Social issues of power harvesting as key enables of WSN in pervasive computing

Pervasive systems have gained popularity and open the door to new applications that will improve the quality of life of the users. Additionally, the implementation of such systems over an infrastructure of Wireless Sensor Networks has been proven to be very powerful. To deal with the WSN problems related to the battery of the elements or nodes that constitute the WSN, Power Harvesting techniques arise as good candidates. With PH each node can extract the energy from the surrounding environment. However, this energy source could not be constant, affecting the continuity and quality of the services provided. This behavior can have a negative impact on the user's perception about the system, which could be perceived as unreliable or faulty. In the current paper, some related works regarding pervasive systems within the home environment are referenced to extrapolate the conclusions and problems to the paradigm of Power Harvesting Pervasive Systems from the user perspective. Besides, the paper speculates about the approach and methods to overcome these potential problems and presents the design trends that could be followed.<br/

OTSS: Oulu traffic simulation system

Abstract. This thesis presents the design and the implementation of Oulu Traffic Simulation System (OTSS), a traffic simulation system for the City of Oulu, Finland. Following agent-based approach, the simulation generates artificial agents that represent the population synthesis of the City of Oulu. Data from several sources, including official statistics, government-organized open data and crowdsourced information were collected and used as input for the simulation. Two traffic demand models are presented in this thesis: (1) the random model which generates traffic trips as random, discrete events; and (2) the activity-based model which defines traffic trips as sequential events in the agents’ day plan. The software development of the system follows the spiral model of software development and enhancement. During the implementation, several development cycles were conducted before the UML software design. The system was executed on two computation systems to test its real-time performance. To evaluate the traffic models, data extracted from the simulation was compared with aggregated survey data from Finnish Transport Agency and traffic count stations around the city. The results showed that a typical server is capable of running the simulation, and even though there were differences in the duration and distance of individual trips, the simulation reflects real-life traffic count significantly well

Identifying prosumer’s energy sharing behaviours for forming optimal prosumer-communities

Smart Grid (SG) achieves bidirectional energy and information flow between the energy user and the utility grid, allowing energy users not only to consume energy, but also to generate the energy and share with the utility grid or with other energy consumers. This type of energy user who consumes energy and who also can generate the energy is called the “prosumer”. The sustainability of the SG energy sharing process heavily depends on its participating prosumers, making prosumer participation and management schemes crucial within the energy sharing approaches. The contribution of this article is twofold. First, this article introduces a novel concept of participating and managing the prosumers in the SG energy sharing process in the form of virtual communities, which involves with computation, software, data access, and storage services that do not need end-prosumer knowledge of the physical location and system configuration. Here, the community of prosumers can collectively increase the amount of power to be auctioned or bought offering higher bargaining power, thereby settling for a higher price per kilowatt in long-term. The initial step to build an effective prosumer-community is the identification of those prosumers who would be suitable to make efficient prosumer communities. This leads the necessity of identifying parameters that influence the energy sharing behaviours of prosumers. The second contribution of this article is that, this comprehensively analyses the different parameters influencing the prosumer’s energy sharing behaviours and thus presents multi-agent architecture for optimal prosumer-community formation

MakeSense: An IoT Testbed for Social Research of Indoor Activities

There has been increasing interest in deploying IoT devices to study human behaviour in locations such as homes and offices. Such devices can be deployed in a laboratory or `in the wild' in natural environments. The latter allows one to collect behavioural data that is not contaminated by the artificiality of a laboratory experiment. Using IoT devices in ordinary environments also brings the benefits of reduced cost, as compared with lab experiments, and less disturbance to the participants' daily routines which in turn helps with recruiting them into the research. However, in this case, it is essential to have an IoT infrastructure that can be easily and swiftly installed and from which real-time data can be securely and straightforwardly collected. In this paper, we present MakeSense, an IoT testbed that enables real-world experimentation for large scale social research on indoor activities through real-time monitoring and/or situation-aware applications. The testbed features quick setup, flexibility in deployment, the integration of a range of IoT devices, resilience, and scalability. We also present two case studies to demonstrate the use of the testbed, one in homes and one in offices.Comment: 20 pages, 11 figure

Virtual Domotic Systems: a 3D Interaction Technique to Control Virtual Building Devices Using Residential Gateways

Residential gateways are systems based on different control technologies that provide a unified way of communication for various devices and appliances present in homes and buildings (sensors, control systems, electronic devices, etc.). The massive introduction of residential gateways in the market is often hindered by the lack of intuitive configuration and visualization interfaces. Moreover, users frequently obtain very limited feedback about the status of the building after the actions carried out by the residential gateway, what reduces the confidence in such systems. This paper presents a Virtual Domotic System (VDS), an innovative solution to provide a Virtual Reality interface to manage residential gateways. VDS comprises three main blocks. The first of them is the residential gateway and the associated control devices of the building. The second element is an advanced 3D Virtual Environment that reliably represents the building, the state of control devices and the environmental characteristics (such as lighting or temperature). Finally, the system includes the software that enables the communication and synchronization between the virtual environment and the control technologies and appliances of the building. The VDS introduces a new 3D interaction technique, where the inputs that modify and configure the 3D virtual environment come directly from the sensors and actuators installed in the buildin

Internet of Things. Information Processing in an Increasingly Connected World

This open access book constitutes the refereed post-conference proceedings of the First IFIP International Cross-Domain Conference on Internet of Things, IFIPIoT 2018, held at the 24th IFIP World Computer Congress, WCC 2018, in Poznan, Poland, in September 2018. The 12 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 24 submissions. Also included in this volume are 4 WCC 2018 plenary contributions, an invited talk and a position paper from the IFIP domain committee on IoT. The papers cover a wide range of topics from a technology to a business perspective and include among others hardware, software and management aspects, process innovation, privacy, power consumption, architecture, applications

Household users cooperation to reduce cost in green mobile networks

The staggering mobile traffic growth is leading to a huge increase of operational costs for Mobile Operators (MOs) due to power supply. In a Smart Grid (SG) scenario, where Demand Response (DR) strategies are widely adopted to better balance the Demand-Supply mismatch, new opportunities arise for MOs, that can receive some monetary rewards for accomplishing the SG requests of periodically increasing or decreasing their energy consumption. This study considers a mobile network that exploits Renewable Energy (RE) to power the BSs and Resource on Demand (RoD) strategies to dynamically adapt the number of active radio resources to the varying traffic demand, in order to better react to the SG requests. On top of this, the purpose of this work is investigating the effects of the cooperation between Household Customers (HCs) engaged in the DR program and the mobile network. Based on a predefined agreement, HCs cooperate with the MO in order to increase its capability to accomplish the SG requests, receiving in return some benefits when stipulating the Internet provisioning contract with the MO. HCs can contribute to achieving the MO goals by means of two techniques. On the one hand, a fraction of the electric loads that are postponed by the HCs when the SG asks for a reduction of the energy consumption can be shifted on behalf of the mobile network, that will receive the corresponding monetary rewards (HC Trade - HCT). On the other hand, HCs can accept to handle some additional mobile traffic, that is moved to their own WiFi Access Points from the BSs, in order to reduce the energy load of the mobile network (WiFi Offloading - WO).Our results show that, although HCT alone provides limited saving in the energy bill due to the poor attitude of HCs to postpone their electric loads, up to 18% of cost saving can be achieved under full HCs cooperation when HCT is combined with WO. The effects of HCs cooperation can be further enhanced by installing larger sized RE generators, allowing to significantly reduce the energy bill up to more than 90%

SHELDON Smart habitat for the elderly.

An insightful document concerning active and assisted living under different perspectives: Furniture and habitat, ICT solutions and Healthcare