A sub-mW IoT-endnode for always-on visual monitoring and smart triggering

This work presents a fully-programmable Internet of Things (IoT) visual sensing node that targets sub-mW power consumption in always-on monitoring scenarios. The system features a spatial-contrast $128\mathrm{x}64$ binary pixel imager with focal-plane processing. The sensor, when working at its lowest power mode ($10\mu W$ at 10 fps), provides as output the number of changed pixels. Based on this information, a dedicated camera interface, implemented on a low-power FPGA, wakes up an ultra-low-power parallel processing unit to extract context-aware visual information. We evaluate the smart sensor on three always-on visual triggering application scenarios. Triggering accuracy comparable to RGB image sensors is achieved at nominal lighting conditions, while consuming an average power between $193\mu W$ and $277\mu W$, depending on context activity. The digital sub-system is extremely flexible, thanks to a fully-programmable digital signal processing engine, but still achieves 19x lower power consumption compared to MCU-based cameras with significantly lower on-board computing capabilities.Comment: 11 pages, 9 figures, submitteted to IEEE IoT Journa

High dimensionality carrierless amplitude phase modulation technique for radio over fiber system

Advanced modulation formats such as carrierless amplitude phase (CAP) modulation technique is one of the solutions to increase flexibility and high bit rates to support multi-level and multi-dimensional modulations with the absence of sinusoidal carrier. Recent work are focussing on the 2D CAP-64 QAM Radio-over-Fiber (RoF) system but no extension of higher dimensions is reported. This thesis expands the area of CAP modulation technique and RoF system. The work described in this thesis is devoted to the investigation of 1.25 GSa/s sampling rate for multi-level and multi-dimensional CAP in point-to-point (P2P) and RoF system at 3 km single-mode fiber (SMF). Another advanced modulation format which is known as discrete multitone (DMT) is compared with CAP modulation in order to observe the performance in different modulation schemes. The 4QAM-DMT and 16QAM-DMT at different number of subcarriers are carried out in this propagation. Based on the results, the transmission performance in terms of BER and received optical power for RoF transmission are degraded to almost 3 dB when comparing to 3 km SMF transmission. These are caused by the wireless power loss and impairment effects. The bit rate and spectral efficiency can be increased with the increasing number of levels, and may decreased once the number of dimensions is increased due to the higher up-sampling factor. However, the additional dimensions can be used to support multiple service applications. Therefore, it can be concluded that CAP has better performance as compared to DMT in terms of higher spectral efficiency and data rate. To conclude, the results presented in this thesis exhibit high feasibility of CAP modulation in the increasing number of dimensions and levels. Thus, CAP has the potential to be utilized in multiple service allocations for different number of users

A Radio-fingerprinting-based Vehicle Classification System for Intelligent Traffic Control in Smart Cities

The measurement and provision of precise and upto-date traffic-related key performance indicators is a key element and crucial factor for intelligent traffic controls systems in upcoming smart cities. The street network is considered as a highly-dynamic Cyber Physical System (CPS) where measured information forms the foundation for dynamic control methods aiming to optimize the overall system state. Apart from global system parameters like traffic flow and density, specific data such as velocity of individual vehicles as well as vehicle type information can be leveraged for highly sophisticated traffic control methods like dynamic type-specific lane assignments. Consequently, solutions for acquiring these kinds of information are required and have to comply with strict requirements ranging from accuracy over cost-efficiency to privacy preservation. In this paper, we present a system for classifying vehicles based on their radio-fingerprint. In contrast to other approaches, the proposed system is able to provide real-time capable and precise vehicle classification as well as cost-efficient installation and maintenance, privacy preservation and weather independence. The system performance in terms of accuracy and resource-efficiency is evaluated in the field using comprehensive measurements. Using a machine learning based approach, the resulting success ratio for classifying cars and trucks is above 99%

VANET Applications: Hot Use Cases

Current challenges of car manufacturers are to make roads safe, to achieve free flowing traffic with few congestions, and to reduce pollution by an effective fuel use. To reach these goals, many improvements are performed in-car, but more and more approaches rely on connected cars with communication capabilities between cars, with an infrastructure, or with IoT devices. Monitoring and coordinating vehicles allow then to compute intelligent ways of transportation. Connected cars have introduced a new way of thinking cars - not only as a mean for a driver to go from A to B, but as smart cars - a user extension like the smartphone today. In this report, we introduce concepts and specific vocabulary in order to classify current innovations or ideas on the emerging topic of smart car. We present a graphical categorization showing this evolution in function of the societal evolution. Different perspectives are adopted: a vehicle-centric view, a vehicle-network view, and a user-centric view; described by simple and complex use-cases and illustrated by a list of emerging and current projects from the academic and industrial worlds. We identified an empty space in innovation between the user and his car: paradoxically even if they are both in interaction, they are separated through different application uses. Future challenge is to interlace social concerns of the user within an intelligent and efficient driving

The Emerging Internet of Things Marketplace From an Industrial Perspective: A Survey

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a dynamic global information network consisting of internet-connected objects, such as Radio-frequency identification (RFIDs), sensors, actuators, as well as other instruments and smart appliances that are becoming an integral component of the future internet. Over the last decade, we have seen a large number of the IoT solutions developed by start-ups, small and medium enterprises, large corporations, academic research institutes (such as universities), and private and public research organisations making their way into the market. In this paper, we survey over one hundred IoT smart solutions in the marketplace and examine them closely in order to identify the technologies used, functionalities, and applications. More importantly, we identify the trends, opportunities and open challenges in the industry-based the IoT solutions. Based on the application domain, we classify and discuss these solutions under five different categories: smart wearable, smart home, smart, city, smart environment, and smart enterprise. This survey is intended to serve as a guideline and conceptual framework for future research in the IoT and to motivate and inspire further developments. It also provides a systematic exploration of existing research and suggests a number of potentially significant research directions.Comment: IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computing 201

A Visual Sensor Network for Parking Lot Occupancy Detection in Smart Cities

Technology is quickly revolutionizing our everyday lives, helping us to perform complex tasks. The Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm is getting more and more popular and is key to the development of Smart Cities. Among all the applications of IoT in the context of Smart Cities, real-time parking lot occupancy detection recently gained a lot of attention. Solutions based on computer vision yield good performance in terms of accuracy and are deployable on top of visual sensor networks. Since the problem of detecting vacant parking lots is usually distributed over multiple cameras, adhoc algorithms for content acquisition and transmission are to be devised. A traditional paradigm consists in acquiring and encoding images or videos and transmitting them to a central controller, which is responsible for analyzing such content. A novel paradigm, which moves part of the analysis to sensing devices, is quickly becoming popular. We propose a system for distributed parking lot occupancy detection based on the latter paradigm, showing that onboard analysis and transmission of simple features yield better performance with respect to the traditional paradigm in terms of the overall rate-energy-accuracy performance