R&I on IoT integration and platforms -

Specific Challenge:

The future design of the Internet of Things applications will depend crucially on the development of sophisticated platform architectures for smart objects, embedded intelligence, and smart networks. Most of the today's IoT systems are however mainly focused on sensors, whereas in the future actuation and smart behaviour will be the key points.

Research driven by ambitious use cases and benefiting from innovation areas in components, systems, networking and web technologies needs to be carried out to respond to the ever increasing needs of future IoT systems in terms of scalability, heterogeneity, complexity and dynamicity. IoT platforms should be open and easy-to-use to support third party innovation

Scope

• Architectures, concepts, methods and tools for open IoT platforms integrating evolving sensing, actuating, energy harvesting, networking and interface technologies. Platforms should provide connectivity and intelligence, actuation and control features, linkage to modular and ad-hoc cloud services, Data analytics and open APIs as well as semantic interoperability across use cases and conflict resolution. The work may also address the emergence of an open Web of Things like environment with search capabilities, so that "thing events" can be published, consumed, aggregated, filtered, re-published and searched for. Platforms should be compatible with existing international developments addressing object identity management, discovery services, virtualisation of objects, devices and infrastructures and trusted IoT approaches. Proposed research and innovation should take advantage of previous work and build on existing platforms, such as FIWARE, CRYSTAL or SOFIA, if appropriate.
• IoT security and privacy. Advanced concepts for end-to-end security in highly distributed, heterogeneous and dynamic IoT environments. Approaches must be holistic and include identification and authentication, data protection and prevention against cyber-attacks at the device and system levels. They should address relevant security and privacy elements such as confidentiality, user data awareness and control, integrity, resilience and authorisation.

Proposals should address above mentioned topics, verification and testing, and identify the added value of the proposed approach specific to IoT in comparison to generic solutions. They are expected to include two or more usage scenarios to demonstrate the practicality of the approach.

The Commission considers that proposals requesting a contribution from the EU of between EUR 3 and 5 million would allow this specific challenge to be addressed appropriately. Nonetheless, this does not preclude submission and selection of proposals requesting other amounts.

Expected Impact:

Two or more of the following criteria should be addressed, with success metrics where appropriate.

• Evolution of platform technologies and contribution to scientific progress enabling novel, advanced semi-autonomous IoT applications.
• Strengthen the industrial EU technological offer of innovative IoT solutions
• Contribution to emerging or future standards and pre-normative activities
• Increase of IoT usability and user acceptance, notably through strengthened security and user control
• Support emergence of an open market of services and innovative businesses
• Promote the adoption of EU platforms in European and international context

Cross-cutting Priorities:

Cross-cutting Key-Enabling Technologies (KETs)

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