Smart human-centric services in interoperable and decentralised IoT environments

Internet of Things (IoT) is identified as a disruptive technology which brings digital transformation into many domains, and with significant influence on human society as a whole. It enables the interweaving of the physical and digital world by enabling networked devices placed in our everyday environment to be operated by end user applications and services, while being managed by software platforms. However, a large number of exiting platforms, as well as their semantic and syntactic incompatibilities, is limiting a proliferation and higher adoption of IoT solutions in practice by restricting them to specific verticals or pilot deployments. 

The IoT4us project is adopting and building upon cutting-edge results of the H2020 symbIoTe project which has developed an open source middleware for IoT interoperability and established an initial ecosystem of interoperable IoT platforms steering a new wave of innovative IoT applications and services across domains and platforms. IoT4us will evolve this ecosystem further to create decentralised, dynamic, secure and privacy-preserving IoT environments that, in addition to cloud resources, also rely on edge (and fog) computing resources. IoT4us will enable human-centric, autonomous and cognitive IoT services within such environments to facilitate either knowledge creation from heterogeneous IoT data sets or to initiate actions based on user preferences and past behaviour. The performed research will contribute to the emergence of next-generation IoT solutions adequate to be incorporated into 5G networks with a primarily goal to offer usable, intelligent, secure and privacy-preserving applications and services for end users. 

Through its research objectives, the project will investigate the following challenging topics:

  • dynamic, decentralized and interoperable IoT ecosystems with secure communication mechanisms,
  • communication protocols for efficient data transmission in Low-Power Wide-Area networks,
  • intelligent and cognitive services for interoperable IoT ecosystems, 
  • Blockchain technology and
  • privacy-preserving mechanisms for IoT.
Project details
Project title Smart human-centric services in interoperable and decentralised IoT environments 
Acronym IoT4us
Project contract number 1986
Project duration 01.01.2020 - 31.12.2023 (48 months)
Project leader Prof. Ivana Podnar Žarko, PhD