SEMANTIC TECHNIQUES FOR IOT DATA AND SERVICE MANAGEMENT: ONTOSMART SYSTEM

International Journal of Wireless & Mobile Networks (IJWMN) Vol. 8, No. 4, August 2016
DOI: 10.5121/ijwmn.2016.8403 43
SEMANTIC TECHNIQUES FOR IOT DATA
AND SERVICE MANAGEMENT:
ONTOSMART SYSTEM
L. Nachabe 3
, M. Girod-Genet 1
and B. ElHassan 2
1
Department of Réseaux et Services Multimédia Mobiles, Telecom SudParis University,
Evry, France
2
Department of Electricity and Electronics, Faculty of Engineering, Branch 1,
Lebanese University, Tripoli, Lebanon.
3
American University of Culture & Education, Faculty of Science,
Beirut, Lebanon.
ABSTRACT
In 2020 more than50 billions devices will be connected over the Internet. Every device will be connected to
anything, anyone, anytime and anywhere in the world of Internet of Thing or IoT. This network will
generate tremendous unstructured or semi structured data that should be shared between different
devices/machines for advanced and automated service delivery in the benefits of the user’s daily life. Thus,
mechanisms for data interoperability and automatic service discovery and delivery should be offered.
Although many approaches have been suggested in the state of art, none of these researches provide a fully
interoperable, light, flexible and modular Sensing/Actuating as service architecture. Therefore, this paper
introduces a new Semantic Multi Agent architecture named OntoSmart for IoT data and service
management through service oriented paradigm. It proposes sensors/actuators and scenarios independent
flexible context aware and distributed architecture for IoT systems, in particular smart home systems.
KEYWORDS
Smart-Home, IoT, Multi-Agent, distributed systems, WSN, semantic, Ontology, sensing as a service,
interoperability, semantic interoperability.
1. INTRODUCTION
The continuing rise of mobile internet access, especially the emergence of 5G technology, in
addition to the significant increase of smartphone users and the integration of mass scale cloud
computing, are now transforming our society to what is called Smart Society. C. Levy et al.
defined Smart Society as “the potential of digital technology and connected devices and the use
of digital networks to improve people’s lives[1]. Smart Society, in particular smart cities and
smart homes, are formed of wireless sensor networks capable of sensing, communicating,
computing and potentially actuating. These wireless networks can play the role of decision
makers to facilitate the life of users. For example, when temperature exceeds a threshold the

44
window is opened automatically. The solutions are really endless. In fact, the Smart Society
affects all aspects of our life including health services, smart home and automated/remote
controlling and monitoring services, smart utility consumption (energy, water) and smart grid,
smart mobility and Vehicle Area Networks, smart public services (parking, safety), Intelligent
Transportation Systems, smart entertainment, etc.[2]. All of these solutions are providing remote
monitoring and control capabilities (in particular through 5G technologies) using machine to
machine communication (M2M) for intelligent data interpretation, new data and knowledge
creation and fast intervention. Fortunately, it will pave the way to the development of new
business and services opportunities. Industry analysts predict that 50 billion devices will be
connected to mobile networks by 2020 [3]. University of Edinburgh is involved in a project call
Smart Society which objective is “to move towards a hybrid system where people and machines
tightly work together to build a smarter society”. They stressed on the importance of bridging the
semantic gap between low-level machine and high-level human interpretation of data in order to
collaborate for conflict resolution goals both at individual and societal levels [4].
5G Era is empowering the idea of stay connected, which means that everything is connected to
anything, anyone, anytime and anywhere. This what has been dubbed the Internet of Thing (IoT)
[5]. IoT is formed of extremely heterogeneous nodes in terms of roles (sensor, actuator, relay,
etc.), manufacturer, communication interface, data rate, data type, etc. Moreover, these nodes can
have limited resource capabilities (memory, battery lifetime and CPU), where tremendous data is
generated. That is why, in most cases, these generated data should be collected and treated in an
external node as local/web server or cloud server [2]. Cloud solutions have been integrated in
these systems because of its unlimited capacity of storage, processing power, virtual resources
creation and service delivery.
X. Sheng et al. [6] and A. Zaslavsky et al. [5] introduced the idea of sensing as service. With the
growth of cloud computing the idea of offering everything as service has been integrated in
almost every business model. Sensing as a service (SeaaS) reveals the idea of transforming
physical word (sensors/actuators) to a service that can be discovered and invoked by users on
demand. To develop SaaS solutions, developers should procure on-demand services, data
portability and interoperability between different data providers, context and situation awareness
as well as mechanisms dedicated for security and privacy.
In this paper, we present a new general architectural for data collection, processing and
management of IoT systems. Furthermore, this architecture paves the way towards SaaS
paradigm where users can request any discovered service regardless the underneath mechanisms
(data collection and sensor configurations). The architecture relies on semantic techniques to
tackle the problem of heterogeneity within the same system, and between different data systems.
Furthermore, it uses the idea of web semantic web servers to provide SaaS solutions. In addition,
it is based on multi-agent architecture in order to distribute the processing among different
components. This leads to flexible, embedded devices compatible and more power consumption
efficient solution. All these aforementioned ideas will be presented in the next sections.
The paper is organized as follow. In Section II IoT challenges are described in order to explain
the reasons behind using ontologies and multi-Agent architectures. Overview of the retained
modular ontologies is also presented in this section. Section III describes the general architecture

45
of our proposed system called OntoSmart system describing the role of different agents. Section
IV details our OntoSmart based applications called OntoSmartHome for data monitoring and
management. Moreover, tests and analysis are given in this section. Finally, Section V concludes
the paper.
2. BACKGROUND
2.1. IoT Challenges
M. Truck defined the IoT “the transformation of any physical object into a digital data product”
[7]. In other words, using your smartphone as pedometer in order to calculate your burned
calories, and publishing these data on social media is part of IoT. In fact, we are now part of IoT
which is becoming a real booming topic. The miniaturization of sensors, the constant evolution of
wearable devices, the connectivity anywhere at any time and the use of smartphone are
conducting us to be part of the IoT. Although IoT paradigm is fundamentally controlling huge
amount of our daily activities (calendar notification, social media, health applications, cloud
storage applications, weather broadcasting, search engines, etc.), but still have paramount
challenges.
The European Research Cluster on IoT (IERC) defined five challenges [8]:
•Develop reference architecture to enable cross industry technology cooperation and resolve the
problem of interoperability.
•Provide complex services and composed solutions.
•Integrate heterogeneous technology at various levels.
•Combine various business models.
•Procure secure, private and reliable solutions.
Zaslavsky et al. insisted on the importance of providing a flexible, easy and distributed
architecture for IoT where data is provided as service. Moreover reasoning and decision making
should be integrated in the architecture [5].
Texas Instruments [9] presented the main challenges of IoT as follow:
•Sensing a complex (Heterogeneous) environment.
•Wide variety of wireless/wired communication protocols.
•Critical power consumption.
•Publishing data to the cloud.
•Security concerns.
Texas instruments summarized the IoT into three levels: the physical devices, the IoT
gateway/relay and the cloud level.
Where billions of devices have been connected, IoT is characterized by Big Data[5]. Volume,
velocity and variety are at the core of big data. Thus, the main challenges of IoT are how to
process this high volume of processing with low power devices. Moreover, the data should be

46
analyzed in real time (especially for health services where immediate intervention should be
done) and enriched with social media options (people nowadays are familiar with social media).
Although data can be shared, security and privacy concerns are still considered the main question
in IoT.
Table 1 summarizes the points that should be respected when designing IoT solution. Moreover,
Table 1 depicts how our proposed IoT architecture addresses each of these points. In the next
sections, all these points are detailed.
Table 1- IoT Challenges and our proposed solutions
2.2 .Reason Behind Using Ontologies
As IoT encompasses different systems, applications, and WSNs, different terminologies are used
to describe the same properties or object. Moreover, various ranges of sensors/actuators (ambient
sensors, electrical devices, biomedical sensors, etc.) from wide range of vendors supporting
different wireless technologies (Bluetooth LE, LoRa, ZigBee, etc.) are used [7]. This variety
caused the problem of heterogeneity management and interoperability. In general, these systems
are monolithically deployed. The integration of a new device or a new service needs the
reconfiguration of the overall system, and some time the deployment of a new system [8]. For
that reason, new techniques that deal with the data meaning and enhance the automatic node and
service discovery are needed. These techniques are named Semantic techniques where an entity
presents an aspect of the real domain described by metadata (data about data). Thus, by using
semantic techniques within IoT, the raw data can be annotated by semantic data respecting a
predefined semantic model to unify its description [9]. In that way, the problem of
interoperability between different systems can be resolved. Ontologies are the most powerful
semantic techniques. Using the formal definition, ontologies are “tools for specifying the
semantics of terminology system in a well-defined and unambiguous manner” [10]. W3C
recommended the use of OWL language to describe ontologies [11]. In fact, the most powerful
point behind using OWL is the capability of reasoning in order to infer more significant data.

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Many researches have introduced the usage of ontologies in IoT. The IoT-A project presents a
high level abstraction of the IoT domain. It basically consists of a Domain Model, Information
model and Communication Model [10]. The Domain Model includes a user who can be a Human
or an Active Digital Entity. The user interacts with a physical entity and invokes at least one
service. A virtual Entity can be associated with a service or/and a resource. The service accesses
at least one resource. The resource can be storage, network, or on-device resources (which hosts a
device). A device can be an actuator, a sensor or a tag device. The authors in [11] extended the
works done in the IoT-A project by adding semantic description and linking the models to
existing domain specific ontologies. The core of the IoT, Information model, consists of Entity,
Resource, Service and Device.
Almost all IoT researches suggested including the idea of sensing as service. Thus, these
researches use OWL-S service ontology as upper service layer. OWL-S [12], the semantic mark-
up for web services, developed by DARPA DAML program using OWL languages aims to
describe semantic web services. It permits the automatic web service: discovery, invocation,
composition, interoperation, and execution monitoring. The OWL-S ontology includes mainly
three sub-ontologies: the service profile ontology that describes what the service does; the process
model ontology that describes how the service is used; and the grounding ontology that describes
how to interact with the service. Nambi et al. [13] proposed a unified semantic knowledge for IoT
where resources are readable, recognizable, locatable, addressable and/or controllable via the
Internet. The Resource Ontology describes the sensors, actuators, physical objects and composite
objects. It is reused from the SSN ontology [14]. The Location Ontology adds the geospatial
information to IoT information. It is reused from the GeoNames ontology [15]. The Domain
ontology models a specific or a generic domain such as E-health, smart home, etc. Any domain
ontology can be imported depending on the IoT application. The Context Domain enables
context-awareness and contextual interoperability during service discovery and composition.
Aspect-Scale-Context (ASC) is used to model conceptual information. The Policy Ontology
defines how to accomplish a service requested by a user. There are three different policy levels:
high level policy defining abstract service, concrete policies for specific services, and low level
policies defining the execution plan of the services. The Service Ontology is built upon the
concept of OWL-S.
Wang et al. [16] introduced a new Semantic Model for IoT architecture composed of seven main
modules. The IoT resources are defined by extending the SSN ontology to include actuators,
servers and gateways. The Observation & Measurement Ontology is reused from the SSN
Ontology. The entity of Interest and physical locations represent the object of the physical world.
It is rigorous that none of these attempts combine the fully description of the sensors/actuators,
data, process, and services. While reliability and service consistency are primordial in such
systems, the QoS and computational resources as well as remaining battery level are needed for
service modeling. In addition, IoT involves wide range of data/service accessing protocols
(HTTP, CoAP, MQTT, SOAP, etc.). Thus grounding methods for service accessing will facilitate
the service discovery.
Therefore, the contribution of this work is OntoSmart system that relies on both MyOntoSens
Ontology [17] (summarized in Figure1) and MyOntoService Ontology (depicted in Figure 3) to
model IoT data and services. These ontologies are provided with associated management

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enablers, within our OntoSmart system, and will enable the handling of all the aforementioned
IoT challenges cited in Table 1.
3. ONTOSMART SYSTEM ONTOLOGIES
IoT can be seen as a WSN (Wireless Sensor Network) encompassing different nodes (sensors,
actuators, equipment, servers and gateways). Each WSN (modeling a home, building, or network)
can have one or more owner (e.g. the patient to be monitored at home) and contact persons
(medical staff or relatives). Each node is used for certain process (temperature, humidity, etc.)
and each actuator performs certain action (turn ON/OFF, shuttle Up/Down, etc.). That is why we
used MyOntoSens ontology detailed in [17] and extended in [18] to describe the components of
our proposed system since this ontology already takes into account all the required attributes that
model WSN (network description, process, data, constraints, measurements, sensors, actuators,
etc.) . MyOntoSens has been designed as a modular ontology and is divided into three parts:
MyOntoSensWSN, MyOntoSensNode and MyOntoSensProcess. Figure 1 summarizes the main
classes of MyOntoSens ontology, while Figure 2 depicts the main classes and attributes of
MyOntoSensProcess part.
Figure 1-MyOntoSens Ontology

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Moreover, the IoT should provide services to the users (monitoring, notification, reminder, etc.).
We are modeling these services by introducing original service ontology, called MyOntoService
•MyOntoServiceProfile that describes the service (QoS, QoI, service constraints and ontology
and depicted in Figure 3. Our new upper service ontology adopts the idea of OWL-S ontology
[18]. It is composed of three main sub-ontologies (as depicted in Figure 3):service type) and
enables their auto-discovery,
•MyOntoServiceProcess that describes how the service is realized based on the Input, Output
Precondition, and Effect (IOPE) mechanism,
•And finally MyOntoServiceGrounding that describes how the service can be invoked (or
accessed in IoT e.g. HTTP, CoAP, etc.)
To ensure automatic senor/service discovery, the ontologies are described by SWRL [18] rules
and the Pellet [19] reasoner is used to infer explicit data. MyOntoService ontology will enable the
use of Sensing as Service paradigm due to the use of the semantic rule (Rule 1). When a sensor is
used for a process, this process will be automatically inferred as atomic service enabling the
automatic sensor discovery. The user can enable/disable the service by adding the object property
“enable”.
Rule 1: Process(?P) -> Service(?P); Sensor(?S), Atomic(?a), usedFor(?S, ?a) ->
hasProducer(?a, ?S)
4. ONTOSMART MULTI-AGENT ARCHITECTURE
The main aim of our proposed system is modularity, scalability, flexibility and distributed
computing. Thus, this architecture should logically be divided in standalone modules offering
certain services, capable of interacting with other modules and that can be instantiated when
required. This is exactly what a software agent can do. An agent is a piece of software that can
run autonomy to perform certain behavior. The composition of many agents is called Multiple
Agents System (MAS) [20]. The agents interact by passing predefined messages. The MAS
architecture describes how different agents are interconnecting. MAS are widely used in complex
system where abstract definition of certain task is required. Figure 4 depicts this multilayered
architecture. In our proposed system basic functionalities are offered by agents capable of
invoking other agents. This is in particular the case for our data collection and information
management/sharing/retrieval functionalities. For example, we can cite the data collector agent,
query agent, notification agent, writer agent, etc.

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Figure 1-MyOntoSensProcess Classes Hierarchy
Figure 2-MyOntoService Ontology
Moreover, using expressive ontologies without defining a general mechanism for data annotation
is pointless [5]. That is why we defined three main agents in our overall system:

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•Scanners: for each communication protocol (Bluetooth LE, WIFI, ZigBee) there is a data
scanner that read raw data and call the adequate wrapper for semantic annotation. Moreover, for
each grounding protocol (CoAP, HTTP, etc.) there is a service scanner that reads the request from
external user and calls the adequate service.
•Writers: To send data from the system to external users, the adequate writer encapsulates the
sent data based on the requested protocol.
•Wrappers: To add semantic description of the raw data based on MyOntoSens and
MyOntoService ontologies.
Detailed description of how to use these components is depicted in section 4.
Figure 3- OntoSmart General Architecture
4. IMPLEMENTATION OF ONTO SMART SYSTEM ONTOLOGY
The increasing number of older persons living independently, in parallel with the considerable
number of individuals with chronic diseases or disabilities pushed the researchers to work on the
idea of smart home systems [18]. These systems help to keep individuals safe, to assist them in

52
controlling home appliances, and to inform their relatives and the medical staff about their status.
Thus, to test our OntoSmart architecture we have chosen the case of a smart home dedicated for
elderly monitoring and assisting. This use case is offering sensors/actuators and scenarios
independent flexible context aware and distributed solution based on standardized WSN and
service ontologies as well as multi-agent architecture described in sections 2 and 3. Figure 5
depicts this smart home.
Figure 4- OnoSmart Home Clusters
4.1 WBAN Cluster
The main aim of the WBAN Cluster is to collect patient’s vital signals in order to send it to the
local server. Here comes the role of the Data Collector Agent (DCA), also called the Cluster Hub.
In our scenario, the WBAN Cluster is formed of the heart rate sensor, acceleration sensor and the
smart phone of the user which is playing the role of the Cluster Hub. To capture the heart rate, the
H7Polar sensor is used. This senor sends the heart rate via its Bluetooth LE interface.
Therefore, a Bluetooth LE Scanner (BLES) agent is installed on the patient’s smart phone in
order to:
•identify any Bluetooth LE device,

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•and recognize the offered service due to the use of UUID defined in standard GATT Profiles
[21].
This scanner gives the first step toward an automatic sensor discovery.
To determine the posture of the patient, the smart phone built-in three acceleration sensor is used.
The detail of the posture calculation is given in [18].
After identifying the node’s characteristics, these latter should be sent to the local server for
semantic annotation and further treatments. JSON [22] message format was adopted due to its
lightness and simplicity. Therefore, a JSON Writer (JS) agent is installed on the smart phone in
order to encapsulate data and send it to the local server.
If other types of sensors are used (like ZigBee), the only think that should be done is to install the
convenient scanner (like ZigBee Scanner). Likewise, if data from the smartphone is encapsulated
using a message format other than the JSON messages, the suitable writer agent should be
compelled. In fact, the use of these data agents and writers enable the automatic discovery of any
added nodes and enhance the flexibility and scalability of the system where any nodes can be
added without the need to rebuild the overall system. What is really required is to ensure that the
communication protocol used by the device has the suitable data scanner agent.
4.2 .WSN Cluster
The WSN Cluster is formed of the sensors dedicated for indoor localization, the ambient
parameters sensors, and the local server (DCA or cluster Hub). In our case, we use the
RadBeacon Bluetooth LE sensors to identify the location of the patient. Moreover, the ambient
parameters (light intensity, humidity and temperature) are retrieved from the built-in sensors in
the patient’s smartphone in order to be sent to the remote server using JSON messages. We
installed, on the local server, the following agents:
•BLES agent: to identify Bluetooth LE sensors and retrieve the required information in order to
invoke the adequate wrapper.
•JSON Scanner (JS) agent: to retrieve data sent from the smartphone and invoke the adequate
wrapper.
•Node Wrapper (NW) agent: to add semantic annotation about the sensors/hubs based on
MyOntoSensNode ontology.
•Process Wrapper (PW) agent: To add semantic annotation about the process used by the sensors
based on MyOntoSensProcess.
In that way, the local server will contain all the semantic description of the home devices.
Because more than one patient can use the same WSN sensors (e.g. indoor localization sensors
can be used to locate more than one patient in the same home), the object property
“measuredFor” has been added between the sensors measurements (Measurement class of

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MyOntoSensProcess ontology) and the patient (Patient Class of MyOntoSensWSN ontology). To
this point, all nodes are automatically discovered. Regarding the service discover, we added
SWRL [12] rules to infer basic services offered by the system. All processes are considered as
service (e.g. heart rate, temperature, etc.). This inference is insured by using Rule 1. Composed
services are deduced from additional rules. For example, using the heart rate sensor implies that
the maximum heart rate service can be used for notification purposes (Rule 2).
(Rule 2) Process (HR) -> Service (MaxHR), hasEffect (MaxHR, Notification).
Moreover, the object property “enable” between patient individual and service individual is used
for allowing the patient to enable/disable any service offered by the system. Only enabled
services are retrieved when invoking the query dedicated for service discovery.
4.3 Remote Semantic Storage and Management Server
The main aim of the remote semantic server is to save the fully semantic description of the smart
home. It plays the role of semantic registry. While intelligence treatment for each home is located
on its local server, the intelligent cooperation between different TSHCSs, and advanced data
analysis for statistical purposes can be conducted on this remote server. In our scenario, the
remote server encompasses the following agents:
•SPARQL Agent: to query semantic information saved on the remote/local server in order to
retrieve new semantic information.
•CoAP Agent: to publish the data in order to be used by external users for remote monitoring
(e.g. patient’s relatives and medical staff). The CoAP [23] is a Rest-full protocol used for
constraint networks. It uses the UDP protocol as transport layer and the reliability mechanism is
driven by the application layer. We used the CoAP Confirmable messages to ensure the required
reliability in our proposed TSCHS system. In that way, the Remote server will play the Role of
CoAP monitoring server allowing remote users to access the data by using CoAP GET requests.
•Notification Agent: to notify external users about abnormal patient’s attitude and dangerous
measured values. In our case, we notify the user if the patient is falling or if his/her heart rate
exceeds the normal value. It is worthy to note that the security mechanism is not within the scope
of this study. That’s why we based our test-bed authentication mechanisms on Android GCM due
to its implementation simplicity, and by assuming that all our system users have a Gmail account.
Let’s precise here that for a commercial application, stronger authentication mechanisms will
obviously have to be designed and implemented. Figure 6 depicts all the aforementioned agents
and building blocks location and interactions.

Figure 5-Implemented Agents and interactions
The remote server will invoke the WSN Wrapper in order to add the new WSN and Patient into
its semantic registry. The PatientID (identifier generated by the remote server) is now returned to
the smartphone and saved in its
used when needed (for patient identification). The patient can now launch its OntoSmartHome
application and log into the OntoSmart system using his/her Gmail account.
5. ONTOSMARTHOME
Two applications have been developed for OntoSmart system: the first application (detailed in
Section A) is dedicated for the patient in order to initialize the system and display the monitoring
values; the second application (detailed in Section 5.2
patient’s monitoring. The same monitoring interface (depicted in Figure 7) is retained for the
patient and relative applications.
5.1. Patient’s OntoSmartHome Application
We have provided our OntoSmart system with a p
applicative agents (see Figure 6). This application, depicted in Figure 7 and Figure 8, is integrated
within the Smartphone of the patient. The details of the patient’s mobile application can be found
in [18]. Note that a compromise between system accuracy and battery consumption is mandatory
in such systems. That’s why, after practical testing, we have chosen to acquire 50 samples/sec
from the sensors. In addition, these modified values will be sent to the loc
server via the JW in order to be updated on the CoAP server and registered in the remote
ontology repository.
Implemented Agents and interactions as deployed in OntoSmart System
the smartphone and saved in its shared Preference (local database on the Smartphone) for being
application and log into the OntoSmart system using his/her Gmail account.
ONTOSMARTHOME APPLICATIONS
values; the second application (detailed in Section 5.2) is dedicated for relatives for remote
Patient’s OntoSmartHome Application
We have provided our OntoSmart system with a patient-dedicated application and corresponding
Note that a compromise between system accuracy and battery consumption is mandatory
from the sensors. In addition, these modified values will be sent to the local server and the remote
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as deployed in OntoSmart System
shared Preference (local database on the Smartphone) for being
) is dedicated for relatives for remote
dedicated application and corresponding
Note that a compromise between system accuracy and battery consumption is mandatory
al server and the remote

Figure 6- Monitoring Interface of OntoSmartHome Application
Figure 7
5.2. Relatives OntoSmartHome Application
The first time the application is installed, the relative should successfully log in using his/her
Gmail account. Afterward, the relative is asked to enter the patient’s email. The patient and
relative emails are sent via the JSON Writer (JW) to the remote server where a SPARQL query is
invoked to verify the relative permissions. Figure 8 depicts the overall authentication process for
the relative’s mobile application.
If the relative is able to monitor the patient, CoAP GET re
CoAP remote server in order to retrieve the values.
Monitoring Interface of OntoSmartHome Application
Figure 7-Patient's OntoSmartHome application
ves OntoSmartHome Application
JSON Writer (JW) to the remote server where a SPARQL query is
the relative’s mobile application.
If the relative is able to monitor the patient, CoAP GET requests are sent every minute to the
CoAP remote server in order to retrieve the values.
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JSON Writer (JW) to the remote server where a SPARQL query is
quests are sent every minute to the

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Our OntoSmart system provides the discovery of any used BLE sensor due to the use of BLE
Scanner which discovers the node, the node wrapper which adds the node’s semantic description
to the semantic registry, and the SPARQL agent that executes the node and service discovery
queries. Moreover, publishing the monitoring patient’s data through a CoAP server permits the
relatives to instantly monitor these data by issuing CoAP GET requests. Further analysis and
advanced diagnostics can be conducted on the remote server by domain experts in order to help
the patient. Moreover, due to the use of semantic registry on the remote server, new domain
expert ontologies can be imported to infer severe situations related, for example, to heredity
problems or environmental diseases.
5.3. Testing & Results
In fact our testing process focused on two main principles: the requirements (as highlighted in
Section I) of IoT systems and the mobile application itself. For that purposes, the applications
were tested on Samsung GALAXY S4 (Android 4.4.2 KITKAT-API 19 and Android 5.0.1-API
21 Lollipop after upgrade) and SONY XPERIA SL (Android 4.1.2 Jelly Bean- API 16). We first
considered one patient per WSN. We installed the application on two different patients’ mobile.
For each patient, one relative was added. We first insure that the ontology is well classified. Due
to the use of incremental reasoner, the services were discovered sequentially. For example, once
the H7 Polar is paired, the heart rate service was added on the server. Moreover, the user was able
to enable/disable the services by his/her own without the intervention of experts. At certain stage,
the Patient 1 decided to disable the indoor localization services. Immediately, on the relative
smart phone, the location field was replaced by “Unknown”. This proves the ability of our
proposed system to offer services based on the occupants needs and requirements.
Then, we considered the scenario where two patients are sharing the same WSN, i.e. sharing the
same Rad Beacons for the indoor localization. The distance between rooms was about 20 m and
three Rad beacons were carried out and setup in three different zones at the patient’s home. For
testing purposes only, the remote server and the local server were on the same machine, but
working on different port numbers. The ontology was well classified without any ambiguity. This
insures the reusability of the proposed system by more than one occupant.
The privacy concerns were addressed by the use of email accounts for application installation and
the authentication mechanism when a relative requests to monitor a patient. It is evident that this
authentication mechanisms, as well as security concerns, could be enhanced by implementing
advanced protocols. However, this enhancement does not affect the overall architecture, but only
require the adoption of a new security/authentication agent invoked when needed.
After insuring the well functionality of the system, we focused on measuring the complexity of
the system on the server. For both cases, the tests were conducted for about 8 hours. Table 2
depicts the time needed to load and classify the ontology, as well as the CPU and memory usage.

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Table 2- System Evaluation on the Server
Case 1 Case 2
Ontology
Load 24 sec 35 sec
Classify 90 sec 75 sec
Model Size 1403 1403
Inferred
Model size
1019 1000
CPU
Max. CPU 76% 60%
Avg. CPU 35% 27%
Memory 425 692 K 415 728 K
We can note that the ontology is classified within 2 minutes. The size of the inferred model
reflects the importance of SWRL rules used in the proposed system. As few data is required to be
sent for the mobile application to the semantic server, lowest bandwidth will be consumed. The
potential of the semantic rules is inferring all needed data to discover the properties of a service.
For example, all HR services will be inferred by just sending that the heart process is offered by
H7 Polar sensor (see Rule 1 and Rule 2). We are actually working on studying the performance of
the server on large scale (more than 10 patients registered in the application) to estimate the
probability of crashing.
We passed than to evaluate the performance of the patient’s mobile application. The time needed
for node/service discovery was maximum 1 second. The patient’s application was tested for
about 8 hours; the battery consumption was maximum 12 % and minimum 5%, while the average
CPU usage was 8%. Table 2 depicts the processing, network and battery usage on the patient
smart phone in initiation mode (done only when the application is loaded for the first time) and
the normal mode where the measurements are taken periodically.
This evaluation ensures that our proposed application is not dramatically affecting the resources
on the smart phone. In fact, these consumptions can be decreased by the use of ambient sensors or
biomedical accelerometer sensors instead of the built-in sensors. In that way, the data will be
received directly on the server for semantic annotation and treatments. Aiming to determine the
falling detection, we tried to test to detect a falling after standing, from bed or from a chair. These
fallings were successfully detected. We can note that the posture and the falling status are not
100% accurate because we were using the Smartphone embedded sensors for the measurements
(for economy purposes). These measurements can be enhanced by using dedicated accelerometer
sensors capable of detecting more precisely the posture of the patient.

59
It is now the time to evaluate the relatives application. We first tested the authentication process.
Only authenticated relatives were able to monitor the patients and receive notifications. We tested
the network and battery consumption (depicted in Table 3) of the relatives for about 8 hours.
Table 3- Resources Consumption for the Patient Smart Phone
Initialization
Phase
Main Activity
Max Average Max Average
CPU % 5% 2% 11% 8%
Network Usage 16 Kb 12 Kb 40 Kb 36 Kb
Battery Usage 7% 5% 12% 10%
On the relatives’ side, the measured values and patient’s status and alarms were displayed in real
time. The CPU usage on the relative’s application attempts as average 0.56 % and as maximum 1
%. These resources consumption are considered insignificant due the use of CoAP messages
(1280 bytes). The values were displayed in real time and the notification when abnormal values
are detected was received within 1 second.
Table 4- Resources Consumption on the Relative Mobile Application
Average CPU % 0.56%
Average Battery
Usage
0.40%
6. CONCLUSION
In summary, although our OntoSmart system does not actually provide the best solution for fall
detection (only because Smartphone embedded sensors were used instead of dedicated sensors), it
offers the flexibility to enhance this detection, whenever needed, by just adding the necessary
sensors. Our OntoSmart system is the first step toward a Sensing as Service where users can
easily add sensors and actuators. Service developers will only focus on ads-on services and
applications without the need to deal with sensor integration and configuration. In addition to the
passive intervention devices, active intervention devices for reminder systems or medical
assistance can be added to OntoSmart System. This system proved the efficiency in solving the

60
challenges in IoT system (see Table 1). Due to the use of Service scanner and MyOntoService
ontology, the users just ask for a service and it will be automatically discovered and served. The
data scanner and node wrappers permit the discovery of any node regardless the physical
interface. Multi agent usage, in combination with the proposed modular ontology allow to
distribute the processing in different IoT nodes taking into the consideration the node’s
capabilities (processing, memory, battery lifetime). The use of semantic rules and SPARQL agent
enhance intelligent decision making by allowing the expert to define domain based rules.
It is worthy to note that, as aforementioned, security mechanisms are not within the scope of this
study. That’s why we based our test-bed authentication mechanisms on Android GCM due to its
implementation simplicity, and by assuming that all our system users have a Gmail account.
Stronger authentication mechanisms will obviously have to be designed and implemented for a
commercial version of our proposed framework. More broadly, security and privacy by design
mechanisms will have to be addressed, specified and carried out within our proposed OntoSmart
system for in particular critical use cases handling and personal data privacy protection.
Nevertheless, we have already investigated few potential security/trust/privacy solutions that
could probably be carried out in our IoT compliant and semantic based system (OntoSmart) for
that purposes. These envisioned potential solutions are summarized below. It is mostly probable
that, for critical e-Health uses cases, a private IoT solution would be preferred to a public one.
For security, the raw data exchanged within the patient’s WSN clusters could be encrypted at the
sensor/actuator level prior to its capture/relay. This could be achieved by e.g. carrying out a
simplified distributed key management infrastructure, provided with distributed Certifications
Authorities, within our OntoSmart system. These distributed certifications authorities could e.g.
reside both in the distributed control and monitoring servers of the patient-associated caregivers
and in the local servers of the patient (e.g. the local semantic server and/or the hub presented in
Figure 4). The simplified keys and certificates provided within such architecture would be used
within OntoSmart for: exchanged data encryption, communication channel security and
authentication purposes (patients and nodes). Furthermore, the keys could also be used by the
Semantic Wrapper Agent of OntoSmart ‘(see Figure 4) to:
•Decrypt the raw data received from Data Scanner Agents,
•Encrypt the corresponding semantic information based on our OntoSmart system ontologies.
For hiding the identity of the users, all the IDs used inside the data/ontologies would probably
have to be replaced by Virtual IDs (VIDs). Only authorized entities (e.g. the patients, their
relatives and their authorized caregivers) would be able (have the right) to link a VID with its
corresponding real ID.
Our OntoSmart system is fully based on MyOntoSens ontology that already embeds a ‘trust level’
attribute within its ‘Node’ building block. This attribute could be in particular associated to a trust
label that a certification authority could delivered based on some level of security
properties/mechanisms carried out within the node. This trust label could be verifiable through
e.g. a certified web-based distributed repository.

61
Concerning data access control and privacy, mechanisms based on data integrated privacy related
attributes and rules (by design within the semantic data model and ontology) associated with
semantic data annotation agents (i.e. data tattooing like agents) and rule engine agents (see Figure
4), could be envisioned. Indeed, our OntoSmart system is fully based on MyOntoSens ontology
that already embeds the following attributes within its ‘Proccess and Measurements’ building
block:
•Data ownership and data owner(s) ID(s) (or VID(s)),
•Data access rights and authorized data reader/writer ID(s) (or VID(s)).
In that way, the data concentrators (e.g. the semantic local/remote servers and the hubs in our
OntoSmart system, see Figure 4) could decide to relay or not the information based on real time
semantic annotation of data, data embedded privacy-related rules that could be added to the
MyOntoSens WSN ontology, and destination node thrust level.
More agents are under construction for example, remind patients to take his/her medication or
alert him/her if a stove burner is left on. Surely, actuators can be added to the system. All these
concerns do not need to re-invent the wheel, but just upgrade the system by adding adequate
agents. More tests are being conducted to measure the efficiency of the remote semantic storage
and management server when dealing with large amount of TSHCSs. Additional scanners and
writers are also under development, especially ZigBee and HL7 scanners/writers. Finally, more
security and privacy concerns are under investigations.
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Authors
Lina Nachabe received her engineering Diploma in 2007 from the faculty of
engineering of the Lebanese university, Tripoli Lebanon. She got her PHD degree
from the University of Télécom SudParis, RS2M department in 2015. From 2009 she
started to teach database and networking courses in Lebanese universities. She is
actually a Telecom Lab Assistant in the Lebanese university, faculty of engineering.
She supervised engineering project in MUT University. Lina Nachabe contributed in
the ETSI technical committee TC SmartBAN, Work Item 1 "Heterogeneity
management, data representation and transfer" as part of her PHD study. She is
interested in wireless sensor networks and ontology researches.
Associate Professor Dr. Marc Girod-Genet received his engineering degree with
distinction (top in one's year) in ‘telecommunications and advanced techniques’ from
EPITA engineering school, Paris, France, in September 1994. He received the MS
degree in Computer Science from Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, New
Jersey, USA, in Mai 1995. He finally received a Ph.D. degree with highest honors in
Computer Science from University of Versailles/Paris VI, France, in July 2000. He
joined Télécom SudParis first as a research project manager in September 2000 and
then was confirmed as a full Associate Professor in January 2005. He teaches courses in
personal communications, short range wireless technologies, service and context
management architectures, optimization/modeling and machine learning. He is also an associate research at
CNRS (network intelligence field) and works / has worked in several national and European research
projects. Dr. Marc Girod-Genet is involved in the ETSI technical committee TC SmartBAN where he
serves as Reporter of Work Item 1 "Heterogeneity management, data representation and transfer". He is /

63
has been a Technical Program Committee member of IEEE conferences, as well as a reviewer for
conferences and journals such as Communications Magazine and Transactions on Wireless
Communications. He has been involved in organizing international conferences symposia and events such
as Globecom Wireless Communication symposium and ASWN workshop. In 2010, Dr. Marc Girod-Genet
received 2 awards: the ITEA2 Achievement Award 2010 Silver Medal for the CAM4Home EU project and
the ADEME Special Award 'Prix de la Croissance Verte Numérique' (digital green growth) for his joint
work on Smart Grids with two of his colleagues.
Professor Dr. Bachar A. ElHassan got his engineering Diploma in 1991 from the
faculty of engineering of the Lebanese university, Tripoli Lebanon, his MS in signal
processing in 1992 from the National polytechnic institute (INPG) of Grenoble,
France and his PhD in electronics in 1995 from the INPG-France in collaboration with
France Telecom. Since 1996 till now he is working at the faculty of engineering of the
Lebanese university Tripoli Lebanon where he is now an associate professor. He
served as chairman of the electrical engineering department for six years. He also
founded the Telecommunications and Networking research team at the laboratory of
Electronics Systems, Telecommunication and Networking (LaSTRe) of the Doctoral
School of Sciences and Technologies (EDST) of the Lebanese University. His research interest’s concern
digital communication and wireless sensor networks. He is the chair of IEEE ComSoc Lebanon chapter
since Jan 2013.

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