MobileTrust: Secure Knowledge Integration in VANETs

Vehicular Ad hoc NETworks (VANET) are becoming popular due to the emergence of the Internet of Things and ambient intelligence applications. In such networks, secure resource sharing functionality is accomplished by incorporating trust schemes. Current solutions adopt peer-to-peer technologies that can cover the large operational area. However, these systems fail to capture some inherent properties of VANETs, such as fast and ephemeral interaction, making robust trust evaluation of crowdsourcing challenging. In this article, we propose MobileTrust—a hybrid trust-based system for secure resource sharing in VANETs. The proposal is a breakthrough in centralized trust computing that utilizes cloud and upcoming 5G technologies to provide robust trust establishment with global scalability. The ad hoc communication is energy-efficient and protects the system against threats that are not countered by the current settings. To evaluate its performance and effectiveness, MobileTrust is modelled in the SUMO simulator and tested on the traffic features of the small-size German city of Eichstatt. Similar schemes are implemented in the same platform to provide a fair comparison. Moreover, MobileTrust is deployed on a typical embedded system platform and applied on a real smart car installation for monitoring traffic and road-state parameters of an urban application. The proposed system is developed under the EU-founded THREAT-ARREST project, to provide security, privacy, and trust in an intelligent and energy-aware transportation scenario, bringing closer the vision of sustainable circular economy

Building Scientific Clouds: The Distributed, Peer-to-Peer Approach

The Scientific community is constantly growing in size. The increase in personnel number and projects have resulted in the requirement of large amounts of storage, CPU power and other computing resources. It has also become necessary to acquire these resources in an affordable manner that is sensitive to work loads. In this thesis, the author presents a novel approach that provides the communication platform that will support such large scale scientific projects. These resources could be difficult to acquire due to NATs, firewalls and other site-based restrictions and policies. Methods used to overcome these hurdles have been discussed in detail along with other advantages of using such a system, which include: increased availability of necessary computing infrastructure; increased grid resource utilization; reduced user dependability; reduced job execution time. Experiments conducted included local infrastructure on the Clemson University Campus as well as resources provided by other federated grid sites

Local flexibility market design for aggregators providing multiple flexibility services at distribution network level

This paper presents a general description of local flexibility markets as a market-based management mechanism for aggregators. The high penetration of distributed energy resources introduces new flexibility services like prosumer or community self-balancing, congestion management and time-of-use optimization. This work is focused on the flexibility framework to enable multiple participants to compete for selling or buying flexibility. In this framework, the aggregator acts as a local market operator and supervises flexibility transactions of the local energy community. Local market participation is voluntary. Potential flexibility stakeholders are the distribution system operator, the balance responsible party and end-users themselves. Flexibility is sold by means of loads, generators, storage units and electric vehicles. Finally, this paper presents needed interactions between all local market stakeholders, the corresponding inputs and outputs of local market operation algorithms from participants and a case study to highlight the application of the local flexibility market in three scenarios. The local market framework could postpone grid upgrades, reduce energy costs and increase distribution grids’ hosting capacity.Postprint (published version

Ancillary Services 4.0: A Top-To-Bottom Control-Based Approach for Solving Ancillary Services Problems in Smart Grids

Power systems are experiencing a large amount of renewable generation with highly stochastic and partly unpredictable characteristics. This change in energy production implies significant consequences related to the provision of ancillary services (AS). Current markets dedicated to the provision of AS are not able to benefit from the flexible energy resources. They also cannot cope with the new level of stochasticity, non-linearity and dynamics of generation and flexibility. To overcome such issues and exploit the potential of flexibility resources, a new strategy is required. In this paper, by capitalising on flexibility resources’ potential, AS 4.0 approach is proposed, which offers a comprehensive solution for the AS provision in the smart grid era