Next Generation IoT as part of Next Generation Internet
Duration: 01/10/2020 – 30/09/2023
Total Funding: € 7,998,622
Overview
The Internet of Things (IoT) is rapidly evolving, with significant potential to drive societal change and economic growth. Market forecasts predict substantial expansion, supported by a wide range of applications in areas such as smart cities, industry 4.0, agriculture, and energy. “Things” now include sensors, wearables, autonomous systems, and even swarms of devices operating as self-organised entities. Key challenges include enabling federated on-device intelligence, ensuring interoperability and data sovereignty, and improving trust, cybersecurity, and user-centric interaction through technologies like Augmented Reality. A flexible, open meta-architecture, leveraging 5G, edge computing, and federated AI, offers a more sustainable path than centralised platforms.
IoT-NGIN introduced innovative concepts to drive the next generation of IoT within the European Next Generation Internet. It developed a patterns-based meta-architecture integrating legacy and future IoT systems, optimised IoT/M2M and 5G communications with secure-by-design microservices, and enabled autonomous, user-aware IoT through federated machine learning and ambient intelligence with AR support. It also advanced distributed cybersecurity and privacy using Self-Sovereign Identities and interconnected DLTs for Meta-Level Digital Twins. The project results were validated through over 30 heterogeneous IoT devices across leading labs and Living Labs, and impact was maximised through open-source releases, strategic alliances, and Open Calls for wider engagement.
Objectives
Define a scalable, secure, open, federated and decentralised IoT meta-architecture for sensing, actuation, and smart behaviour, such as streaming and processing on-device or at the edge cloud.
Enhance IoT underlying technology offering IoT/5G optimisation and a “by-design” secure edge cloud execution environment to support micro-services’ offloading and increase scalability.
Enhance IoT privacy-preserving federated ML and on-device ethical AI.
Enhance IoT Tactile and Contextual Sensing/Actuating towards a Human-Centric IoT.
Enhance IoT Cybersecurity against data poisoning and ML-based anomaly detection.
Enforce data sovereignty by making IoT data accessible in a trusted, auditable and controlled way.
Validate the IoT-NGIN enhancements with diversified and heterogeneous use cases.
Demonstrate flexibility and User Acceptance by integrating new 3rd party components and apps.
Competitive Advantage through IoT business platforms.
IoT Business modelling and Opportunities in use case verticals.
Establish the IoT-NGIN sustainability via major enablers end established DIHs and ecosystems.
Improve European citizens quality of life in a Human-Centred Europe.
Improve Accessibility to IoT resources.
Achieve scientific Advancement and Impact creation.
eBOS Role in the Project
In IoT-NGIN, eBOS led the collection, analysis, and documentation of requirements for the development of the ‘Next Generation IoT Meta-Architecture’. It also contributed to refining the use cases, elaborating the detailed architecture of the IoT-NGIN Platform, and specifying the technical components, including the testing framework for validating and benchmarking results. eBOS supported a continuous technology watch on next-generation IoT developments to ensure alignment with the project’s innovations. In addition, it worked on blockchain-related tasks, supporting the development of a peer-to-peer network infrastructure necessary for efficient smart contract transactions and enabling a decentralised live streaming service for individual paying subscribers.
eBOS also contributed to the analysis of emerging privacy, data protection, ethics, security, and societal (PRESS) concerns in the IoT domain, and played an active role in exploitation and dissemination activities, helping to promote project outcomes.
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 957246.
