Abstract
The fast development and adoption of IoT technologies has been enabling their application into increasingly sensitive domains, such as Medical and Industrial IoT, in which safety and cyber-security are paramount. While the number of deployed IoT devices increases annually, they still present severe cyber-security vulnerabilities, becoming potential targets and entry points for further attacks. As these nodes become compromised, attackers aim to set up stealthy communication behaviours, to exfiltrate data or to orchestrate nodes in a cloaked fashion, and network timing covert channels are increasingly being used with such malicious intents. The IEEE 802.15.4 is one of the most pervasive protocols in IoT and a fundamental part of many communication infrastructures. Despite this fact, the possibility of setting up such covert communication techniques on this medium has received very little attention. We aim to analyse the performance and feasibility of such covert-channel implementations upon the IEEE 802.15.4 protocol, particularly upon the DSME behaviour, one of the most promising for large-scale time critical communications. This enables us to better understand the involved risk of such threats and help support the development of active cyber-security mechanisms to mitigate these threats, which, for now, we provide in the form of practical network setup recommendations.

Abstract
Electromobility is a critical component of Europe’s strategy to create a more sustainable society and support the European Green Transition while enhancing quality of life. Electrification also plays an important role in securing Europe’s position in the growing market of electric and autonomous vehicles (EAV). The EU-funded OPEVA project aims to take a big step towards deployment of sustainable electric vehicles by means of optimising their support in an ecosystem. Specifically, the project focuses on analysing and designing optimisation architecture, reducing battery charging time, and developing infrastructure, as well as reporting on the driver-oriented human factors. Overall, OPEVA’s goal is to enhance EAV market penetration and adoption, making them more accessible and convenient. The aim of this paper is to inform the European automotive, transportation, energy and mobility community be presenting the OPEVA manifestation, and the overall solution strategy solidified through the progress throughout the first year of the project.

Abstract
This paper presents how the ICT infrastructure developed in the European ENCOURAGE project, centered around a message oriented middleware, enabled energy savings in buildings and households. The components of the middleware, as well as the supervisory control strategy, are overviewed, to support the presentation of the results and how they could be achieved. The main results are presented on three of the pilots of the project, a first one consisting of a single household, a second one of a residential neighborhood, and a third one in a university campus. © 2016 IEEE.

Abstract
The increasing number of IoT deployment scenarios and applications fostered the development of a multitude of specially crafted communication solutions, several proprietary, which are erecting barriers to IoT interoperability, impairing their pervasiveness. To address such problems, several middleware solutions exist to standardize IoT communications, hence promoting and facilitating interoperability. Although being increasingly adopted in most IoT systems, it became clear that there was no one size fits all solution that could address the multiple Quality-of-Service heterogeneous IoT systems may impose. Consequently, we witness new interoperability challenges regarding the usage of diverse middleware. In this work, we address this issue by proposing a novel architecture - the PolyglIoT, that can effectively interconnect diverse middleware solutions while considering the delivery QoS requirements alongside the proposed translation. We analyze the performance and robustness of the solution and show that such Multiprotocol Translator is feasible and can achieve a high performance, thus becoming a fundamental piece to enable future highly heterogeneous IoT systems of systems.

Abstract
This paper explores the use of Robotics and decentralized Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) for side-by-side navigation in Intelligent Wheelchairs (IW). Evolving from a previous work approach using traditional single-agent methodologies, it adopts a Multi-Agent Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (MADDPG) algorithm to provide control input and enable a pair of IW to be deployed as decentralized computing agents in real-world environments, discarding the need to rely on communication between each other. In this study, the Flatland 2D simulator, in conjunction with the Robot Operating System (ROS), is used as a realistic environment to train and test the navigation algorithm. An overhaul of the reward function is introduced, which now provides individual rewards for each agent and revised reward incentives. Additionally, the logic for identifying side-by-side navigation was improved, to encourage dynamic alignment control. The preliminary results outline a promising research direction, with the IWs learning to navigate in various realistic hallways testing scenarios. The outcome also suggests that while the MADDPG approach holds potential over single-agent techniques for the decentralized IW robotics application, further investigation are needed for real-world deployment.

Abstract
Developing distributed and scalable Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) that can handle large amounts of data at high data rates at the edge, remains a challenging task. Also, the limited availability of open-source solutions makes it difficult for developers and researchers to experiment with and deploy CPSs on a larger scale. This work introduces Edge4CPS, an open-source multi-architecture solution built over Kubernetes that aims to enable an easy to use, efficient and scalable solution for the deployment of applications on edge-like distributed computing clusters. To verify the successful real-world implementation of the introduced architecture, the system was tested in a railway scenario, derived from the Ferrovia 4.0 project, which highlights its functionalities.