As IoT grows at a staggering pace, the need for contextual intelligence is a fundamental and critical factor for IoT intelligence, efficiency, effectiveness, performance, and sustainability. As the standardisation efforts for IoT are fast progressing, efforts in standardising context management platforms led by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) are gaining more attention from both academic and industrial research organizations. These standardisation endeavours will enable intelligent interactions between ‘things’, where things could be devices, software components, web-services, or sensing/actuating systems. Therefore, having a generic platform to describe and query context is crucial for the future of IoT applications. In this paper, we propose Context Definition and Query Language (CDQL), an advanced approach that enables things to exchange, reuse and share context between each other. CDQL consists of two main parts, namely: context definition model, which is designed to describe situations and high-level context; and Context Query Language (CQL), which is a powerful and flexible query language to express contextual information requirements without considering details of the underlying data structures. An important feature of the proposed query language is its ability to query entities in IoT environments based on their situation in a fully dynamic manner where users can define situations and context entities as part of the query. We exemplify the usage of CDQL on three different smart city use cases to highlight how CDQL can be utilised to deliver contextual information to IoT applications. Performance evaluation has demonstrated scalability and efficiency of CDQL in handling a fairly large number of concurrent context queries.

As the Internet of Things (IoT) is evolving at a fast pace, the need for contextual intelligence has become more crucial for delivering IoT intelligence, efficiency, effectiveness, performance, and sustainability. Contextual intelligence enables interactions between IoT devices such as sensors/actuators, smartphones and connected vehicles, to name but a few. Context management platforms (CMP) are emerging as a promising solution to deliver contextual intelligence for IoT. However, the development of a generic solution that allows IoT devices and services to publish, consume, monitor, and share context is still in its infancy. In this paper, we propose, validate and explain the details of a novel mechanism called Context Query Engine (CQE), which is an integral part of a pioneering CMP called Context-as-a-Service (CoaaS). CQE is responsible for efficient execution of context queries in near real-time. We present the architecture of CQE and illuminate its workflows. We also conduct extensive experimental performance and scalability evaluation of the proposed CQE. Results of experimental evaluation convincingly demonstrate that CoaaS outperforms its competitors in executing complex context queries. Moreover, the advanced functionality of the embedded query language makes CoaaS a decent candidate for real-life deployments.

In mainstream programming languages such as Java, a common way to enable concurrency is to manually introduce explicit concurrency constructs such as multi-threading. In multi-threaded programs, managing synchronization between threads is a complicated and challenging task for the programmers due to thread interleaving and heap interference that leads to problems such as deadlocks, data races. With these considerations in mind, access permission-based dependencies have been investigated as an alternative approach to verify the correctness of multi-threaded programs and to exploit the implicit concurrency present in sequential programs without using explicit concurrency constraints. However, significant annotation overhead can arise from manually adding permission-based specifications in a source program, diminishing the effectiveness of existing permission-based approaches. In this paper,we present a framework, Sip4J, to automatically extract access permission-based implicit dependencies from sequential Java programs, by performing inter-procedural static analysis of the source code. Moreover, we integrate and extend an existing permission-based verification tool, Pulse, to automatically verify correctness of the inferred specifications and to reason about their concurrent behaviors. Our evaluation on some widely-used benchmarks gives strong evidence of the correctness of the inferred annotations and their effectiveness in enabling concurrency in sequential programs.

Service-oriented Mobile Social Network in Proximity (MSNP) lets participants establish new social interactions with strangers in public proximity using heterogeneous platforms and devices. Such characteristic faces challenges in discovery latency and trustworthiness. In a public service-oriented MSNP environment, which consists of a large number of participants, a content requester who searches for a particular service provided by other MSNP participants will need to retrieve and process a large number of Service Description Metadata (SDM) files, associated semantic metadata files and identifying the trustworthiness of the content providers. Performing such tasks on a resource constraint mobile device can be time consuming, and the overall discovery performance will be affected and will result in high latency. This paper analyses the service discovery models of MSNP and presents corresponding solutions to improve the service discovery performance of MSNP. We firstly present and analyse the basic service discovery models of service-oriented MSNP. To follow up, we apply a context-aware user preference prediction scheme to enhance the speed of the semantic service discovery process. Later, we address the trustworthiness issue in MSNP and propose a scheme to reduce the latency of the trustworthy service discovery for MSNP. The proposed scheme has been tested and evaluated on MSNP application prototype operating on real mobile devices and MSNP simulation environments.