2016 IEEE International Conference on Cloud Engineering

IoT End-User Applications Provisioning in the Cloud: State of the Art

Sami Yangui∗ , Roch H. Glitho∗ , Fatna Belqami† , Monique J. Morrow‡ and Paul A. Polakos§
∗ CIISE, Concordia University, Montreal, QC, Canada.
{s_yangui, glitho}@encs.concordia.ca
† Zayed University, Abu Dhabi, UAE.
Fatna.Belqasmi@zu.ac.ae
‡ Cisco systems, Zurich, Switzerland.
mmorrow@cisco.com
§ Cisco systems, New York, NY, USA.
ppolakos@cisco.com

Abstract—Internet of Things (IoT) is expected to enable a
myriad of end-user applications by interconnecting physical
objects. Cloud computing is a promising paradigm for provi-
sioning IoT end-user applications in a cost-efficient manner.
IoT end-user applications are provisioned in cloud settings
using PaaS and offered as SaaS. This paper focuses on the PaaS
aspects of IoT end-user applications provisioning. It critically
reviews the state of the art. The critical review discusses the
PaaS on the whole spectrum of IoT verticals and also the PaaS
dealing with specific IoT verticals.
Keywords-Cloud computing; Internet of Things (IoT); Plat-
form as-a-Service (PaaS);
I. I NTRODUCTION
Internet of Things (IoT) refers to the ever-growing per-
vasive network of various objects connected over the Inter-
net. These objects are able to interact and cooperate with
their neighbors through unique addressing schemes seeking
to reach a common goal. This emerging infrastructure of
objects will certainly enable a plethora of novel end-user
applications. Efficiency in resource usage, scalability, elas-
ticity and easy development are the key requirements in these
applications. Notably, cloud computing might aid in meeting
these requirements.
IoT end-user applications are provisioned in cloud settings
using PaaS and offered as SaaS. It should be noted that
existing PaaS (e.g. Cloud Foundry, OpenShift and Heroku)
are not convenient for IoT end-user applications provi-
sioning. However, several approaches have been recently
proposed for PaaS, aiming at the provisioning of IoT end-
user applications. This paper will discuss them. In the next
section, the works that propose PaaS supporting the whole
spectrum of IoT verticals are reviewed. In the third section,
the works that propose PaaS for specific IoT verticals (e.g.
PaaS for robots, PaaS for Wireless Sensors Network) are
reviewed. The final section concludes the paper.
II. PAA S FOR W HOLE S PECTRUM OF I OT V ERTICALS
These works are classified into three groups of ap-
proaches: (i) The virtual vertical-based approach; (ii) the
services compositions approach; and (iii) a set of work in
which contributors focus only on a sub-set of functionality.
A. Virtual vertical-based approach
In [1], the authors propose a PaaS architecture and
implementation based on the concepts of virtual verticals.
A virtual vertical consists of a set of resources and ser-
vices, provided by a given IoT IaaS in the form of an
isolated virtual solution at the PaaS. The vertical solution
can be assimilated to the hosting environment of IoT end-
user applications and can be customized in relation to the
physical objects they use. The technical PaaS services (e.g.
monitoring) can be shared horizontally between the vertical
solutions.
For the end-user application deployment, the same authors
propose in [2] to extend Topology and Orchestration Spec-
ification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA) specifications in
order to support IoT end-user applications provisioning.
B. Services compositions approach
In [3], the authors propose an open-source PaaS for smart
city end-user applications. It provides features to discover
and compose services in order to build and deploy end-user
applications upstream smart objects. The architecture of the
PaaS consists of a marketplace, a runtime engine and an
ingestion layer.
The marketplace provides GUIs for developers to operate
the reusable services. The runtime engine is the component
responsible for deploying the end-user applications. This
engine is based on an extension of Cloud Foundry PaaS.
The ingestion layer provides the APIs and the interfaces
to connect and make the services interact with the smart
objects.
C. Focus on sub-set of functionality
Some work concentrate on a single aspect of provisioning
IoT end-user applications in PaaS. For example, the authors
introduce an IoT-oriented data storage framework at the PaaS
in [4]. The proposed framework allows (i) processing the

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DOI 10.1109/IC2E.2016.43
high throughput of the data sent by the objects to the running
end-user applications and (ii) scaling horizontally the data
management resources in order to support the huge volume
of the data.
The proposed data storage framework handles heteroge-
neous data collected from various objects. The file repository
is based on an extended Hadoop server to handle unstruc-
tured data. The database module manages the structured
data and aggregates several database sources. The resources
configuration module ensures the data management. The ser-
vice module builds corresponding RESTful services from the
data stored according to meta-data models and configuration
patterns provided by the resources configuration module.
III. PAA S FOR S PECIFIC I OT V ERTICALS
The solutions in this category are organized into platforms
that focus on sensing resource provisioning and those de-
voted to robot resources provisioning.
A. PaaS for WSN
In [5], the authors propose Dinam Cloud, the PaaS for
on-demand WSN end-user applications development, de-
ployment, configuration and monitoring. The Dinam Cloud
architecture consists of three layers, following the three
service delivery layers of the cloud architecture: IaaS, PaaS
and SaaS. The Dinam IaaS layer offers WSN computing
resources and it is formed by heterogeneous wireless sensor
nodes. The Dinam SaaS includes the concrete applications
that are developed based on the Dinam PaaS. The Dinam
PaaS facilitates WSN end-user applications provisioning.
Another example of the PaaS for WSN is Cloud4Sens, a
cloud-based platform for collecting, integrating and manag-
ing the sensing capabilities from various sources [6]. These
capabilities are offered to the users via two provisioning
models: Data-centric and service-centric. In the data-centric
model, the users are given access to environmental data as-
a-Service. With the device-centric model, Cloud4Sens uses
virtualization techniques to provide its users with a virtual
sensing and actuation infrastructure.
B. PaaS for robots
Examples of works in this category include DAvinCi
and Rapyuta. DAvinCi is a software framework that allows
robots in large environments to collaborate in order to
achieve environment exploration and map building [7]. The
sensing capabilities are distributed among the robots. Parts
of the global map are provided to the robots as-a-Service on
demand according to the robots’ needs. The computationally
intense tasks of the process are offloaded to computing nodes
in the cloud. The framework also offers a standard set of
algorithms as cloud services.
Rapyuta is an open-source robotics PaaS, which enables
robots to offload heavy computations to customizable and
elastic computing environments in the cloud [8]. These
233
computing environments are tightly interconnected to allow
information and service sharing among the different robots.
Rapytua’s internal processes intercommunicate over sockets,
using the ROS inter-process communication and exchanging
serialized ROS messages. Rapyuta’s processes communicat-
ing with physical robots convert data messages between the
external and internal communication formats.
IV. C ONCLUSION
This paper provided a survey on the PaaS for IoT end-
user applications. While some of these architectures target
on the whole spectrum of IoT verticals, others target specific
IoT verticals or specific IoT technologies. WSN and robots
are the specific verticals that have been targeted so far by
the proposed architectures.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This work is partially supported by CISCO systems
through grant CG-589630.
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