On participatory service provision at the network edge with community home gateways

Edge computing is considered as a technology to enable new types of services which operate at the network edge. There are important use cases in ambient intelligence and the Internet of Things (IoT) for edge computing driven by huge business potentials. Most of today's edge computing platforms, however, consist of proprietary gateways, which are either closed or fairly restricted to deploy any third-party services. In this paper we discuss a participatory edge computing system running on home gateways to serve as an open environment to deploy local services. We present first motivating use cases and review existing approaches and design considerations for the proposed system. Then we show our platform which materializes the principles of an open and participatory edge environment, to lower the entry barriers for service deployment at the network edge. By using containers, our platform can flexibly enable third-party services, and may serve as an infrastructure to support several application domains of ambient intelligence.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Managing emergency situations in the smart city: The smart signal

In a city there are numerous items, many of them unnoticed but essential; this is the case of the signals. Signals are considered objects with reduced technological interest, but in this paper we prove that making them smart and integrating in the IoT (Internet of Things) could be a relevant contribution to the Smart City. This paper presents the concept of Smart Signal, as a device conscious of its context, with communication skills, able to offer the best message to the user, and as a ubiquitous element that contributes with information to the city. We present the design considerations and a real implementation and validation of the system in one of the most challenging environments that may exist in a city: a tunnel. The main advantages of the Smart Signal are the improvement of the actual functionality of the signal providing new interaction capabilities with users and a new sensory mechanism of the Smart City

CorteXlab: A Facility for Testing Cognitive Radio Networks in a Reproducible Environment

International audience—While many theoretical and simulation works have highlighted the potential gains of cognitive radio, several technical issues still need to be evaluated from an experimental point of view. Deploying complex heterogeneous system scenarios is tedious, time consuming and hardly reproducible. To address this problem, we have developed a new experimental facility, called CorteXlab, that allows complex multi-node cognitive radio scenarios to be easily deployed and tested by anyone in the world. Our objective is not to design new software defined radio (SDR) nodes, but rather to provide a comprehensive access to a large set of high performance SDR nodes. The CorteXlab facility offers a 167 m 2 electromagnetically (EM) shielded room and integrates a set of 24 universal software radio peripherals (USRPs) from National Instruments, 18 PicoSDR nodes from Nutaq and 42 IoT-Lab wireless sensor nodes from Hikob. CorteXlab is built upon the foundations of the SensLAB testbed and is based the free and open-source toolkit GNU Radio. Automation in scenario deployment, experiment start, stop and results collection is performed by an experiment controller, called Minus. CorteXlab is in its final stages of development and is already capable of running test scenarios. In this contribution, we show that CorteXlab is able to easily cope with the usual issues faced by other testbeds providing a reproducible experiment environment for CR experimentation