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

Implementación de tecnologías RFID e IoT inalámbricas en el Modelado de información de construcción (BIM)

ABSTRACT: The integration and installation of innovative Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technologies in combination with wireless Internet of Things (IoT) technologies in Building Information Modelling (BIM), assigned building elements, can create connectivity between the physical- and the virtual world. Beyond the identification of physical objects, further information can be connected, which can be made available to different user groups during the entire life cycle of the building structure. This provides a high level of transparency, in that by scanning the tagged building elements, complete associated information can be accessed and presented to users via applications, in visual and audio form. One use of an RFID and BIM-supported electronic guidance system, namely for the visually impaired, has already been investigated in my bachelor thesis at the University of Applied Sciences (Technische Hochschule Mittelhessen, THM). This Master’s Thesis focuses on the implementation of passive RFID technology into BIM models in combining them with open-source software applications. BIM represents the digital twin of building models in the digital world and can be linked to physical structures (buildings, roads, sewer systems and such others) and building materials (e.g. textiles, mineral and plastic floor coverings, concrete components) by integrating RFID tags. Connecting the parametric BIM models with the physical building elements by using RFID and wireless IoT technologies in a multi-platform application enables the BIM building models to be actively used throughout the life cycle of a building, not only by the facility management, but also by the public for various use cases. During the literature review, suitable software and hardware components were selected, and a prototype multi-platform application for a navigation and positioning system was developed as proof of concept for the Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) file. (See Demo Version at https://opennavibim.herokuapp.com/ ). The challenge was to read the RFID tags in different installation scenarios. Depending on the installation situations (under, over or in the material), various requirements were specified for RFID tags and readers (RFID, handhold personal digital assistant “PDA”). In this field, further hardware developments are necessary.RESUMEN: Mediante la integración e instalación de la innovadora tecnología de identificación por radiofrecuencia (RFID, Radio Frequency Identification) en el modelado digital de información de construcción (BIM, Building Information Modelling), con la interconexión inalámbrica del internet de las cosas (IoT, Internet of Things), es posible crear una conectividad entre el mundo físico y el virtual. Más allá de la mera identificación de objetos existentes, esta conectividad permite incorporar información adicional, que puede ponerse en disposición de los diferentes grupos de usuarios que intervienen durante el ciclo completo de vida de la estructura de la edificación. Se consigue un alto de nivel de transparencia en ese traspaso de información, accesible por medio del escaneado de los elementos etiquetados en la edificación, al tener una completa información asociada que es presentada a los usuarios vía aplicaciones en formato visual o de audio. Una investigación en la aplicación de tecnología RFID basada en BIM para un sistema de navegación electrónica, destinada a personas con discapacidad visual, ha sido desarrollada en mi trabajo fin de grado en la Universidad de Ciencias Aplicadas de Mittelhessen (THM). El presente Trabajo Fin de Master se centra en la implementación de tecnología RFID pasiva en modelos BIM combinados con aplicaciones de software libre. El modelo BIM representa el gemelo digital de los elementos de construcción en el mundo virtual, permitiendo establecer una relación del modelo con estructuras físicas (edificios, carreteras o sistemas de alcantarillado, entre otros) y materiales de construcción (por ejemplo, textiles, cubiertas de suelo minerales o plásticas, componentes de hormigón, …) por medio de la integración de etiquetas RFID. La conexión de los modelos paramétricos BIM con los elementos físicos del edificio, mediante el uso de tecnologías RFID e IoT inalámbricas en una aplicación multiplataforma, permite que los modelos de construcción BIM se utilicen activamente a lo largo del ciclo de vida de un edificio, no solo por la gestión de las instalaciones, sino también por el público para diversos casos de uso. Durante la revisión bibliográfica, se seleccionaron los componentes de software y hardware adecuados, y se desarrolló un prototipo de aplicación multiplataforma para un sistema de navegación y posicionamiento como prueba de viabilidad del concepto del modelo Industry Foundation Classes (IFC). (Véase la versión de demostración en https://opennavibim.herokuapp.com/ ). La lectura de las etiquetas RFID en diferentes en diferentes situaciones de instalación presenta un desafío, dependiendo de la instalación (debajo, encima o en el material) los requisitos impuestos a las etiquetas y lectores RFID son diferentes. Por lo tanto, es necesario seguir desarrollando el hardware en este ámbito.Máster en Ingeniería de Caminos, Canales y Puertos (Plan 2020

Situational awareness through IoT sensors : A smart healthcare system as a use case

Emerging technologies of the Internet of Things are getting increasingly significant and to some extent essential as well to the society we are living in. These technologies have shown ability over the time to be implemented in a number of different fields, for instance, Smart Home, Smart Building, Smart City, Smart Retail, Smart Supply Chain, Smart Farming, Smart Grid, Industrial Internet and many more. Incorporation of Internet of Things technologies in the healthcare sector has potential to benefit not only medical related enterprises but at the same time it can improve the overall health and well-being of individuals as well. The deployment of IoT integrated systems has to deal with fairly heterogeneous environments that consist of a large number of sensors and actuators which all can be quite different from one another in many aspects. For example, they can use different operating systems and can have different hardware architecture. Such sensors are sometimes used for situational awareness of the surrounding and for making the individuals interact better with their environment. Such variety of applications and tasks poses a problem for system designers and developers on the choice of the most suitable technology to be employed to accomplish a specific task. This thesis explores the potential of Internet of Things technologies in the medical sector. We used analytical hierarchical process to have a kind of situational awareness through IoT technologies. As an use case, a healthcare system was considered for elderly people with neurological problems who need special care – people suffering with dementia for example. At the same time we have taken into account for the proposed system that it would enable regular people track and monitor their usual activities with a focus on improving the quality of life and enhancing their overall wellbeing. It is of prime importance for the system designers and developers that they have an idea about the potential IoT technologies and applications that can help this cause. We have considered eleven different IoT technologies to select from for the proposed paradigm. The decision of selecting the most appropriate technology obviously depends upon different criteria. Every IoT technology has its pros and cons. According to the needs of the proposed healthcare system, we have constructed a multi-criteria hierarchical model to assess the potential of those eleven IoT technologies for the healthcare system and chosen the best one based on set criteria and sub criteria. A 4-tier Analytical Hierarchical model is used to compare those technologies in terms of their quality of service or effectiveness, their acceptability and from the cost perspective. These criteria are then further divided into sub-criteria and the technologies are compared with respect to these ten sub-criteria to have a more thorough and comprehensive analysis. For these comparisons, quantitative data were collected from the internet including IEEE articles, and some of the comparisons are purely subjective. The results indicate that wide-area low-power solutions show more potential for the proposed healthcare system than other IoT technologies which we used for comparison, and SigFox tops the table. Also WiFi solutions have shown significant potential. But again, every technology has its shortcomings as well. Further studies are needed to see if we can somehow make a hybrid healthcare system that utilizes multiple IoT technologies and incorporate the plus points of all of them into the system; such future system can prove to be revolutionary in the medical care

New Waves of IoT Technologies Research – Transcending Intelligence and Senses at the Edge to Create Multi Experience Environments

The next wave of Internet of Things (IoT) and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) brings new technological developments that incorporate radical advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI), edge computing processing, new sensing capabilities, more security protection and autonomous functions accelerating progress towards the ability for IoT systems to self-develop, self-maintain and self-optimise. The emergence of hyper autonomous IoT applications with enhanced sensing, distributed intelligence, edge processing and connectivity, combined with human augmentation, has the potential to power the transformation and optimisation of industrial sectors and to change the innovation landscape. This chapter is reviewing the most recent advances in the next wave of the IoT by looking not only at the technology enabling the IoT but also at the platforms and smart data aspects that will bring intelligence, sustainability, dependability, autonomy, and will support human-centric solutions.acceptedVersio

A Distributed Audit Trail for the Internet of Things

Sharing Internet of Things (IoT) data over open-data platforms and digital data marketplaces can reduce infrastructure investments, improve sustainability by reducing the required resources, and foster innovation. However, due to the inability to audit the authenticity, integrity, and quality of IoT data, third-party data consumers cannot assess the trustworthiness of received data. Therefore, it is challenging to use IoT data obtained from third parties for quality-relevant applications. To overcome this limitation, the IoT data must be auditable. Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) is a promising approach for building auditable systems. However, the existing solutions do not integrate authenticity, integrity, data quality, and location into an all-encompassing auditable model and only focus on specific parts of auditability. This thesis aims to provide a distributed audit trail that makes the IoT auditable and enables sharing of IoT data between multiple organizations for quality relevant applications. Therefore, we designed and evaluated the Veritaa framework. The Veritaa framework comprises the Graph of Trust (GoT) as distributed audit trail and a DLT to immutably store the transactions that build the GoT. The contributions of this thesis are summarized as follows. First, we designed and evaluated the GoT a DLT-based Distributed Public Key Infrastructure (DPKI) with a signature store. Second, we designed a Distributed Calibration Certificate Infrastructure (DCCI) based on the GoT, which makes quality-relevant maintenance information of IoT devices auditable. Third, we designed an Auditable Positioning System (APS) to make positions in the IoT auditable. Finally, we designed an Location Verification System (LVS) to verify location claims and prevent physical layer attacks against the APS. All these components are integrated into the GoT and build the distributed audit trail. We implemented a real-world testbed to evaluate the proposed distributed audit trail. This testbed comprises several custom-built IoT devices connectable over Long Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN) or Long-Term Evolution Category M1 (LTE Cat M1), and a Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE)-based Angle of Arrival (AoA) positioning system. All these low-power devices can manage their identity and secure their data on the distributed audit trail using the IoT client of the Veritaa framework. The experiments suggest that a distributed audit trail is feasible and secure, and the low-power IoT devices are capable of performing the required cryptographic functions. Furthermore, the energy overhead introduced by making the IoT auditable is limited and reasonable for quality-relevant applications

Securing Wireless Communication in Critical Infrastructure: Challenges and Opportunities

Critical infrastructure constitutes the foundation of every society. While traditionally solely relying on dedicated cable-based communication, this infrastructure rapidly transforms to highly digitized and interconnected systems which increasingly rely on wireless communication. Besides providing tremendous benefits, especially affording the easy, cheap, and flexible interconnection of a large number of assets spread over larger geographic areas, wireless communication in critical infrastructure also raises unique security challenges. Most importantly, the shift from dedicated private wired networks to heterogeneous wireless communication over public and shared networks requires significantly more involved security measures. In this paper, we identify the most relevant challenges resulting from the use of wireless communication in critical infrastructure and use those to identify a comprehensive set of promising opportunities to preserve the high security standards of critical infrastructure even when switching from wired to wireless communication.Comment: Author's version of a paper accepted for publication in Proceedings of the 20th EAI International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems: Computing, Networking and Services (MobiQuitous 2023

Quality assessment technique for ubiquitous software and middleware

The new paradigm of computing or information systems is ubiquitous computing systems. The technology-oriented issues of ubiquitous computing systems have made researchers pay much attention to the feasibility study of the technologies rather than building quality assurance indices or guidelines. In this context, measuring quality is the key to developing high-quality ubiquitous computing products. For this reason, various quality models have been defined, adopted and enhanced over the years, for example, the need for one recognised standard quality model (ISO/IEC 9126) is the result of a consensus for a software quality model on three levels: characteristics, sub-characteristics, and metrics. However, it is very much unlikely that this scheme will be directly applicable to ubiquitous computing environments which are considerably different to conventional software, trailing a big concern which is being given to reformulate existing methods, and especially to elaborate new assessment techniques for ubiquitous computing environments. This paper selects appropriate quality characteristics for the ubiquitous computing environment, which can be used as the quality target for both ubiquitous computing product evaluation processes ad development processes. Further, each of the quality characteristics has been expanded with evaluation questions and metrics, in some cases with measures. In addition, this quality model has been applied to the industrial setting of the ubiquitous computing environment. These have revealed that while the approach was sound, there are some parts to be more developed in the future

Machine Learning Meets Communication Networks: Current Trends and Future Challenges

The growing network density and unprecedented increase in network traffic, caused by the massively expanding number of connected devices and online services, require intelligent network operations. Machine Learning (ML) has been applied in this regard in different types of networks and networking technologies to meet the requirements of future communicating devices and services. In this article, we provide a detailed account of current research on the application of ML in communication networks and shed light on future research challenges. Research on the application of ML in communication networks is described in: i) the three layers, i.e., physical, access, and network layers; and ii) novel computing and networking concepts such as Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC), Software Defined Networking (SDN), Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), and a brief overview of ML-based network security. Important future research challenges are identified and presented to help stir further research in key areas in this direction

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV)-Enabled Wireless Communications and Networking

The emerging massive density of human-held and machine-type nodes implies larger traffic deviatiolns in the future than we are facing today. In the future, the network will be characterized by a high degree of flexibility, allowing it to adapt smoothly, autonomously, and efficiently to the quickly changing traffic demands both in time and space. This flexibility cannot be achieved when the network’s infrastructure remains static. To this end, the topic of UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) have enabled wireless communications, and networking has received increased attention. As mentioned above, the network must serve a massive density of nodes that can be either human-held (user devices) or machine-type nodes (sensors). If we wish to properly serve these nodes and optimize their data, a proper wireless connection is fundamental. This can be achieved by using UAV-enabled communication and networks. This Special Issue addresses the many existing issues that still exist to allow UAV-enabled wireless communications and networking to be properly rolled out