Internet of things

Manual of Digital Earth / Editors: Huadong Guo, Michael F. Goodchild, Alessandro Annoni .- Springer, 2020 .- ISBN: 978-981-32-9915-3Digital Earth was born with the aim of replicating the real world within the digital world. Many efforts have been made to observe and sense the Earth, both from space (remote sensing) and by using in situ sensors. Focusing on the latter, advances in Digital Earth have established vital bridges to exploit these sensors and their networks by taking location as a key element. The current era of connectivity envisions that everything is connected to everything. The concept of the Internet of Things(IoT)emergedasaholisticproposaltoenableanecosystemofvaried,heterogeneous networked objects and devices to speak to and interact with each other. To make the IoT ecosystem a reality, it is necessary to understand the electronic components, communication protocols, real-time analysis techniques, and the location of the objects and devices. The IoT ecosystem and the Digital Earth (DE) jointly form interrelated infrastructures for addressing today’s pressing issues and complex challenges. In this chapter, we explore the synergies and frictions in establishing an efficient and permanent collaboration between the two infrastructures, in order to adequately address multidisciplinary and increasingly complex real-world problems. Although there are still some pending issues, the identified synergies generate optimism for a true collaboration between the Internet of Things and the Digital Earth

An Energy Aware and Secure MAC Protocol for Tackling Denial of Sleep Attacks in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks which form part of the core for the Internet of Things consist of resource constrained sensors that are usually powered by batteries. Therefore, careful energy awareness is essential when working with these devices. Indeed,the introduction of security techniques such as authentication and encryption, to ensure confidentiality and integrity of data, can place higher energy load on the sensors. However, the absence of security protection c ould give room for energy drain attacks such as denial of sleep attacks which have a higher negative impact on the life span ( of the sensors than the presence of security features. This thesis, therefore, focuses on tackling denial of sleep attacks from two perspectives A security perspective and an energy efficiency perspective. The security perspective involves evaluating and ranking a number of security based techniques to curbing denial of sleep attacks. The energy efficiency perspective, on the other hand, involves exploring duty cycling and simulating three Media Access Control ( protocols Sensor MAC, Timeout MAC andTunableMAC under different network sizes and measuring different parameters such as the Received Signal Strength RSSI) and Link Quality Indicator ( Transmit power, throughput and energy efficiency Duty cycling happens to be one of the major techniques for conserving energy in wireless sensor networks and this research aims to answer questions with regards to the effect of duty cycles on the energy efficiency as well as the throughput of three duty cycle protocols Sensor MAC ( Timeout MAC ( and TunableMAC in addition to creating a novel MAC protocol that is also more resilient to denial of sleep a ttacks than existing protocols. The main contributions to knowledge from this thesis are the developed framework used for evaluation of existing denial of sleep attack solutions and the algorithms which fuel the other contribution to knowledge a newly developed protocol tested on the Castalia Simulator on the OMNET++ platform. The new protocol has been compared with existing protocols and has been found to have significant improvement in energy efficiency and also better resilience to denial of sleep at tacks Part of this research has been published Two conference publications in IEEE Explore and one workshop paper

From MANET to people-centric networking: Milestones and open research challenges

In this paper, we discuss the state of the art of (mobile) multi-hop ad hoc networking with the aim to present the current status of the research activities and identify the consolidated research areas, with limited research opportunities, and the hot and emerging research areas for which further research is required. We start by briefly discussing the MANET paradigm, and why the research on MANET protocols is now a cold research topic. Then we analyze the active research areas. Specifically, after discussing the wireless-network technologies, we analyze four successful ad hoc networking paradigms, mesh networks, opportunistic networks, vehicular networks, and sensor networks that emerged from the MANET world. We also present an emerging research direction in the multi-hop ad hoc networking field: people centric networking, triggered by the increasing penetration of the smartphones in everyday life, which is generating a people-centric revolution in computing and communications

Internet of Things-based Traffic Management System for Maseru, Lesotho.

Published ThesisThe number of vehicles in Maseru has been steadily increasing, leading to heightened intensity of congestion and traffic occurrences. This is further exacerbated by ineffective solutions that are currently in place as well as the absence of tools that facilitate dispersal of information to motorists. Traffic lights have been put in place to manage flow of traffic but are becoming increasingly inefficient due to their design. The preset timing cycles between green, amber and red disregarding prevailing conditions leads, inter alia, to increased wait times, use of additional fuel and air pollution. In addition, lack of equipment that is able to provide motorists with information about prevailing road conditions further increases the possibility of one being stuck in traffic. To make traffic management more efficient at signaled junctions, the implementation of the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm is used to create intelligent traffic management systems such as Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) and fuzzy algorithms to intelligently decide the phases of traffic lights. Road density and vehicles’ speeds are collected from the road infrastructure using cameras and are passed to a fuzzy algorithm to determine how congested a road is. Dependent on these parameters, the algorithm will also determine which roads should be given highest priority while maintaining a degree of fairness, thus optimizing traffic flow. In addition, the ubiquitous provision of road condition information to motorists in various formats such as text and audio is also used. This feature allows for the acquisition of the latest road status, thus making it possible to find alternative routes. The unique feature in this project is the ability to collect road parameters from the road infrastructure itself, using WSN as well as crowd source data from road users using mobile devices. A study conducted in this research revealed a relationship between the number of cars on a road and concentration of Carbon Dioxide (CO2); the results showed that as the number of cars increases, so does the measure of CO2. Questionnaire-based surveys showed that Maseru citizens have noted an increase in congestion which they attributed to the increase in number of vehicles on the road that is not met by the increase or improvement in road infrastructure. The respondents in this survey also noted limited mechanisms that provide them with road conditions and highlighted that such tools may alleviate congestion. The performance of intelligent traffic lights was conducted via simulations compared with fixed cycle traffic lights. From the simulations it was observed that IoT- based traffic management systems reduced the wait times of vehicles at signaled junctions which would also result in reduction of the pollutant CO2. It is envisaged that the future implementation will include the ability to manage a network of junctions and ability to predict abnormal traffic flows

Wireless ICT monitoring for hydroponic agriculture

It is becoming increasingly evident that agriculture is playing a pivotal role in the socio-economic development of South Africa. The agricultural sector is important because it contributes approximately 2% to the gross domestic product of the country. However, many factors impact on the sustainability of traditional agriculture in South Africa. Unpredictable climatic conditions, land degradation and a lack of information and awareness of innovative farming solutions are among the factors plaguing the South African agricultural landscape. Various farming techniques have been looked at in order to mitigate these challenges. Among these interventions are the introduction of organic agriculture, greenhouse agriculture and hydroponic agriculture, which is the focus area of this study. Hydroponic agriculture is a method of precision agriculture where plants are grown in a mineral nutrient solution instead labour- intensive activity that requires an incessant monitoring of the farm environment in order to ensure a successful harvest. Hydroponic agriculture, however, presents a number of challenges that can be mitigated by leveraging the recent mobile Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) breakthroughs. This dissertation reports on the development of a wireless ICT monitoring application for hydroponic agriculture: HydroWatcher mobile app. HydroWatcher is a complex system that is composed of several interlacing parts and this study will be focusing on the development of the mobile app, the front-end of the system. This focus is motivated by the fact that in such systems the front-end, being the part that the users interact with, is critical for the acceptance of the system. However, in order to design and develop any part of HydroWatcher, it is crucial to understand the context of hydroponic agriculture in South Africa. Therefore, complementary objectives of this study are to identify the critical factors that impact hydroponic agriculture as well as the challenges faced by hydroponic farmers in South Africa. Thus, it leads to the elicitation of the requirements for the design and development of HydroWatcher. This study followed a mixed methods approach, including interviews, observations, exploration of hydroponic farming, to collect the data, which will best enable the researcher to understand the activities relating to hydroponic agriculture. A qualitative content analysis was followed to analyse the data and to constitute the requirements for the system and later to assert their applicability to the mobile app. HydroWatcher proposes to couple recent advances in mobile technology development, like the Android platform, with the contemporary advances in electronics necessary for the creation of wireless sensor nodes, as well as Human Computer interaction guidelines tailored for developing countries, in order to boost the user experience

Machine Learning Based Fluid-Transportation Monitoring and Controlling

The discipline of fluid mechanics is developing quickly, propelled by previously unheard-of data volumes from experiments, field measurements, and expansive simulations at various spatiotemporal scales. The field of machine learning (ML) provides a plethora of methods for gleaning insights from data that can be used to inform our understanding of the fluid dynamics at play. As an added bonus, ML algorithms can be used to automate duties associated with flow control and optimization, while also enhancing domain expertise. This article provides a review of the background, current state, and potential future applications of ML in fluid mechanics. We provide an introduction to the most fundamental ML approaches and describe their applications to the study, modelling, optimization, and management of fluid flows. From the standpoint of scientific inquiry, which treats data as an integral aspect of modelling, experiments, and simulations, the benefits and drawbacks of these approaches are discussed. Since ML provides a robust information-processing framework, it can supplement and potentially revolutionize conventional approaches to fluid mechanics study and industrial applications. &nbsp

A Novel Cryptography-Based Multipath Routing Protocol for Wireless Communications

Communication in a heterogeneous, dynamic, low-power, and lossy network is dependable and seamless thanks to Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANETs). Low power and Lossy Networks (LLN) Routing Protocol (RPL) has been designed to make MANET routing more efficient. For different types of traffic, RPL routing can experience problems with packet transmission rates and latency. RPL is an optimal routing protocol for low power lossy networks (LLN) having the capacity to establish a path between resource constraints nodes by using standard objective functions: OF0 and MRHOF. The standard objective functions lead to a decrease in the network lifetime due to increasing the computations for establishing routing between nodes in the heterogeneous network (LLN) due to poor decision problems. Currently, conventional Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET) is subjected to different security issues. Weathering those storms would help if you struck a good speed-memory-storage equilibrium. This article presents a security algorithm for MANET networks that employ the Rapid Packet Loss (RPL) routing protocol. The constructed network uses optimization-based deep learning reinforcement learning for MANET route creation. An improved network security algorithm is applied after a route has been set up using (ClonQlearn). The suggested method relies on a lightweight encryption scheme that can be used for both encryption and decryption. The suggested security method uses Elliptic-curve cryptography (ClonQlearn+ECC) for a random key generation based on reinforcement learning (ClonQlearn). The simulation study showed that the proposed ClonQlearn+ECC method improved network performance over the status quo. Secure data transmission is demonstrated by the proposed ClonQlearn + ECC, which also improves network speed. The proposed ClonQlearn + ECC increased network efficiency by 8-10% in terms of packet delivery ratio, 7-13% in terms of throughput, 5-10% in terms of end-to-end delay, and 3-7% in terms of power usage variation

Magneto-inductive wireless underground sensor networks: novel longevity model, communication concepts and workarounds to key theoretical issues using analogical thinking

This research has attempted to devise novel workarounds to key theoretical issues in magneto-inductive wireless underground sensor networks (WUSNs), founded on analogical thinking (Gassmann & Zeschky 2008). The problem statement for this research can be summarized as follows. There has been a substantial output of research publications in the past 5 years, devoted to theoretically analysing and resolving the issues pertaining to deployment of MI based WUSNs. However, no alternate solution approaches to such theoretical analyses have been considered. The goal of this research was to explore such alternate solution approaches. This research has used the principle of analogical thinking in devising such alternate solution approaches. This research has made several key contributions to the existing body of work. First, this research is the first of its kind to demonstrate by means of review of state-of-the-art research on MI based WUSNs, the largely theoretical genus of the research to the exclusion of alternate solution approaches to circumvent key theoretical issues. Second, this research is the first of its kind to introduce the notion of analogical thinking as a solution approach in finding viable workarounds to theoretical impediments in MI based WUSNs, and validate such solution approach by means of simulations. Third, this research is the first of its kind to explore novel communication concepts in the realm of MI based WUSNs, based on analogical thinking. Fourth, this research is the first of its kind to explore a novel longevity model in the realm of MI based WUSNs, based on analogical thinking. Fifth, this research is also the first to extend the notion of analogical thinking to futuristic directions in MI based WUSNs research, by means of providing possible indicators drawn from various other areas of contemporary research. In essence, the author believes that the findings of this research mark a paradigm shift in the research on MI based WUSNs