Internet of things for disaster management: state-of-the-art and prospects

Disastrous events are cordially involved with the momentum of nature. As such mishaps have been showing off own mastery, situations have gone beyond the control of human resistive mechanisms far ago. Fortunately, several technologies are in service to gain affirmative knowledge and analysis of a disaster's occurrence. Recently, Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm has opened a promising door toward catering of multitude problems related to agriculture, industry, security, and medicine due to its attractive features, such as heterogeneity, interoperability, light-weight, and flexibility. This paper surveys existing approaches to encounter the relevant issues with disasters, such as early warning, notification, data analytics, knowledge aggregation, remote monitoring, real-time analytics, and victim localization. Simultaneous interventions with IoT are also given utmost importance while presenting these facts. A comprehensive discussion on the state-of-the-art scenarios to handle disastrous events is presented. Furthermore, IoT-supported protocols and market-ready deployable products are summarized to address these issues. Finally, this survey highlights open challenges and research trends in IoT-enabled disaster management systems. © 2013 IEEE

Internet of Things-aided Smart Grid: Technologies, Architectures, Applications, Prototypes, and Future Research Directions

Traditional power grids are being transformed into Smart Grids (SGs) to address the issues in existing power system due to uni-directional information flow, energy wastage, growing energy demand, reliability and security. SGs offer bi-directional energy flow between service providers and consumers, involving power generation, transmission, distribution and utilization systems. SGs employ various devices for the monitoring, analysis and control of the grid, deployed at power plants, distribution centers and in consumers' premises in a very large number. Hence, an SG requires connectivity, automation and the tracking of such devices. This is achieved with the help of Internet of Things (IoT). IoT helps SG systems to support various network functions throughout the generation, transmission, distribution and consumption of energy by incorporating IoT devices (such as sensors, actuators and smart meters), as well as by providing the connectivity, automation and tracking for such devices. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey on IoT-aided SG systems, which includes the existing architectures, applications and prototypes of IoT-aided SG systems. This survey also highlights the open issues, challenges and future research directions for IoT-aided SG systems

New platform for intelligent context-based distributed information fusion

Tesis por compendio de publicaciones[ES]Durante las últimas décadas, las redes de sensores se han vuelto cada vez más importantes y hoy en día están presentes en prácticamente todos los sectores de nuestra sociedad. Su gran capacidad para adquirir datos y actuar sobre el entorno, puede facilitar la construcción de sistemas sensibles al contexto, que permitan un análisis detallado y flexible de los procesos que ocurren y los servicios que se pueden proporcionar a los usuarios. Esta tesis doctoral se presenta en el formato de “Compendio de Artículos”, de tal forma que las principales características de la arquitectura multi-agente distribuida propuesta para facilitar la interconexión de redes de sensores se presentan en tres artículos bien diferenciados. Se ha planteado una arquitectura modular y ligera para dispositivos limitados computacionalmente, diseñando un mecanismo de comunicación flexible que permite la interacción entre diferentes agentes embebidos, desplegados en dispositivos de tamaño reducido. Se propone un nuevo modelo de agente embebido, como mecanismo de extensión para la plataforma PANGEA. Además, se diseña un nuevo modelo de organización virtual de agentes especializada en la fusión de información. De esta forma, los agentes inteligentes tienen en cuenta las características de las organizaciones existentes en el entorno a la hora de proporcionar servicios. El modelo de fusión de información presenta una arquitectura claramente diferenciada en 4 niveles, siendo capaz de obtener la información proporcionada por las redes de sensores (capas inferiores) para ser integrada con organizaciones virtuales de agentes (capas superiores). El filtrado de señales, minería de datos, sistemas de razonamiento basados en casos y otras técnicas de Inteligencia Artificial han sido aplicadas para la consecución exitosa de esta investigación. Una de las principales innovaciones que pretendo con mi estudio, es investigar acerca de nuevos mecanismos que permitan la adición dinámica de redes de sensores combinando diferentes tecnologías con el propósito final de exponer un conjunto de servicios de usuario de forma distribuida. En este sentido, se propondrá una arquitectura multiagente basada en organizaciones virtuales que gestione de forma autónoma la infraestructura subyacente constituida por el hardware y los diferentes sensores

Socio-economic aware data forwarding in mobile sensing networks and systems

The vision for smart sustainable cities is one whereby urban sensing is core to optimising city operation which in turn improves citizen contentment. Wireless Sensor Networks are envisioned to become pervasive form of data collection and analysis for smart cities but deployment of millions of inter-connected sensors in a city can be cost-prohibitive. Given the ubiquity and ever-increasing capabilities of sensor-rich mobile devices, Wireless Sensor Networks with Mobile Phones (WSN-MP) provide a highly flexible and ready-made wireless infrastructure for future smart cities. In a WSN-MP, mobile phones not only generate the sensing data but also relay the data using cellular communication or short range opportunistic communication. The largest challenge here is the efficient transmission of potentially huge volumes of sensor data over sometimes meagre or faulty communications networks in a cost-effective way. This thesis investigates distributed data forwarding schemes in three types of WSN-MP: WSN with mobile sinks (WSN-MS), WSN with mobile relays (WSN-HR) and Mobile Phone Sensing Systems (MPSS). For these dynamic WSN-MP, realistic models are established and distributed algorithms are developed for efficient network performance including data routing and forwarding, sensing rate control and and pricing. This thesis also considered realistic urban sensing issues such as economic incentivisation and demonstrates how social network and mobility awareness improves data transmission. Through simulations and real testbed experiments, it is shown that proposed algorithms perform better than state-of-the-art schemes.Open Acces

Architecture and Applications of IoT Devices in Socially Relevant Fields

Number of IoT enabled devices are being tried and introduced every year and there is a healthy competition among researched and businesses to capitalize the space created by IoT, as these devices have a great market potential. Depending on the type of task involved and sensitive nature of data that the device handles, various IoT architectures, communication protocols and components are chosen and their performance is evaluated. This paper reviews such IoT enabled devices based on their architecture, communication protocols and functions in few key socially relevant fields like health care, farming, firefighting, women/individual safety/call for help/harm alert, home surveillance and mapping as these fields involve majority of the general public. It can be seen, to one's amazement, that already significant number of devices are being reported on these fields and their performance is promising. This paper also outlines the challenges involved in each of these fields that require solutions to make these devices reliableComment: 1

Building the Future Internet through FIRE

The Internet as we know it today is the result of a continuous activity for improving network communications, end user services, computational processes and also information technology infrastructures. The Internet has become a critical infrastructure for the human-being by offering complex networking services and end-user applications that all together have transformed all aspects, mainly economical, of our lives. Recently, with the advent of new paradigms and the progress in wireless technology, sensor networks and information systems and also the inexorable shift towards everything connected paradigm, first as known as the Internet of Things and lately envisioning into the Internet of Everything, a data-driven society has been created. In a data-driven society, productivity, knowledge, and experience are dependent on increasingly open, dynamic, interdependent and complex Internet services. The challenge for the Internet of the Future design is to build robust enabling technologies, implement and deploy adaptive systems, to create business opportunities considering increasing uncertainties and emergent systemic behaviors where humans and machines seamlessly cooperate