Service level assurance of Smart Infrastructures

The Internet of Things has emerged as a new paradigm able to drive extra efficiencies out of existing city infrastructures, decreasing the size of new investment necessary to meet growth requirements. By installing sensors in a city environment, authorities could get a near real-time view of situations and take appropriate actions to improve citizens quality of life.
BT's Data Hub approach provides additional benefits through the delivery of a platform to pull sensor data feeds together but also supporting an ecosystem of partners and tools to trade the data; that is the Data Hub brings together Data Providers who make sensor data feeds available with own licences, privacy terms and SLA guarantees and Data Consumers (citizens, app developers or even SMEs) who subscribe to use certain data feeds of interest. In this digital ecosystem, the key challenge is how to guarantee and maintain SLAs, when end-to-end service delivery engages multiple authorities, each authority owing a separate domain of control over the part of the service they are responsible for.
The PhD should focus on techniques and approaches for End-to-end SLA management in an IoT/Data hub ecosystem environment considering areas like:
(i) predictive analytics that can foretell trends and could determine a high possibility of disrupting SLAs
(ii) how we can best detect problems with feeds and where there have been SLA affecting matters, how to handle reporting these without a large strain of searches etc. on the hub, and how to issue repudiation e.g. service credits
(iii) orchestration techniques that optimise deployment of IoT devices, network connectivity parameters, app logic deployment etc, to guarantee end-to-end customer SLAs.