Pervasive computing and Internet of Things (IoTs) paradigms have created a huge potential for new business. To fully realize this potential, there is a need for a common way to abstract the heterogeneity of devices so that their functionality can be represented as a virtual computing platform. To this end, we present novel semantic level interoperability architecture for pervasive computing and IoTs. There are two main principles in the proposed architecture. First, information and capabilities of devices are represented with semantic web knowledge representation technologies and interaction with devices and the physical world is achieved by accessing and modifying their virtual representations. Second, global IoT is divided into numerous local smart spaces managed by a semantic information broker (SIB) that provides a means to monitor and update the virtual representation of the physical world. An integral part of the architecture is a resolution infrastructure that provides a means to resolve the network address of a SIB either using a physical object identifier as a pointer to information or by searching SIBs matching a specification represented with SPARQL. We present several reference implementations and applications that we have developed to evaluate the architecture in practice. The evaluation also includes performance studies that, together with the applications, demonstrate the suitability of the architecture to real-life IoT scenarios. In addition, to validate that the proposed architecture conforms to the common IoT-A architecture reference model (ARM), we map the central components of the architecture to the IoT-ARM.

We study the possibility of applying an emerging RFID-based communication technology, NFC (Near Field Communication), to health monitoring. We suggest that NFC is, compared to other competing technologies, a high-potential technology for short-range connectivity between health monitoring devices and mobile terminals. We propose practices to apply NFC to some health monitoring applications and study the benefits that are attainable with NFC. We compare NFC to other short-range communication technologies such as Bluetooth and IrDA, and study the possibility of improving the usability of health monitoring devices with NFC. We also introduce a research platform for technical evaluation, applicability study and application demonstrations of NFC.

Abstract. In this paper, we study the applicability of an emerging RFID-based communication technology, NFC (Near Field Communication), to ultra-low power wireless sensors. We present potential application examples of passive and semi-passive NFC-enabled sensors. We compare their NFC-based implementations to corresponding implementations based on short-range radios such as Bluetooth and Wibree. The comparison addresses both technical properties and usability. We also introduce Smart NFC Interface, which is our general-purpose prototype platform for rapid prototyping of NFC and Bluetooth implementations. Two pilot sensor implementations and an NFC-Bluetooth gateway implementation based on our platform are presented and evaluated. Finally, needs and possibilities for technical improvements of available NFC technology are discussed.

An implementation of an unobtrusive five-point acceleration sensing wireless body area network (WBAN) with mobile device data logging capabilities is presented, along with practical experiences on performance. Results show good communications performance in laboratory conditions. Field test performance is weaker and the reasons for this are discussed.

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