2017 IEEE International Congress on Internet of Things
Mobile Internet of Things (MIoT) and its Applications for Smart Environments
A Positional Overview
Amany Alnahdi
Computer Science Department
King Abdulaziz University
Jeddah, Saudi Arabia
Kent State University
Kent, OH, USA
aalnahdi@kent.edu
AbstractInternet of Things (IoT) is an emergent technology
paradigm that has been adopted in many areas such as smart
cities, smart health organizations, and smart homes. IoT has
facilitated the use of computing services for communities. IoT
has provided lots of benefits in different domains. The use of
IoT technology can be exorbitant; therefore there is a need to
find economical solution to facilitate the use of IoT in different
domains. In this paper, we propose a new model for IoT that
provides mobility in terms of location change. In addition, we
propose our positional view of the components of Mobile IoT
model. Moreover, we provide scenario applications for MIoT
uses.
Keywords-IoT; MIoT; smart environment
I. INTRODUCTION
Intern of Things (IoT) is a recent technology trend to
benefit different applications domains. Smart applications
such as smart health, smart buildings, and smart cities can be
based on an IoT infrastructure. Incorporating hardware and
software devices in smart environments can be beneficial,
however the cost of using IoT is an essential issue when it
comes to selecting an IoT as a technology for facilitating a
smart environment. Therefore, cost effective ways of using
IoT is crucial from the perspective of both business owners
and customers.
Business owners and customers usually look at Return on
Investment (RoI) solutions for their businesses and
purchases. When it comes to technology solutions, it is
essential to adopt a methodology where the resources can be
fully utilized and not wasted specifically for temporary
situations. Temporary smart environments such as buildings
needed to host construction workers who would sit for few
months to build housing units and then these buildings will
be removed when the housing project is finished. For such
temporary situation, the short-term use for an IoT technology
motivates the need for using provisional version of the IoT.
This further can reduce the cost of using the resources in
such environments.
In this paper, we propose the concept of Mobile Internet
of Things (MIoT). MIoT is a model for using IoT technology
trend with feature of the mobility and the transitioning to
serve smart environments. Moreover, we provide detailed
information of the components of our proposed MIoT model.
978-1-5386-2011-3/17 $31.00 2017 IEEE
DOI 10.1109/IEEE.ICIOT.2017.26
Shih-Hsi Liu
Computer Science Department
California State University, Fresno
Fresno, CA, USA
shliu@csufresno.edu
In addition, this paper provides scenario applications from
which MIoT can benefit.
This paper defines several concepts related to IoT and
MIoT such as Smart IoT Environment, Mobile Internet of
Things (MIoT), MIoT Stakeholders, MIoT Scenario
applications, and MIoT Service. The definitions of these
terminologies are as follows:
Smart IoT Environment is a city or building that is
built, rebuilt, or improved based on IoT system.
Mobile Internet of Things (MIoT) is an IoT system that
can be moved and reused in different locations.
MIoT Stakeholders are personnel that work in building
and maintaining MIoT systems.
MIoT Scenario application is an exemplary application
that can benefit from the use of MIoT systems.
MIoT Service is a software service that can be used to
facilitate the jobs of MIoT systems.
This paper is organized as follows: Section II reviews
some of the work done in the domain of IoT. Section III
provides description of our proposed model of MIoT. In
section IV, we provide some scenario applications. Section
V concludes the paper and provides some of the challenges
that can be used in the domain of MIoT.
II. LITERATURE REVIEW
IoT is a hot topic in the technology domain. Most of the
studies in the literature concentrate on illustrating the IoT
concepts, technical parts of IoT in terms of network
standards used to deploy IoT, how IoT has been applied, and
the challenges in the domain.
The model of IoT and its standards have been reviewed
in several literature studies. In [5], the authors reviewed three
aspects of Internet of Things (IoT), Internet of Everything
(IoE), and Internet of Nano Things (IoNT). As the authors
explained IoT is based on connected things, they also
distinguished the difference between IoE and IoNT. While
the IoE is based on people, data, process, and things by
extending business process to nurture the quality of people
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lives, IoNT concept consists of Nano-sensors that are
embedded in objects devices and connected through Nano -
networks. Likewise, the authors of [7] also identified the
blocks of the Internet including identification, sensing,
communication, computation, services, and semantics. In
addition, the authors listed some of IoT requirements,
including functional, non-functional, and architectural
requirements. Similarity, in [1], the authors surveyed
building blocks of IoT specifically fog computing and
embedded systems. In addition, in [1] the authors reviewed
IoT platforms such as embedded system and prototypes, IoT
communication technologies, IoT backup technologies,
security of the IoT, and IoT applications. Moreover, in [4],
the author described wireless technology standards for
connectivity challenges in smart home applications that use
connected devices such as appliances and denoted that the
wireless technology used in IoT platform include Zigbee, Z-
Wave, Bluetooth, and Thread. In addition, the authors of [3]
presented in their paper a demo to show advantages of
hybrid platform-as-a-service (PaaS) to clarify how the
applications can be used in such hybrid IoT environment.
The challenges in deploying IoT have been addressed in
several studies. The challenges of IoT as indicated in [5] are
related to technology factors rather than human resistance.
On the other hand, the challenges of smart home applications
as the author in [4] include interoperability for facilitating
ease of use of IoT devices, self-management so devices can
maintain their operation status and inform the user for fault
conditions. Moreover, the authors of [2] addressed the
challenges of the use of IoT in healthcare including
processing high volume data, the need of high network
bandwidth, the need of standardization, and the uniformity of
collected data. As well, the authors of [6] indicated the
challenges of the IoT including gap bridging between the
physical and software world. Additionally, in their paper [6],
the authors analyzed IoT history and reviewed several IoT
employment projects. Further, the authors of [7], in their
paper reviewed the literature on the challenges and open
problems of IoT coordination for example IoT
interoperability, context awareness, and discovery. The
authors denoted the three paradigms of IoT including
middleware, sensors, and knowledge.
The literature showed the acceptance of using IoT. This
paper integrates IoT concept to mobile applications.
Mobility in this context is that where an IoT system can be
used in different locations. This integration is expected to
provide more flexibility on using IoT in several locations
while saving resources.
III. DESCRIPTION OF MIOT
This section emphasizes on the motivation of MIoT
systems, describes their components, their general
applications, and expected benefits of using MIoT systems.
Figure 1 illustrates the components of the proposed system.
Building smart environments requires considerable effort
and resources. Having sharable resources will help business
owners, technology users, and consumers to share their
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resources. Hardware and software devices used to build IoT
systems can be very costly in terms of value, storage space,
and maintenance. To benefit from IoT resources that can be
idle for a period of time, MIoT systems can be built and used
in different locations to utilize resources.
A system that is based on MIoT is composed of multiple
components including human resources, hardware, and
software. The human resources are MIoT stakeholders who
work on building and maintain MIoT systems. MIoT
stakeholders, include MIoT business owners who own MIoT
model and sell it or lend it to customers including other
business owners who would benefit from MIoT systems.
MIoT programmer is a programmer who is specialized in
programming services for IoT and MIoT systems. Hardware
specialist is a person who is specialized on maintaining
hardware devices of MIoT systems.
MIoT Stakeholder
Hardware
Software
Devices Services MIoT Expert
Sensors Operating MIoT
Mobility System programmer
devices Scheduling MIoT system
services support
Auditing
service
Feedback
service
Figure 1. Components of MIoT System.
MIoT moderator is a person who is specialized on
managing MIoT system and scheduling MIoT lending and
maintenance tasks with other MIoT employees and MIoT
customers.
MIoT systems can be used to in several domains such as
health, education, housing, and entertainment. Using such
systems will provide smart ways on facilitating building,
restoring, and enhancing such applications.
The expected benefits of using MIoT systems include
sharing technology system resources which will lead to
efficient utilization of these resources from the perspective
on business owners. In addition, using MIoT systems can
provide an efficient and fast way when building new systems
for business and consumer using MIoT systems. The use of
MIoT is beneficial for seasonal business or consumers who
would benefit from that business for specific times. Mobility
feature of MIoT will help consumers who live in places
where the utility services are difficult to benefit from the
facilities provided by MIoT features.
MIoT systems should consist of scheduling components
to be in the business process. The scheduling components
will enable business owners and the system users to find
available time to lend and use the system. The scheduling
process is responsible on ensuring the availability of the
system for appropriate time required by the user taking in the
consideration the time used to move the system to the user
location. The scheduling process should include the time
required for moving the system to the user location.
In addition, the feedback service component is essential
in MIoT systems. The feedback service will enable both
system users and system owners to have communication on
evaluating the service. Service evaluation from the system
users will enable the system owners to understand customer
requirements and enhance their services for future business
tasks. Evaluation from business owners to their customers
will enable the system customers to improve their future
system use experience. The mutual feedback from both
system users and owners is anticipated to maintain the
overall quality of the MIoT system.
Additionally, the mobility feature of MIoT systems
requires that the system has to be audited for resources and
devices to be used in applications before and after the
scheduling task has to be done.
IV. SCENARIO APPLICATIONS
MIoT can be used in several domains such as smart cities,
smart health environments, smart entertainment cities, smart
homes, smart educational systems, and smart marketing
systems. This section explores some exemplary scenario
applications that can benefit from the use of MIoT model.
Smart cities can utilize MIoT model in a way that
different cities can share MIoT equipment. For example,
when a city encounters a natural disaster such as earthquakes
or hurricanes there will be an essential need to rebuild the
city. Re-building a city requires huge effort and resources
that is assumed to be difficult to exist in these situations.
MIoT system will be essential to help a city that encountered
a natural disaster to be re-established and re-built fast using
the mobility, utilization, and features of MIoT systems.
Devices such as water resource monitoring and weather
status sensing are essential in this case.
Smart health environments that have temporary
characteristic for example hospitals dedicated to help people
who reside in cities encountered natural disasters such as
tornados, earthquakes, and floods. MIoT systems can help in
managing patient and health workers medical and contact
records, monitoring patients medical status for patients who
live in their homes, documenting and conducting statistical
computation for health data, and connecting to other health
information systems for getting support.
Smart entertainment cities can benefit from the
temporarily advantage of MIoT systems. When building or
operating those cities temporarily in different yearly seasons
such as during summer, or winter time, it is beneficial in
terms of the reverse on investment for business owners to
mutually share such systems. For example, an entertainment
city that operates on summer can share MIoT system
resources that operate on winter. Such an environment can
include weather sensing, parking monitoring, and security
devices, among others.
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Smart homes can benefits from MIoT systems in several
scenarios. For example, when building compound houses
business owners and workers will be restricted by specific
budget and time to build the housing units. Using MIoT for
housing systems can facilitate the process of building houses
in a timely manner and delivering the projects within the
budget. Using MIoT will enable business owners who work
in different projects that have different time schedules to
share MIoT systems and save their budgets. In addition,
houses that are not fully occupied throughout the year such
as summer resorts can benefit from the MIoT systems in
during the occupation time.
Smart seasonal schools that would run only for specific
programs in certain times in the year such as summer would
benefit from using MIoT. Camping schools that run in
different places can also benefit from sharing technology
educational systems for the duration the school operates. In
addition, mobile libraries that move to different locations in
different cities will provide educational chances for students
in different cities.
Marketing systems can use MIoT systems to enable
marketing services for different products and services
including installing MIoT systems in different locations.
Marketing MIoT systems for system users who are hesitated
on using the IoT or MIoT system can be done by using
MIoT. This will give system users to try and experience the
system and might purchase it in the future.
Plethora of smart applications that can benefit from
mobility, temporally, and economic features of using
technology emphasizes the necessity of using MIoT these
applications are illustrated in Figure 2.
smart cities
markting smart health
systems environments
MIoT
Applications
smart smart
educational entertainment
system cities
smart homes
Figure 2. Applications of MIoT
 V. CONCLUSION 132-136.
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