Wireless Netw (2014) 20:2201–2217
DOI 10.1007/s11276-014-0731-0
Future Internet of Things: open issues and challenges
Chun-Wei Tsai • Chin-Feng Lai • Athanasios V. Vasilakos
Published online: 13 May 2014
 Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014
Abstract Internet of Things (IoT) and its relevant tech-
nologies have been attracting the attention of researchers
from academia, industry, and government in recent years.
However, since the requirements of the IoT are quite dif-
ferent from what the Internet today can offer, several
innovative techniques have been gradually developed and
incorporated into IoT, which is referred to as the Future
Internet of Things (FIoT). Among them, how to extract
‘‘data’’ and transfer them into ‘‘knowledge’’ from sensing
layer to application layer has become a vital issue. This
paper begins with an overview of IoT and FIoT, followed
by discussions on how to apply data mining and compu-
tational intelligence to FIoT. An intelligent data manage-
ment framework inspired by swarm optimization will then
given. Finally, open issues and future trends of this field
will be addressed.
Keywords Future Internet of Things  Data mining 
Cloud computing
C.-W. Tsai
Department of Applied Informatics and Multimedia, Chia Nan
University of Pharmacy and Science, Tainan, Taiwan, ROC
C.-F. Lai
Institute of Computer Science and Information Engineering,
National Chung Cheng University, Chia-Yi, Taiwan, ROC
e-mail: cinfon@ieee.org
A. V. Vasilakos (&)
Department of Computer Science, Kuwait University, Kuwait,
Kuwait
e-mail: vasilako@ath.forthnet.gr
1 Introduction
Today, we can enjoy the successful results of various
information systems and Internet applications because they
underwent several changes and redesigns to satisfy the
needs of end users. With relevant technologies, systems,
and Internet at hand, several incredible approaches can
then be imagined and realized. The Internet applications
are now linked closely to the daily life of humans covering
various fields from the World Wide Web to e-mail to
e-Learning to search engine to social network [1, 2]. Debut
of these applications has made our life much more con-
venient today than in the past.
Recently, several studies from academics, industries,
and governments have attempted to connect all things in
the world to the Internet to provide a seamless integrated
system for enhancing their performance in the transmission
of information, called Internet of Things (IoT) [3, 4]. In
addition to providing us a better life (in terms of food,
dressing, housing, transportation, education, and enter-
tainment), the impact of IoT can also be found in the
market of renewable/sustainable energy no matter where it
is [5]. Until now, the IoT is still not well defined. That is
why several studies [4, 6–8] have focused on clarifying the
definition of IoT and discussing its future research direc-
tions, such as smart city, global supply chain logistics, and
health care.
As one of the emerging industries, the IoT has been
facing the following challenges: applying it to different
domains and integrating it with devices, systems and net-
work environments emerged and discussed in several
studies [6, 9]. One of the most important things is that
given an integrated architecture for IoT. Another important
thing is to solve the problems the Internet today faces. That
is why future Internet and FIoT were frequently discussed
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in recent years. Among the studies of IoT, the promising
researches are (1) developing approaches for Future
Internet of Things from the perspective of system design
and (2) using the information retrieval and data mining
technologies [10–13] to analyze the data from things or
systems of IoT from the perspective of information
analysis.
With several studies of IoT and FIoT presented in recent
years, their importance has now becoming more and more
clear. First, it can be found that the marketing trends of IoT
grew rapidly in the last decade [14, 15]. More preciesly, the
marketing of IoT is estimated to reach $309 billion per year
by 2020 [14]. Another technology report [15] pointed out
that the potential economic impact of IoT will reach $2.7
trillion to $6.2 trillion per year by 2025. Although the esti-
mations of marketing value for IoT and its relevant appli-
cations from different researches are different, one thing in
common is that they will strongly impact the industries and
economies in the near future. Different from the impact of
marketing, althouth IoT now is just stepping into its initial
stage, many prototype systems and applications [4, 4–8]
have been presented in recent years. By using technologies of
IoT in our daily life, fast and convenient environments can be
expected. Everything can be easily controlled, monitored,
and cooperated with each other. For example, we can now
track the status (e.g., activity or location) of our shipment via
the web.1 Thus, we can monitor and manage these things
more effectively and provide better services to users.
The aim of this paper is not only to provide a systematic
description of IoT and data management technologies for
IoT but also to discuss the characteristics of FIoT so as to
provide a guideline for the researchers focusing on IoT to
shift to FIoT, especially the comparisons of their archi-
tectures and systems. The main contributions of the paper
can be summarized as follows:
• A brief introduction to IoT and FIoT is presented the
focus of which is on the design issues to provide a
simple comparison of them.
• An integrated data management framework is presented
in this paper to integrate the information from FIoT
using swarm intelligence to create knowledge for us.
• The open issues and possible research trends are given
to illustrate the critical research of FIoT, especially for
data analysis.
The remainder of the paper is organized as follows.
Section 2 gives a brief introduction to the IoT and FIoT
and their variants. Section 3 then discusses computation
intelligence and data mining to IoT. Section 4 starts with
the basic idea of the proposed framework. Then, the
1
FedExr Tracking, https://www.fedex.com/fedextrack/?action=
track
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Wireless Netw (2014) 20:2201–2217
proposed framework and a simple scenario are described in
detail. The open issues and possible research trends are
discussed in Sects. 5 and 6, respectively.
2 From Internet of Things to Future Internet of Things
2.1 The Internet of Things
These historical development processes can be traced back
to [3] and Auto-ID of MIT. The importance of IoT was
quickly realized by some researchers; therefore, several
organizations established research groups to discuss pos-
sible architectures and standards while trying to develop
practicable IoT systems [16]. Since the concepts and pro-
ducts were presented, definitions for IoT for various con-
siderations have also been developed. One of the early
developments can be found in the EPC global architecture
framework of electronic product code (EPC) which is
focused on the radio-frequency identification (RFID)
approach which not only provides a prototype system, but
also illustrates the other possibilities of IoT.
As shown in Table 1, definitions of IoT can be found in
different researches, such as United States, European,
Japan, and China. Although definitions from different
organizations are somehow different, the requirements [4]
for IoT are essentially the same, such as being able to
integrate heterogeneous devices, ubiquitous data exchange,
localization and tracking capabilities, and even being able
to make the simple decision by themselves [17]. To pro-
vide better services for the end user, the intelligence has
become a vital issue of IoT. That is why several studies [4,
8, 17–19] are focused on making things on IoT as intelli-
gent as possible (called smart objects) instead of just fol-
lowing the simple rules to make decisions.
The basic architecture of IoT is three-layer, , as shown
in Fig. 1(a), which is widely used to explain the approaches
of IoT [20–24]. The perception layer (also called the
sensing layer or the edge technology layer) is the bottom
layer which can be regarded as the hardware or physical
layer. Data collection is done on this layer. The middle
layer, i.e., the network layer, is responsible for connecting
the perception layer and the application layer so that things
can be passed from the perception layer to the application
layer and systems, applications, services can be passed
from the application layer to the perception layer. The
application layer usually plays the role of providing ser-
vices or applications that integrate or analyze the infor-
mation received from the other two layers.
As shown in Fig. 1(b), inspired by [16], a recent study
[6] added the access gateway layer and the middleware
layer to the three-layer architecture of IoT. In [6], the
perception layer at the bottom of IoT’s architecture is also
Wireless Netw (2014) 20:2201–2217 2203

Table 1 The definitions and standards of IoT Table 2 The definitions and standards of FIoT
Organization Web link Name Web link

Massachusetts Institute http://www.autoidlabs.org/ Future Internet Architecture http://www.nets-fia.net/

of Technology (FIA)
EPCglobal http://www.gs1.org/epcglobal Future Internet Design http://www.nets-find.net/
National Intelligence http://www.fas.org/irp/nic/disruptive (FIND)
Council Future Internet Research and http://www.ict-fire.eu/home.html
European Commission http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/ict/enet/home_ Experimentation (FIRE)
en.html AKARI http://www.nict.go.jp/en/photonic_
European Commission http://www.smart-systems-integration.org/ nw/archi/akari/akari-top_e.html
public/internet-of-things Name Data Networking http://named-data.net/
Ubiquitous ID Center http://www.uidcenter.org/ (NDN)
Internet of Things China http://www.iotcn.org.cn/ SENSEI http://www.sensei-project.eu/
Internet of things- http://www.iot-a.eu/public
Architecture (IoT-A)

smarter planet of IBM2 and the 50 sensor applications for a

Application Layer
Middleware Layer
Application Layer Network Layer
Network Layer Access Gateway Layer
Preception Layer Preception Layer
smarter world.3 Since the potentials of IoT also can be
found in the applications for the smart grid systems [25]
and smart homes [26], from the perspective of the design
concept, the IoT has been gradually shifted from extended
applications with one kind of equipment to an integration
of different appliances. The design concept of integration
and flexibility has become essential because the vertical
and horizontal integration between different appliances,
network communication, systems, applications, services
are the characteristics of most IoT applications nowadays.

(a) (b) 2.2 The Future Internet of Things

Fig. 1 The architecture of IoT. a Three-layer architecture b five-layer
architecture
called the edge layer, which provides the definition of
gathering the data. Different from the three-layer archi-
tecture of IoT that uses only the network layer to connect
the perception and application layers, the access gateway
layer is added to the five-layer architecture of IoT, together
with network layer, to manage the communications in the
IoT environment and to transmit messages between the
objects and systems. The middleware layer is another layer
for the five-layer architecture of IoT which is usually used
to provide a more flexible association interface between the
hardware and applications. Finally, the top layer of this
five-layer architecture is the application layer. The defini-
tion of this layer is similar to that in the three-layer
architecture.
With the advance of IoT, many innovative services and
applications now are no longer imagination, they will be
presented to the public with good possibilities, which can
be found on some well-known examples, such as the
With advance of internet technology and development of
social network, it is reasonable to expect that a new gen-
eration of Internet (also called future Internet) that will
appear in the near future. In [27], several key technical
issues of IoT were pointed out, such as heterogeneity,
connectivity, scale, naming, addressing, identification, and
privacy. These challenges and open issues clarify that the
dilemma of current Internet architecture requires great
efforts to change. The design of IoT that will accompany
future Internet has to be redesigned. Similar to the devel-
opment of FIoT, several governments and organizations
have focused on defining and determining the possible
standards, architectures, and relevant technologies for this
new generation IoT, which are FIA, FIND, FIRE, and
AKARI, as shown in Table 2. Contemporaneous with the
above programs, the proliferation can be found on several
studies [21, 22, 24, 27–34]. They were presented for
enduing FIoT that has more different characteristics to
satisfy the need of end users, such as reliability or security.
2
http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/
3
http://www.libelium.com/

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In [28, 34], brief reviews and comparisons for FIoT and Fig. 2 One architecture of FIoT
[29] Social Layer
the possible research trends are given. Based on these
studies, one of the characteristics in the design of FIoT is to
change the way information is extracted. To solve the Application Layer
problem of the Internet today that has to know the IP
address to get the contents, a different content dissemina- Network Layer
tion model was employed for the NDN of FIA to change
the way information is transmitted between the end users. Preception Layer
In other words, the end users just need to concern ‘‘what’’
the contents are instead of ‘‘where’’ the contents are [28].
To provide a comprehensive and high performance Internet
Table 3 Research topics on IoT and FIoT
architecture, the major concerns of the NEBULA [35] of
FIA are supporting cloud computing and highly reliable Level Research topics References
applications. The design of NEBULA also takes into System design Standard and [6, 22, 29, 33, 35, 36],
account integrating with other future Internet architectures. framework Tables 1 and 2
Different from the NDN and NEBULA of FIA from the Security and [37–40]
United States, the SENSEI is from seventh framework privacy
programme (FP7) of European Union. Similar to other Applications/ Smart city and [25, 26, 41–44]
FIoT architectures, of course, the major concern of SEN- services smart home
SEI is also on providing a highly scalable architectural Transportation [45–49]
framework and open service interface, but one of the main Health care [7, 50, 51]
focuses is on the integration of the resources between real Social network [16, 30, 52, 53]
world and digital world (SENSEI system) with the resource Education [54–56]
and entity abstraction levels. According to the observations Algorithms/ Data mining [10–13, 57–61]
technologies Computational [62–66]
of [34], SENSEI can provide more flexible services than
intelligence
Auto-ID. IoT-A is another FIoT of FP7. Similar to the
SENSEI, IoT-A also considers how to integrate the Smart object [8, 17–19]
resource of IoT and entity of real world with other future Overall Survey and review [4, 6–9, 16, 28, 31]
discussions Comparision and [21, 24, 27, 32, 34]
Internet. In addition, one of the focuses of IoT-A is
discussion
machine-to-machine communication.
In order to provide better services to end users, self-
management capabilities of IoT are a necessary rather than security, physical security, and management security.
a comprehensive framework. Recently, some researches Another promising research of FIoT is the social internet of
[22, 29, 30] have focused on integrating artificial intelligent things (SIoT) [30]. The basic idea of SIoT is to integrate
and social network concepts into FIoT. In [22], a man-like the social network with IoT to provide better services for
nervous (MLN) architecture was presented for FIoT. An the end users of such a system. Under this kind of archi-
interesting characteristic of MLN is the emphasis of the tecture, the definitions of social relationships and social
intelligent control. To realize this kind of intelligent FIoT network structures are the essential to success. Applying
architecture, the management and centralized data center intelligent technologies to make the FIoT smart has also
(M&DC), distributed control nodes, and IoT network and appeared in the studies of SIoT, such as employing the
sensors are generally regarded as brain, spinal cord, and ontologies to represent the social activities with semantic
nerves. In the same study [22], Ning and Wang also pre- view.
sented social-based framework for FIoT, called social
organization framework (SOF). Based on the definitions 2.3 Summarization
given to different levels of M&DC, SOF can construct and
manage an integrated ubiquitous IoT. In a nutshell, for A summarization of the researches on IoT and FIoT is
MLN, neuron represents the sensor, neural network rep- given in this section. As shown in Table 3, they can be
resents the Internet, and M&DC is the brain. The data categorized as system design, applications/services, algo-
collection procedure from sensors (neurons) to brain rithms/technologies, and overall discussions. In other
(M&DC) is just like the process of human to sense the words, these studies can be regarded as an epitome of
events or to get the data. As shown in Fig. 2, the focus of research trends and topics on IoT. For the system design
later study [29] (IPM) has then been changed to the net- point of view, several organizations proposed frameworks
work security from the perspectives of information as well as standards for the IoT and FIoT. Among these

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organizations are research teams, societies, and govern-
ments. These researches usually involved in the definitions,
communication protocols, data types, and system models
of IoT. However, although a large number of studies focus
on how to realize the IoT by using their frameworks,
exchanging data between IoTs still is a problem faced by
these researches. While most researches pay their attention
to defining the standards, frameworks, and system models
of IoT, security and privacy [37–40] are another two crit-
ical issues to be addressed for the IoT. This can be easily
justified because this kind of system will own much more
data about us, i.e., not only the data recorded by the IoT but
also the data created by such systems. Thus, how to protect
our assets on IoT has become a very important issue.
Different from system design, because of the maturity of
some systems and technologies of IoT, a greater number of
researches have been focusing on presenting the innovative
applications for our daily life, such as smarter planet of
IBM, plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV), intelligent
appliances for smart home, health care, social network, and
e-Learning [7, 16, 25, 26, 30, 41–56]. It is expected that
most touchable ‘‘things’’ in our life will be connected to an
IoT system, and the service provider will be able to provide
us suitable and necessary services, by analyzing the data
collected by IoT. For example, the data collected from
different sensors (e.g., driving behavior, power consump-
tion, and location information) can provide sufficient
information for PHEV to predict the best time to charge. Of
course, the things of IoT (e.g., sensors and cameras) can
also be employed to predict the conditions of human falling
for health care applications. In brief, the applications of IoT
will be indispensable to our life in the near future.
To develop better services and applications, some
researches are focused on developing smart ‘‘thing’’ (also
called smart object) [8, 17–19] from the intelligent per-
spective of IoT. It means that each sensor or appliance may
be able to think by itself or be able to cooperate with other
devices. The other two research trends are applying the
data mining [10–13, 57–61] and computational intelligence
(CI) [62–66] technologies to IoT, such as suggesting a new
path for a driver to avoid traffic jam or automatically
turning lights on or off. Among them, clustering, classifi-
cation, and associate rule are the typical data mining
technologies for IoT to provide a convenient life. In these
researches, the environment of IoT will generally be
modeled as a data mining approach first and then a tradi-
tional mining algorithm is used to solve it. The results of
using data mining for IoT are promising in terms of both
the accuracy rate and computation time, but not many
studies pay attention to integrate these mining technologies
for different IoT systems to do a single task, such as falling
detection system for the elder that needs information from
different detection systems and even from the notification
2205
systems. For these reasons, in addition to surveys and
reviews [4, 6–9, 16, 28, 31] for IoT and FIoT, some
comparisons and discussions [21, 24, 27, 32, 34] are pre-
sented to point out some promising and possible solutions
that may help us understand the critical points of IoT so as
to enhance its performance.
In summary, the differences between IoT and FIoT are
not only in the environment, infrastructures, protocols,
standards, and systems, but also in some integrated issues
which are given as follows:
• Finding the needed contents and resources: How to find
the useful contents will become an important issue for
FIoT because every ‘‘thing’’ needs them to finish its job
or provide better services. Different from the fact that
IPv6 is used to increase the number of addresses to
satisfy a much larger number of things, as we
mentioned previously, the name data networking is
expected for FIoT because the trend is content-oriented,
not host-oriented. Of course, this is just the first step,
but it may give us a helpful starting point to make
things be able to find useful information by themselves
or to automatically exchange the information.
• Infrastructures: In addition to IPv6 and NDN, the
infrastructures of FIoT will also differ from IoT
because many IoT approaches are designed and devel-
oped with the current internet environment. We can say
that FIoT will bring a revolution of the internet. But the
only one thing we know is that the FIoT will not be
designed and developed on the current internet envi-
ronment; rather, it will be designed and developed on
an environment that integrates internet, cloud comput-
ing, and smart grid.
• Smartness to intelligenc: Making things more intelli-
gent has always been the ultimate goal of computer
systems, including IoT and FIoT. According to our
observations, the early studies of IoT usually use rule-
based mechanisms to provide smart services, such as
turning on the light because the sensor detected
someone is entering the room. Nowadays, the research
trends have been employing much more intelligent
mechanisms to replace the rule-based mechanisms to
make things think as much as the way humans think.
For this reason, the modern computational intelligence
will also be employed in FIoT.
• Colletive intelligence: Since social networks have
changed the using behavior of internet users which
also changed the marketing strategies of companies.
Another important characteristic is that the discussion
forum between users will have more members and will
transmit information much faster. Although not many
studies of IoT focus on colletive intelligence, we all
know that social networks will accelerate the
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development of colletive intelligence in the forthcom-
ing future. Thus, the colletive intelligence will certainly
play a critical role in the provisioning of applicable
services by FIoT.
3 Smartness for IoT
As we mentioned in Sect. 2.3, data mining and computa-
tion intelligence are the two critical technologies to make
IoT provide better services for us. In this section, we will
start with a brief introduction to CI which contains the
basic ideas and comparisons of CI methods, especially the
evolutionary computing and swarm optimization. We will
then turn the discussion to the applications of IoT by using
CI methods. The basic idea of data mining and its appli-
cations in IoT will also be given in this section.
3.1 Computational intelligence
The CI [67] is definitely one of the vital branches of the
history and evolution of computers, which is aimed at
making computers be able to ‘‘think by themselves.’’ To
imitate the brain of human to make decisions or to emulate
the genius of nature to solve complex problems are all the
possible models of CI. Moreover, the technologies of CI
now cover and overlap a large number of research domains.
Examples are neural network, fuzzy logic, evolutionary
computation, and nature-inspired algorithms. The nature-
inspired algorithm is one of the important CI methods
which uses the heuristic and strategic guess to find the
possible solutions. Based on the observation of [68, 69], the
computation time of nature-inspired algorithms is usually
faster than brute-force or exhaustive search. That is why a
large number of researches have attempted to apply the
nature-inspired algorithm to solve the complex and large
scale problems in recent years.
The neural network and fuzzy logic were spread fast in
the 1980s or even earlier. Several applications of neural
network and fuzzy logic can be found in industry and
commercial today [70, 71]. On the other hand, the nature-
inspired algorithms are expanded in the 1990s even though
some of them were presented in 1960s or even earlier. In
brief, let alone the timing to spread, most of the CI algo-
rithms have now taken their place and have also been
accepted as a search method for complex problems. The
evolutionary computing [72–74] and swarm intelligence
(SI) [75–77] are two promising kinds of search algorithms.
For instance, genetic algorithm (GA) [72–74], a well-
known evolutionary computing, employs the crossover,
mutation, and selection operators to emulate the process of
natural selection to find better candidate solutions. Because
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Wireless Netw (2014) 20:2201–2217
the design of GA can be easily understood and applied to
parallel computing system, it was spread very fast and has
been applied to several research and practical problems.
From the perspective of the search probability of diversi-
fication and intensification, because GA has multiple
chromosomes4 to represent the candidate solutions and
search directions, the global search ability and its search
diversification are better than single-solution-based search
algorithms.5 Also because the crossover and mutation
operators play the role of exchanging the information
between chromosomes and disturbing the current solutions,
respectively, the GA is able to fine an approximate solution
within a shorter period of computation time.
More recently, nature-inspired algorithms, collectively
called swarm intelligence [78], presented continuously
after the 1990s, has attracted researchers from different
domains. The behaviors of ants, bees, fireflies, or bats are
used as models to study. The ant colony optimization
(ACO) [75, 76] and particle swarm optimization (PSO)
[77] are two representatives of swarm optimization for
discrete and continuous problems, respectively. According
to our observation, the main features of SI are social
behaviors and common information communication. For
example, ACO [75, 76] uses pheromone and heuristic
information to construct the partial routing paths step by
step, as shown in Eq. (1). More precisely, each ant has
more than one routing path (also called edge) that can be
selected when it is at a node i (also called the subsolution)
with probability
8
>
< ½sij a ½gij b k
P if j 2 N i ;
pkij ¼ a
k ½sij  ½gij 
b
ð1Þ
>
: j2N i
0 otherwise;
where i and j denote the jthe subsolution of the ith solution;
k
k the kth ant; N i the set of candidate subsolutions; sij the
pheromone value, and gij the heuristic value. Based on
Eq. (1) and pheromone update operator, each ant then can
share the search experience and information with other ants
via a common pheromone matrix. Another interesting
example is particle swarm optimization [77] which origi-
nates from an observation of the social behavior of bird
flock or fish school. Different from ACO, PSO uses the
velocity and position of each particle to define the search
strategy. As shown in Eq. (2), three different kinds of
forces, inertial velocity v, personal best pb, and global best
gb, will impact on the search direction of each particle. In
4
The chromosome of GA, ant of ACO, particle or PSO are generally
regarded as the candidate solution.
5
Single-solution-based search algorithm uses a single search direc-
tion while population-based search algorithm uses multiple search
directions to find the solution at the same time.
Wireless Netw (2014) 20:2201–2217 2207

found in the predecessor of IoT or relevant systems, such as

smart home, information appliance system, and smart grid.
Knowledge
Interpreation 3.2 Data mining for FIoT

In addition to the CI, many recent studies [10–13, 79, 80]

has applied data mining or CI-based mining technologies to
IoT. Figure 3 presents the steps of the knowledge discov-
Pattern Data Mining ery in databases (KDD) [81] process. Among these steps is
the data mining technologies. After these steps, an infor-
mation system can efficiently and effectively extract, filter,
manage, and analyze data captured from the lower layer or
the perception layer. The details of KDD can be found in
Transformed Data Transformation [81].
The main reasons of using these technologies are: (1) a
large amount of data captured by the sensors and other
appliances of IoT need to be effectively managed and
analyzed, and (2) data mining may be able to find out
Preprocessed Data Preprocessing meaningful hidden information from this large amount of
data. It is expected that the first issue the IoT designers
have to solve is that a deluge of data will enter to the IoT.
The existing sampling, compression, or filtering technolo-
gies [82] can only mitigate the symptoms but not treat the
Target Data Selection cause from the root. In addition, the importance of effec-
tively managing and analyzing the data is not only for the
system performance but also for finding useful information
from the captured data. As a result, rather than applying the
CI or data mining technologies to the systems of IoT or
Data
FIoT, ‘‘rethinking’’ of the overall architecture of IoT and
Fig. 3 Outline of KDD [81] then ‘‘constructing’’ a novel CI system would have a much
stronger impact. For the details of other data mining
technologies for IoT, you are referred to [83].
addition, the search experience can be exchanged and
shared via the global best value.
vtþ1 t t t t t
ij ¼ xvij þ a1 u1 ðpbij  pij Þ þ a2 u2 ðgbj  pij Þ; ð2Þ 4 The proposed framework for FIoT

and 4.1 The basic idea

ptþ1
ij ¼ ptij þ vtþ1
ij ;
where vtij and ptij denote the velocity and position of the jth
dimension of the ith particle at iteration t; x an inertial
weight; u1 and u2 two uniformly distributed random
numbers; and a1 and a2 two constant values.
After these discussions, we now know that CI is able to
find the approximate solution within a reasonable time.
Some pioneer researches [62–64] also attempted to apply
CI to IoT and applications relevant to it, such as localiza-
tion, data aggregation and sensor fusion, clustering, and
scheduling. For this reason, CI has the potential of making
IoT and FIoT provide smarter services, besides to
enhancing the performance of these systems. In fact, some
studies [65, 66] showed that the CI technologies can also be
ð3Þ
For FIoT is now in its initial stage, we generally believe
that there is plenty of room for improvement. For example,
first, the CI technologies can be used to replace or combine
with the rule-based technologies to further increase the
flexibility of the systems and things of IoT. Although XML
and other relevant technologies can provide gateway
between information systems, exchanging inforamtion
between these systems still is a difficult problem. This
dilemma is now still in the IoT and FIoT. In addition, a
large scale of data will be created or detected from the
things and systems of FIoT, how to handle these data will
also become a problem. For these reasons, to enhance the
performance of FIoT and to provide applicable services for
the end user, two possible solutions are (1) data

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2208
u1
S.N.
Social Layer
u7
APP1
Application Layer
cloud
Network Layer
LDB
Preception Layer
a1
a2
Fig. 4 The proposed framework
management and mining and (2) CI. The basic idea of the
proposed framework can be divided into twofold:
• Data management and mining technologies for Future
Internet of Things: As mentioned previously, data
mining and its relevant technologies [13, 84] can be
used for an IoT system to effectively manage and
analyze the data from the perception layer. A design
using the concept of data management and mining is
needed for Future Internet of Things, especially when
the amount of data is too large, thus making it difficult
to handle, manage, and analyze.
• Computational intelligence and social network for
Future Internet of Things: The concepts of computa-
tional intelligence and social network can also be
employed in the design of IoT and FIoT [22, 85–87].
Because the social networks in digital world will
become much more large and complex, how to design a
high performance of IoT will also become an important
research issue.
Based on these observations, an intelligent data man-
agement framework based on the swarm optimization,
called Data Management Framework based Swarm Opti-
mization (DMFSO), will be presented in this paper.
4.2 Data management framework based swarm
optimization
As shown in Figure 4, the proposed framework is designed
to conform to the architecture of FIoT, especially for the
support of social network and cloud computing. The per-
formance of data management and analysis is also con-
sidered for the DMFSO.
As shown in the middle of Fig. 4, each sensor or
appliance is associated with a simple agent of the percep-
tion layer. These agents play the role of controlling the
123
Wireless Netw (2014) 20:2201–2217
Interpreation Layer
u2 u3 u4 u5 u6
u8 u9 u10 u11 u12
APP3 Mangment and
Mining Layer
APP2 APP4
GDB
LDB LDB
Extraction Layer
b1 c1 c3
a3 b2 c2 c4
appliances (sensor, RFID, or near field communication tag)
for data collection, data extraction, and data filtering pro-
cess. Different from the traditional approaches of IoT, the
data on different appliances or devices will not be inde-
pendent in the perception layer of the proposed framework
because different appliances and devices can communicate
and coordinate to process data via the communication
among agents.
Similar to the study of [22], the data storage of the
proposed framework will be centralized for the small scale
systems but will be distributed for the large scale systems.
Data collected by the perception layer’s devices will be
uploaded to the local database (LB) first. The data collected
from different devices in the perception layer will be stored
in the same local database because they are close to each
other. The global database (GDB) in the proposed frame-
work plays the role of integrating data from the LDBs.
More precisely, the local data of the proposed framework
will be centralized, thus the data can be preprocessed or
processed (i.e., data reduction, compression, and refor-
matting) more effectively before they become too large to
be processed at a machine. Then, the GDB can integrate
less data from different LDBs. The applications can access
the needed data via the GDB while the user can use these
applications through a cloud environment. Note that in
Fig. 4, APP denotes application; S.N. the social network;
and u the user.
As shown in the right side of Fig. 4, we condensed the
KDD into the extraction, management and mining, and
interpretation layers. The extraction layer maps to the
perception layer. Different from the traditional KDD, the
extraction layer of the proposed framework also takes into
consideration the behavior of agents for its devices. The
management and mining layer of DMFSO consists of the
network layer, the application layer, and the social layer
because it can be employed to manage and analyze the data
Wireless Netw (2014) 20:2201–2217
for these layers of FIoT. Different from the design of [13],
the proposed framework adds an interpretation layer, which
plays the role of summarizing the information from the
data mining tools, making the decisions via the information
from the management and mining layer.
The design of the agent for the proposed framework is
inspired by the ACO and PSO, especially by the informa-
tion and experience sharing between ants or particles using
Eq. (1) and (eq:velocity). As a result, the agents are
designed as follows:
• For its neighbors: The information sharing and
exchange will exist between agents that are either at
the same region or very close to each other. For
example, assume that there are some devices in the
same room all of which are in the power saving mode.
If one of the devices wakes up because of the event of
someone entering this room, the other devices will also
be waken up by the agents. In addition, if the devices
are close to each other and collect the same data, they
can be compressed to reduce the size of the data before
they are saved to the database.
• For a particular propose: One of the purposes of
information sharing is for the same application or the
same service. Different devices need to upload the
information they have to the application or its database
even though they are close to each other. For example,
after negotiation between the agents and application,
instead of uploading all the data collected by all the
devices to the application, the device just needs to
upload the needed and useful data to the application.
The other information the application needs can be
obtained from the global information database. This
way, the size of data can be reduced. Thus, the database
does not need to store the redundant data, and the
transmission of information can sped up.
In summary, agents in the proposed framework act like the
swarm, and the information can be transited quickly. The
size of data can also be reduced because some of the
redundant data can be detected and removed by the agents.
As shown in Table 4, each agent will make the decision,
update its own information and the global information by
using Eqs. (1) and (2) of the information exchange algo-
rithm (IEA) we proposed. In this case, agent Ab will make
the decision and update the information, when agent Ab
received the event Ea and information I a from agent Aa .
Upon receiving the event and information, IEA will first
compute the relevance and importance between agents Aa
and Ab which can then be used to determine the impact of
Ea and I a on agent Ab . The relevance information can be
used to differentiate the relevance between agents Aa and
Ab for different methods, such as relevance for applications
or services. Different from the relevance information, the
2209
Table 4 Outline of information exchange between agents on the
proposed framework
1. Receive event (Ea ) and information (I a ) from other agent Aa .
2. Compute the relevance (dab ) between agent Aa and agent Ab .
3. Compute the importance (iab ) of information from agent a for
agent b.
4. Make the decision of agent Ab by using the information I a , I b ,
dab , iab , and Eq. (4).
5. Update the information I b by using Eq. (3) and global
experience matrix M.
6. Output Ea and I b to its neighbors.
importance iab can be regarded as the importance of
information even though agents Aa and Ab are not in the
same group. With relevance, importance, and Eq. (1), the
proposed algorithm can then make the decision to conform
to the current situation of other agents. For example, agent
Ab has more than one procedure to use, and the probability
of performing which procedure (or work) can be repre-
sented by paj where j is the index of the possible proce-
dures. An agent can easily know which procedure to invoke
when it is triggered by some event or receives the infor-
mation from other agents by using
paj ¼ dab  iab  paj ð4Þ
In addition, IEA will also update the information of agent
Ab by using Eq. (3) for the local experience and the
experience matrix M for the global experience. The event
Ea and information of agent Ab will then also be passed to
the other agents.
To increase the transparency of data and devices of the
proposed framework, four kinds of grouping methods are
employed for the devices. As shown in Fig. 5, they are
device-based, hold-based, location-based, and services-
based grouping methods. The device-based grouping
method is for collecting data from the same type of device
which can be used by applications, which need a large
number of devices of the same type, such as the pressure
sensor in a parking area. The hold-based grouping method
is for collecting data from the same user or particular users.
For example, for a smart home, different types of sensor
are employed to collect the data for the same application.
The location-based grouping method is for applications in a
particular region, such as an e-Learning approach with
particular classrooms. The service-based grouping method
usually exists in the IoT approach, because most services
and applications need more than one type of devices to
collect the data, such as IoT for public transit system.
4.3 A simple scenario
In this section, we use a smart city approach of FIoT as a
simple scenario to elaborate the basic concept of the
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2210 Wireless Netw (2014) 20:2201–2217

Fig. 5 Different grouping

methods of sensors and its
a2
agents
b1 a1

b2 c1 b2
b1

Device−based Hold−based

APP1 APP3

APP2 APP4 a1

cloud
GDB a1 c1 b1
LDB LDB LDB b1 a2
b2
a1 b1 c1 c3
a2 a3 b2 c2 c4

Location−based Service−based

front door
camera 1 camera 2
light 1

light 3
light 2

camera 3

camera 4
light 5 light 5
camera 5

Fig. 6 A example of information exchange between agents of a smart home

DMFSO. As shown in Fig. 6, a simple example for smart
home is used to show how agents exchange the information
and make the decision on their own. In this smart home
example, ten agents are employed to control five cameras
and five lights. For the agent of camera, one possible
application is using Eq. (2) to trace a particular object or
thing. if someone enters the home from the front door,
agents of cameras 2 and 3 will know that a particular object
should be traced because the agent of camera 1 will detect
this person and pass this information to the others. As a
result, these cameras will then act like a swarm to detect
the events we want to monitor. For the agent of light, by
using Eq. (1) in the same situation that someone enters the
home and opens light 1, the agent of light 2 can then use
the information of cameras 1 and 2 to predict the timing to
automatically turn light 2 on.
To realize a smart city with FIoT, in addition to con-
sidering the public things and the overall situations (i.e.,
environment, energy, and transportation), the big data [88],
cloud computing, [89], smart grid [90–92] are the prom-
ising research trends. Imagine that this FIoT system has to
integrate data from a large number of devices of different
types and regions for different applications and services. In
this case, different kinds of grouping methods can be used
to differentiate what kinds of data should be put together
for analysis. For example, a public transit system needs
different types of devices to monitor the passengers as the
service-based grouping method, but a school needs the

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Wireless Netw (2014) 20:2201–2217
devices in a particular region to monitor the events.
Although these two approaches employ more than one type
of devices, the main difference is that the public transit
system may cover the whole city but the school does not.
To manage data from this intricate system (or environ-
ment), effectively grouping the devices is one possible
solution. Another problem we need to face is the big data
issue, especially when a large amount of data or events on
every thing can be collected. For example, the light sensor
of every street light can be used to detect the light. The
other devices in a smart city, such as the surveillance
cameras, can also be used to collect a large amount of data
every day. Now, the problem is which parts of the data are
useful. The light information may not be useful for the
residents but could be very useful for the city government
for the meteorological observation or environmental mon-
itoring for the public. The video data from the surveillance
cameras can be used for the same purpose. Its importance
depends on the kind of application, such as traffic jam vs.
traffic accident (inconvenience vs. danger). For these rea-
sons, dropping the data is not a good idea. But the fact is
that even the best computers available today cannot store
all the data we created. How to manage the data has thus
become the first problem we have to face when handling
the so-called ‘‘big data.’’ The proposed framework builds
on the concept of centralizing the local data and distrib-
uting the global data. Thus, the data can be easily prepro-
cessed because the local data are generally much smaller.
The data can also be easily integrated because the data in
the local database are more useful, meaningful, and much
less than raw data.
5 The open issues and challenges
5.1 The open issues and challenge of IoT
Although the success of IoT has witnessed the possibilities
and potentials, we now have to face the other research
issues and challenges of IoT. An interesting example is that
data collected from sensors or other appliances of IoT will
become very large because of our attempt to have every-
thing connect to the Internet and collect data for the sys-
tems we design. It is easy to imagine that the data thus
collected will be huge, even too huge to be handled by the
current computer systems. That is why the issues about big
data [93] have attracted many researchers from different
disciplines in recent years [6, 9, 10]. Another problem that
can also be found from this example is that some of the
data need to be processed at real time in IoT. The reason
could be that the sensor does not have enough storage to
keep all the data collected or that the sensor needs to make
decision on its own. No matter which architecture of IoT is
2211
employed, several foundation problems still exist as far as
the IoT is concerned.
In [16], Antonio et al. pointed out that IoT nowadays
still has some open issues, such as (1) standardizations of
IoT are not integrated into a comprehensive framework, (2)
the current network and communication designs are not
able to provide a complete IoT service, and (3) the security
and privacy issues still exist in IoT. According to our
observation, the open issues of IoT can be viewed from
three different perspectives:
• Infrastructure perspective: A unified IoT framework is
usually expected to be presented to provide an
integrated solution to develop the IoT system in the
near future. An alternative solution is to have a general
communication interface that will be able to provide a
more flexible service for exchanging the information
between different IoT systems. Even though the
characteristics of decentralization and heterogeneity
[94] will have an impact on the design of IoT, more are
discussed about which parts need to be centralized or
decentralized [22] for the development of IoT. Differ-
ent from the standardizations, communication inter-
faces, number of IP addresses, and (de)centralization
management issues [16], another issue is that the
development of IoT has to be compatible with the
current systems and technologies [27].
• Data management perspective: The first problem that
the developer of IoT needs to consider is the data
extraction which can be regarded as the work on how to
collect the data from the appliances and then to extract
useful information from the collected data. Apparently,
how data are extracted will have a strong impact on the
performance of such a system, especially when the
number of appliances are increased to a certain number.
The memory size, computation power, and network
bandwidth can be used to measure whether we need to
redesign the whole system. However, the study [95]
believes that the data management issues (i.e., data
acquisition, deposition, analysis, and integration) may
strongly impact the performance of IoT. Different from
the data extraction issues, the data representation is
another important research topic because the common
data representation may be conducive to information
exchange between the IoT system and others, such as
ontology and semantic web technologies [96].
• Computational intelligence perspective: When the IoT
is able to manage the data efficiently, another corner-
stone is how to make it smart and make useful
decisions. Even though the smart object [17] of IoT
has been considered, the data mining and other
computational intelligence technologies still are at their
infancy. The present situation is that even though there
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2212
exist several successful smart home approaches [26, 97,
98] and their relevant technologies can be employed for
smart city, we still have many things to do for a
successful and complete smart city. Since the compu-
tational intelligence for IoT is also still at its infancy,
most studies attempt to apply the simple or original
intelligent method to IoT. For this reason, the advanced
intelligence technologies can be expected to be applied
to IoT to provide better services.
In summary, these infrastructure, data management, and CI
perspectives can be regarded as the internets, things, and
intelligent methods for IoT, respectively. The applications
of IoT also confront the issue of handling large scale
datasets (also called big data)6 from sensor data analysis
[79] and the issues of integrating different systems.
Because the Internet today is more than 40 years old, and
several parts of the design are out of date; therefore, the
Internet has to be redesigned to satisfy the demand today
[28]. A simple example is that the number of IP addresses
may be not enough for the large number of appliances of
IoT. To solve the problems of Internet today, the devel-
opment of next generation Internet (also called future
Internet) is emerging in several recent studies [32, 99].
5.2 The open issues and challenge of FIoT
Generally speaking, the contents, services, and things are
the essential components of future Internet [100]. Since
most of the developments on FIoT were focused on solving
the problems the Internet today faces. Even if the number
of IP addresses can be solved by using IPv6, however,
based on the observations of [89, 100, 101], until now,
there still exist many open issues that have to be solved.
For instance, the disruption-tolerant networking (DTN)
[102–105] seems to be applicable to FIoT, becuase this
new environment will generally composed of heteroge-
neous networks and the connectivity may not always be
continuous. Due to the considerations of FIoT (i.e., data
exchange between things or systems), the concept of self-
ishless behavior for data forwarding may need to be added
to DTN or such approaches. But these adjustments may
also bring up the privacy and security issues or degrade the
performance of the whole environment of FIoT. As a
result, a much more comprehensive consideration from the
infrastructure all the way up to the services will be needed.
In [100], Issarny et al. pointed out the five challenges of
future Internet, namely, scalability, heterogeneity, mobil-
ity, awareness and adaptability, security, and privacy and
trust. The challenges of future Internet also exist in the
Internet today. According to our observations, although the
6
http://www.sciencemag.org/site/special/data/
123
Wireless Netw (2014) 20:2201–2217
open issues of FIoT are similar to IoT, recent innovation on
the internet technologies may strongly impact FIoT which
can be viewed from two different perspectives:
• Cloud computing perspective: The unlimited comput-
ing resource and abundant storage are the main
characteristics of cloud computing. However, how to
integrate FIoT to different cloud computing systems
will become an important issue because it will become
part of the Internet. As a result, the integration issue is
not only how to integrate FIoT to a cloud system but
also how to transmit data between these two different
environments. An alternative solution described in [35]
is the design of FIoT takes into consideration the
support of cloud computing systems.
• Social network perspective: According to [106], the
digital natives were born in the last decade of the 20th
century while the digital technologies have been
surrounded in their daily life for a long time. The
social network shocked not only the daily life of the
digital natives but also the daily life of digital
immigrants. Using the digital social behavior to
enhance the performance of FIoT [29, 30] is a possible
solution. For instance, instead of finding out the IP
address to get the needed contents, we may ask friends
who have the contents to shorten the search time to find
the needed contents.
In summary, besides the intrinsic open issues of IoT, the
design of FIoT need take into account the cloud computing
and social network issues. Fortunately, most concerns of
these two open issues are the compatible issues although it
is expected that these two innovation internet technologies
will provide much more information for the FIoT. More
details of the open issues of future Internet and FIoT can be
found in [100, 101].
6 Conclusion
In this paper, we first review studies on IoT and FIoT,
including not only the basic concepts and architectures but
also the discussions and comparisons. The open issues and
challenges of IoT and FIoT are also given. Then, an
intelligent data management framework, which is inspired
by the swarm intelligence to collect the resources by using
all the capabilities of the whole swarm, is presented for the
FIoT to provide a high-performance method to manage the
data. The cloud computing and social network environ-
ments are also considered in the proposed framework.
Based on these observations, a brief discussion of the
research trends for FIoT is given to help the audience of the
paper to find possible solutions in solving these problems,
as follows:
Wireless Netw (2014) 20:2201–2217
• Communication between the agents and devices is no
doubt an important research topic of FIoT. The problem
of how to integrate the agents and devices can be
regarded as a resource management of FIoT. Thus, the
mechanisms for communication and negotiation
between agents have become a very important issue
which may have a strong impact on the performance of
the FIoT. To make the agents more smart, ontology and
semantic web technologies provide some possible
solutions.
• The cloud computing, social network, and big data
issues have attracted attention of researchers from
different disciplines in recent years because these
technologies may have a strong impact on the devel-
opment of computer and information systems. For this
reason, these three promising issues will also affect the
development of FIoT. A possible solution is to integrate
them into the FIoT system, which can be found in some
recent studies, such as NEBULA [35] for cloud.
• The data mining technologies will also play an
important role in finding useful information of FIoT
for different purposes. One of the reasons is that the
current mining technologies need to be redesigned to fit
the need because FIoT will cover social network and
cloud computing, especially the computing environ-
ments and data will be distributed. Thus, data prepro-
cessing, data fusion, data abstraction, data mining, and
data summarization need to be modified or redesigned.
• The power management and smart grid issues also will
be covered in the researches of FIoT because the
technologies of how to use them are relevant. For
example, embedded systems and their relevant tech-
nologies will be employed in power management, smart
grid, and FIoT. For this reason, integrating them into a
single system would provide a better solution to the
integration of different resources and systems. Also, the
systems can get the additional information from others
to enhance their performance.
• After the FIoT and relevant systems are realized, system
intelligence will become an important research subject.
Today, several studies argue that their systems are
intelligent, but according to our observation, this is not
the case because most of these system are based on rule-
based mechanisms which cannot inference or make the
decision by themselves for unknown situations. A possible
solution is based on machine learning, but it is not the
ultimate solution. An alternative solution is to integrate the
feedback and interaction mechanisms to associate the
system and human which may be more possibly to make
the FIoT able to ‘‘think’’ and ‘‘be smart.’’
FIoT will become a part of our daily life as expected.
The impact of IoT can be easily found in marketing,
2213
industries, or even the user behavior. Of couse, it will bring
better services for users and make the environments,
information systems, and applications much faster and
more precise. However, something that we need to take
into account is that some unexpected issues usually
accompany these successful results. For instance, we may
lose our privacy if the design and using of FIoT did not
take care of this issue. In other words, since every thing
will be connected to the internet and every event will be
recorded, all our behaviors will leave us nowhere to hide.
For these reasons, when we make great progress in FIoT to
further improve our daily life, how to prevent these tech-
nologies from bringing us undesirable impact will be a
critical issue.
Acknowledgments The authors would like to thank the editors and
anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions on
the paper that greatly improve the quality of the paper. This work was
supported in part by the Ministry of Science and Technology of
Taiwan, R.O.C., under Contracts NSC102-2221-E-041-006, NSC102-
2219-E-194-002, NSC102-2219-E-027-002, NSC101-2628-E-194-
003-MY3, and NSC101-2221-E-197-008-MY3.
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(2010). Smart transmission grid: Vision and framework. IEEE National Pingtung University of
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internet of things. doctoral fellow with the
95. Reichman, O. J., Jones, M. B., & Schildhauer, M. P. (2011). Department of Electrical Engi-
Challenges and opportunities of open data in ecology. Science, neering, National Cheng Kung
331, 703–705. University, Tainan, Taiwan
96. Katasonov, A., Kaykova, O., Khriyenko, O., Nikitin, S., & before joining the faculty of
Terziyan, V. Y. (2008). Smart semantic middleware for the Applied Geoinformatics and then the faculty of Applied Informatics
internet of things. In Proceedings of the international confer- and Multimedia, Chia Nan University of Pharmacy & Science, Ta-
ence on informatics in control, automation and robotics, intel- inan, Taiwan in 2010 and 2012, respectively, where he is currently an
ligent control systems and optimization, pp. 169–178. Assistant Professor. His research interests include data mining,
97. Fleury, A., Vacher, M., & Noury, N. (2010). SVM-based multimodal internet technology, and metaheuristic algorithms.
classification of activities of daily living in health smart homes:
Sensors, algorithms, and first experimental results. IEEE Transac- Chin-Feng Lai is an assistant
tions on Information Technology in Biomedicine, 14(2), 274–283. professor at Department of
98. Nguyen, Q. C., Shin, D., Shin, D., & Kim, J. (2009). Real-time Computer Science and Infor-
human tracker based on location and motion recognition of user mation Engineering, National
for smart home. In Proceedings of the international conference Chung Cheng University since
on multimedia and ubiquitous, engineering, pp. 243–250. 2013. He received the Ph.D.
99. Rexford, J., & Dovrolis, C. (2010). Future internet architecture: degree in department of engi-
Clean-slate versus evolutionary research. Communications of the neering science from the
ACM, 53(9), 36–40. National Cheng Kung Univer-
100. Issarny, V., Georgantas, N., Hachem, S., Zarras, A., Vassiliadist, sity, Taiwan, in 2008. He
P., Autili, M., et al. (2011). Service-oriented middleware for the received Best Paper Award
future internet: State of the art and research directions. Journal from IEEE EUC 2012. He has
of Internet Services and Applications, 2(1), 23–45. more than 100 paper publica-
101. Brito Carvalho, T., Miers, C., Dominicini, C., & Redı́golo, F. tions. He is an associate editor-
(2010). Key issues on future internet. In T. Tronco (Ed.), New in-chief for Journal of Internet
Network architectures, vol. 297 of studies in computational Technology and serves as editor or associate editor for IET Networks,
intelligence, pp. 221–236. Springer, Berlin. International Journal of Internet Protocol Technology, KSII Trans-
102. Fall, K. (2003). A delay-tolerant network architecture for chal- actions on Internet and Information Systems. He is TPC Co-Chair for
lenged internets. In Proceedings of the conference on applica- the 12th IEEE International Conference on Computer and Information
tions, technologies, architectures, and protocols for, computer Technology (IEEE CIT-2012) and was selected an honorary member
communications, pp. 27–34. of the Phi Tau Phi Scholastic Honor Society of the Republic of China
103. Li, Y., Wang, Z., Jin, D., Zeng, L., & Chen, S. (2012). Col- in 2009, TC member of Multimedia Systems & Applications Tech-
laborative vehicular content dissemination with directional nical Committee (MSATC), IEEE Circuits and Systems Society, 2009
antennas. IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, and Co-Chair of the Interest Group on Multimedia Services and
11(4), 1301–1306. Applications over Emerging Networks of the IEEE Multimedia
104. Li, Y., Su, G., Hui, P., Jin, D., Su, L., & Zeng, L. (2011). Communication Technical Committee During 2012–2014. His
Multiple mobile data offloading through delay tolerant net- research focuses on Internet of Things, Body Sensor Networks,
works. In Proceedings of the ACM workshop on challenged, E-healthcare, Mobile Cloud Computing, Cloud-Assisted Multimedia
networks, pp. 43–48. Network, Embedded Systems, etc. He is an IEEE Member since 2007.

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Wireless Netw (2014) 20:2201–2217
Athanasios V. Vasilakos
received his Ph.D. degree in
computer engineering from the
University of Patras, Patras,
Greece. He is currently Profes-
sor at Kuwait university, Com-
puter Science Dept. He has
authored or co-authored over
250 technical papers in major
international journals and con-
ferences. He is author/coauthor
of five books and 20 book
chapters in the areas of com-
munications. Prof. Vasilakos
has served as General Chair,
Technical Program Committee Chair for many international
2217
conferences. He served or is serving as an Editor or/and Guest Editor
for many technical journals, such as the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON
NETWORK AND SERVICES MANAGEMENT, IEEE TRANS-
ACTIONS ON SYSTEMS, MAN, AND CYBERNETICSPART
B:CYBERNETICS, IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INFORMATION
TECHNOLOGY IN BIOMEDICINE, IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON
COMPUTERS, ACM TRANSACTIONS ON AUTONOMOUS AND
ADAPTIVE SYSTEMS, the IEEE Communications Magazine,
ACM/Springer Wireless Networks(WINET), ACM/Springer Mobile
Networks and Applications(MONET). He is founding Editor-in-Chief
of the InternationalJournal of Adaptive and Autonomous Communi-
cations Systems (IJAACS,http://www.inderscience.com/ijaacs) and
the International Journal of Arts andTechnology (IJART, http://www.
inderscience.com/ijart). He is General Chair of the European Alli-
ances for Innovation, http://eai.eu/, (funded by the EU Parliament).
123