (parking, bikes, jams, weather) under the umbrella of a smart region infrastructure dedicated to simplify the involvement of industry in testing and developing new services. The infrastructure is currently being deployed, and the services will be operational by mid 2018.

Vehicular communications are gaining one of the largest share of the automotive IoT market. The combination of the automotive sector with the transportation resulted in the emergence of the concept of connected vehicles. Therefore, motivating new proposals for real-time applications for managing traffic and incident alerts to improve the overall mobility and road safety. The growing demand for new and better solutions lead to two of the biggest challenges faced in IoT - scalability and interoperability. Therefore in this paper, we propose an highly modular and easily distributable architecture built upon DevOps practices and relying on edge computing to enable V2X applications to be easily deployed and monitored in real-time. The architecture was implemented and a vehicular application was divided in small modules to validate the functionalities of the proposed architecture.