Platform Architecture and Components

Conceptual Overview

The MONICA platform is a cloud based, advanced, open IoT platform with automated closed-loop actuating functions. The platform dynamically integrates devices and mobile wearables in the physical world with automated closed-loop feedback functions. The platform also integrates humans in the loop by providing situational awareness and dynamic decision support tools. The platform supports multiple IoT applications in a wide usage context focusing on the two most important challenges for organisers of large-scale events in cities and urban: Unwanted noise in the surroundings and security of the audience.

The MONICA platform

The MONICA platform is built on several IoT physical world network infrastructures and a closed loop control system for each application. The components are connected via dedicated communication network and data repositories. Some solutions cover with data capture from the physical world with analysis and transmission of information to the MONICA private cloud service. Other solutions deal with providing situational awareness from the information, decision support and feedback/actuation back to the physical world.

Functional View Architecture

The functional view gives an overview of the architecture and its main components, including main functionalities, interfaces and interactions. Taken all the components together, it demonstrates how the entire platform performs the functions needed by MONICA solutions and how it meets the related requirements.

The functional view is the result of the collection and categorization of technologies and software components provided by the MONICA partners and based on application requirements from the users.

Functional View of the MONICA Platform Architecture.

The architecture comprises the following subsystems, also called layers:

• The Device Layer includes all IoT wearables (g., wristbands and glasses) and IoT sensors, which can be fixed (e.g., sound level meters, loudspeakers, cameras, environmental sensors) or mobile (e.g., wireless sound level meters, cameras installed in a Blimp).
• The Network Layer allows the effective communication between the heterogeneous IoT wearables, IoT devices and the IoT platform modules. This layer is responsible of forwarding data coming from the IoT wearables and IoT sensors as well as of responding to service requests coming from upper layers;
• The Edge Layer includes a set of processing modules (g., the Wearables GW running localization algorithms, Processing Units executing video-based algorithms, the Sound Field Control System (SFCS) for managing the sound quality and noise reduction) that process real-time data directly from the Device Layer. To this purpose, these modules need to be deployed locally in the pilot site to avoid the latency introduced by the upper layers of the platform. Moreover, these modules require an efficient and scalable Network Infrastructure that will be presented in section 5.2.
• The IoT Layer is composed of the following three subcomponents:
  • The Adaptation Layer, here represented by the SCRAL, providing technology independent management of physical resources and uniform mapping of data into standard representations that can be easily handled by the upper platform modules;
  • The Middleware, here represented by the LinkSmart, which offers storage and directory services for resources registered in the IoT platform;
  • The External IoT Platform Connectors, handling the communication with external IoT platforms and the integration of data coming from outside (g. from the Hamburg Smart City platform). In addition, MONICA integrates the OneM2M Network Service Capabilities Layer (NSCL) allowing the platform to expose the IoT data according to the OneM2M standard;
• The Services Layer, where the intelligence of the platform is implemented and specific processing modules are integrated to provide technical solutions compliant with the application requirements. The services modules are combined together with knowledge base components and decision support tools, whose aim is to propose a set of intervention strategies to assist human operators in gathering context-sensitive information and decision making;
• The MONICA APIs Layer, which provides service access points for MONICA application developers and external application developers that want to access MONICA functionalities and information streaming from the platform;
• The Cyber Security and Privacy Framework, enabling trust-based communication, policy management and technical support across all levels of the platform. More specifically, this framework ensures secure data flows and storage, protected information exchange and trusted federation mechanism to facilitate private information sharing;
• The Deployment and Monitoring Tools. These tools belong to a transversal framework able to easy the platform deployment (g. modules belonging to the Device and Network layers) and used for checking the operational status of the devices, networks and overall system. Moreover, these tools are also used for measuring performance metrics and tracing pilot events.

The IoT Layer consists of a middleware and an adaptation layer. The middleware (LinkSmart) offers either storage or directory services for resources registered in the platform. The Adaptation Layer (SCRAL) provides technology independent management of physical resources and uniform mapping of data into standard representations that can be easily handled by platform modules belonging to upper layers.

The platform architecture has been defined based on the HLA developed by the Working Group 3 (WG3) of the AIOTI. The WG3 last updated the HLA in June 2017 (AIOTI HLA, 2017), which at the same time is described using the ISO/IEC/IEEE 42010 standard (ISO/IEC/IEEE 42010, 2011). Related documents to the HLA defined by the WG3 are available at https://aioti.eu/aioti-wg03-reports-on-iot-standards/. The MONICA functional architecture has been mapped to the HLA, which describes functions and interfaces (interactions) within the IoT domain.

Deployment View Architecture

The deployment view describes how the MONICA platform is deployed on the field with concrete IoT platforms (e.g., base stations, cameras, sound level meters, embedded systems running real-time processing algorithms, cloud Infrastructure) and concrete execution environments (e.g., SCRAL, LinkSmart, DSS).

The deployment view focuses on aspects of the system that are important after the system has been tested and is ready to go live. It thus defines the physical environment in which it is intended to run, including:

• required hardware environment (g. processing nodes, network interconnections, etc.);
• technical environment requirements for each node;
• mapping of software elements to the runtime environment;
• third-party software requirements;
• network requirements.

The deployment view needs to document the required deployment environment of the MONICA platform, which depends on the pilot areas and their topology.

MONICA High-Level Deployment Architecture

Starting from the bottom, firstly, there are the wearables (i.e., wristbands and glasses), which are battery powered, running their intelligence in small and low power microcontrollers; then there are IoT devices, which can be fixed or mobile, such as cameras, blimp and microphones that are equipped their own processing module. Thanks to the Network Infrastructure the IoT devices and wearables communicate their data to the Edge Layer, which includes some modules for further real-time data processing.

All the data processed in the Edge Layer are sent upward to the IoT Platform thanks to the Network Infrastructure. Every module of the Edge Layer hosts an instance of the SCRAL for its integration with the IoT Layer. An exception has been made for the Sound Level Meter GW and the OneM2M GW that are already deployed in their own cloud solutions; in fact, these two modules have been integrated with the IoT Layer by means of the SCRAL deployed in the MONICA cloud.

The MONICA Cloud Infrastructure provided by Atos is hosting the IoT platform (composed of the SCRAL and LinkSmart middleware), the DSS, the Open-Air Event App Services, the Data Repository and the MONICA APIs. Conversely, the High Level Data Fusion module will use a Azure Cloud solution as it reuses some submodules that are based on Azure specific tools.