There is no escaping the Big Data hype. Vendors are peddling Big Data solutions; consulting firms employ Big Data specialists; Big Data conferences are aplenty. There is a rush to extract golden nuggets (of insight) from mountains (of data). By focusing merely on the mountain (of Big Data), these adventurers are overlooking the source of the revolution-namely, the many digital data streams (DDSs) that create Big Data-and the opportunity to improve real-time decision making. This article discusses the characteristics of DDSs, describes their common structure, and offers guidelines to enable firms to profit from their untapped potential.

With near exponential growth predicted in the number of Internet of Things (IoT) based devices within networked systems there is need of a means of providing their flexible and secure integration. Software Defined Networking (SDN) is a concept that allows for the centralised control and configuration of network devices, and also provides opportunities for the dynamic control of network traffic. This paper proposes the use of an SDN gateway as a distributed means of monitoring the traffic originating from and directed to IoT based devices. This gateway can then both detect anomalous behaviour and perform an appropriate response (blocking, forwarding, or applying Quality of Service). Initial results demonstrate that, while the addition of the attack detection functionality has an impact on the number of flow installations possible per second, it can successfully detect and block TCP and ICMP flood based attacks.

Abstract:The Internet of Things (IoT) is an extension of the Internet in which large numbers of "things", including sensors, actuators and processors, in addition to human users, are networked and able to provide high resolution data on their environment and exercise a degree of control over it. It is still at an early stage of development, and many problems/research challenges must be solved before it is widely adopted. Many of these are technical, including interoperability and scalability, as billions of heterogeneous devices will be connected, but deciding on how to invest in the IoT is a challenge for business, and there are also major social, legal and ethical challenges, including security and privacy of data collection, which must be resolved. As the future IoT will be a multi-national, multi-industry, multi-technology infrastructure, the paper reviews the global standardization efforts that are underway to facilitate its worldwide creation and adoption. The main purpose of the paper is to give a broad survey, based on published literature, of the methods of Operations Research (OR), both the mathematical tools and techniques of "hard" OR, and the various approaches of Systems Thinking, including "soft" OR, which may assist in dealing with these problems. A subset of these is described in greater depth to better convey what might be involved in applying OR and Systems Thinking to the IoT. It is suggested that OR has a role to play in balancing the technical and non-technical research challenges which confront the IoT.

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