After the study undertaken in the past years of alternative communication paradigms, protocols and network architectures, the research group wants to focus on analyzing the feasibility and the benefits for some Future Network Architectures (FNA) paradigms and solutions. More concretely, several FNA technologies and techniques has been identified as enablers for the efficient deployment and integration of heterogeneous networks in different fields, such as Smart Grids, Smart Cities, Industrial IoT, Media Distribution and Ambient Assistant Living (AAL).
Another challenge focuses on the Web of Things (WoT) concept. Indeed, in the last few years, GRITS worked on the application of WoT to the energy field – Web of Energy (WoE). Going further on the concept of WoT, the future work of GRITS aims at deepening its evolution into the Social Internet of Things (SIoT), and its application in the Smart Grids and AAL fields.
On the other hand, GRITS aims at providing relevant research outputs applying HF Communications to extend the concept of IoT to Remote IoT (RIoT), in which devices located in places out of coverage of traditional systems are included, enabling communication systems for emergency situations where any other communication system crashes.
Taking into account the distributed nature of IoT, GRITS is also interested in continuing its research in the line of distributed systems, ranging from scalability issues in classical distributed databases to architectural concerns in cloud storage environments, including adaptive data partitioning schemes and load balancing in high-capacity hybrid storage (i.e., composed by both private and public clouds) distributed systems.
Last but not the least, based on the experience acquired in the recent years, the group also plans to address cybersecurity aspects and analyze how cybersecurity threats can be addressed in different solutions that integrate IoT (SIoT and RIoT), Cloud/Fog systems and FNA approaches. More concretely, the research to be done covers the specification of aspects as event monitoring methodologies in technologies like cloud computing and SDNs, to prevent security threats and apply protection measures.
The Research Group on Internet Technologies & Storage has been recognized as a Research Group by the Generalitat de Catalunya (Catalan Government) in the framework of the 2017 SGR Call (2017 SGR 977). We have also been recognized as a member of the tech-transfer TECNIO Developers by ACCIÓ, the Agency for Business Competitiveness of the Catalan Government.
