2016 1 st International Conference on New Research Achievements in Electrical and Computer Engineering Cloud of Things: Cloud Computing and IoT Convergence Mohammad Ali Safvati Department of Information Technology Engineering, Iranian Electronic Institute of Higher Education Tehran, Iran masafvati@iranian.ac.ir Tel number: +989122652092 Mohammad Reza Mesbahi Department of Computer Engineering, Science and Research Branch, Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran m.mesbahi@srbiau.ac.ir Abstract – Nowadays communications between different objects in the real world start a new discussion and challenges in the IT world. The Internet as a main corridor plays one of the important roles in this stream. Objects can send their behavior in the format of data, so the necessity of having an infrastructure for processing and computing is imperative. In this paper, we will have a general overview of Internet of Things and Cloud computing as a suitable on demand and scalable environment to provide shared computing resources. In addition, we will present current issues and challenges of these two technologies. Keywords—Internet of Things; Cloud Computing, Convergence, Cloud of Things; I. INTRODUCTION The Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm is based on intelligent objects that are interconnected in a heterogeneous network. Objects are connected and are able to have an interaction with servers over the internet. Objects are specified with an identifier to be identical in the real world. Objects can generate queries and change their states or their information programs. So we would be able to track everything in the world [1]. For example, in an electronic health care system in smart cities, a person for personal health protection is equipped with different sensors which are organized as a Body Area Network (BAN) that send monitoring data continually. The main goal of this system is the prevention of hospitalizing. Sensors such as RFID and WSN sense and capture actions of objects in the real environment and send them to a central processing and computing units. for example, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) are used for automatic objects and people identification and store their information such as a serial number on a microchip [2]. Wireless sensor network (WSN) can monitor assets and wirelessly transmits data for processing and analyze various data to the gateway [3]. Ubiquitous computing means some numbers of connected devices are increasing rapidly, so smartphones, sensors, and household appliances communicate with each other and thus large volumes of data are created. Generally, IoT is described by real world small things that are extensively distributed with limited storage, processing and computing capacity. So for solving this limitation we need to have a reliable and rental infrastructure. These characteristics provide challenges and Cloud computing can be a favorable solution to deal with these characteristics. IoT and Cloud computing convergence make a new paradigm : “Cloud of Things (CoT)” [4] or “ClouT” [5]. Cloud computing provides a flexible environment for processing any application over a pool of shared resources, scaling up and down according to the usage of treatment. Cloud datacenters can provide an on-demand service with a requested QoS level. Also, Cloud paradigm brings new models based on the pay per use that reduce operational costs and time on the actual use of service [6]. This technology has solved most of the IoT issues. IoT and Cloud have being merged together to change current and future of the internet services [7]. It is not so simple to allow that everything becomes a part of IoT including all the available resources in Cloud computing systems. There are some issues that should be considered in Cloud of thing such as Security, Privacy, and especially Identity of Protection which is very important in Cloud environments. In Cloud of thing, heterogeneous networks will be involved by different types of data and services. The network must have the flexibility to support all types of data [4]. As one of the best definition of Cloud computing we can refer to the proposed definition of National Institute of Standard and Technology (NIST): “Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be provisioned and released rapidly with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. This cloud model is composed of five essential characteristics, three service models, and four deployment models.” [8]. TABLE I. CHARACTERISTICS OF CLOUD COMPUTING WITH A REAL EXAMPLE. Characteristic Comment Example On-demand self-service All services provided without human participating. Email, storage Broad network access Cloud always is accessible in a heterogeneous network. Mobile, laptop Resource pooling Resources all assigned based on user’s demand. Processing, memory Rapid elasticity Increase or decrease cloud services according to requirement. Processing, memory Measured service Ability of evolution to optimizing resources. CPU hours, bandwidth usage