Smart Vehicular Traffic Management System using RFID Technology

Public places are often characterized with incessant traffic congestion, especially during special occasions and events, as large number of automobiles attempt to use the same parking lot concurrently. This usually result in confusion and dispute, auto crashes, waste of time and resources, and release of more carbon into the ecosystem. Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology offers effective solution for distant object identification without requiring a line of sight. In this paper, the authors developed an intelligent, cost-effective, and eco-friendly park management system for scalable traffic control using RFID and Solar photovoltaic (SPV) technologies. Pre-registered and visiting vehicles are assigned tags to access designated parking lots. However, large-scale implementation of the technology for intelligent park management requires a stable power supply with no threat to our ecosystem. SPV-powered UHF RFID readers transmit vehicle information via wireless data links to a host system application at the SPV-powered central database management system for further processing. This system will ensure effective traffic control during peak periods in order to avoid crashes, save time and resources, and as well save our plane

Radio frequency identification (RFID) in pervasive healthcare

Active and passive RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) technology are available and licensed for the use in hospitals, and can be used to establish highly reliable pervasive environments within healthcare facilities. They should not be understood as competing technologies and complement each other when intelligently integrated in compact frameworks. This paper describes the state-of-the-art of RFID technology and the current use in the healthcare industry, and points out recent developments and future options

Localização segura de objectos autenticados por RFID

Trabalho apresentado no âmbito do Mestrado em Engenharia Informática, como requisito parcial para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia InformáticaNão obstante a utilização de tecnologia RFID estar hoje vulgarizada, a sua utilização em novas aplicações com requisitos de fiabilidade, ubiquidade, escala e segurança apresenta alguns problemas e limitações. Na área da segurança de sistemas com tecnologia RFID, são importantes os aspectos associados à manutenção de propriedades de confidencialidade, autenticidade e privacidade dos alvos identificados, bem como garantias de operação confiável por parte de estações de leitura. São aspectos muito relevantes na monitorização ou localização de pessoas ou bens, em sistemas de monitorização remota, ubíqua e permeada em ambientes de larga escala, não supervisionados ou não coordenados por uma única entidade. Por outro lado, a convergência entre a tecnologia RFID e as tecnologias da área das redes PAN sem fios (Wireless Personal Area Networks e redes 802.15.4), bem como com ambientes de redes de telefonia móvel, mostra-se uma direcção prometedora. Esta convergência apresenta desafios acrescidos à concretização de arquitecturas de segurança para monitorização e localização de alvos móveis identificados por RFID. A presente dissertação visa propor, implementar e testar experimentalmente uma arquitectura de segurança para monitorização e localização remota de objectos autenticados por RFID. A arquitectura objectiva o suporte de ambientes de monitorização permeados e de grande escala, para localização ubíqua de alvos móveis. O sistema proposto conjuga protocolos de autenticação mútua entre dispositivos RFID, estações locais de monitorização e estações centrais de rastreio, salvaguardando condições de confidencialidade e de privacidade dos alvos. A proposta considera ainda propriedades de fiabilidade e tolerância a intrusões como contramedidas complementares face a falhas de operação de estações locais de localização ou face a operação incorrecta das mesmas, resultantes de ataques por intrusão. Para o efeito usam-se mecanismos de processamento e agregação segura dos dados de localização, obtidos a partir de certificados de localização emitidos por estações independentes e enviados por múltiplas rotas de encaminhamento até às estações centrais de rastreio

Technologies for Development: From Innovation to Social Impact

Development Engineering; Technologies for Development; Innovation for Humanitarian Action; Emerging Countries; Developing Countries; Tech4De

Enabling Censorship Tolerant Networking

Billions of people in the world live under heavy information censorship. We propose a new class of delay tolerant network (DTN), known as a censorship tolerant network (CTN), to counter the growing practice of Internet-based censorship. CTNs should provide strict guarantees on the privacy of both information shared within the network and the identities of network participants. CTN software needs to be publicly available as open source software and run on personal mobile devices with real-world computational, storage, and energy constraints. We show that these simple assumptions and system constraints have a non-obvious impact on the design and implementation of CTNs, and serve to differentiate our system design from previous work. We design data routing within a CTN using a new paradigm: one where nodes operate selfishly to maximize their own utility, make decisions based only on their own observations, and only communicate with nodes they trust. We introduce the Laissez-faire framework, an incentivized approach to CTN routing. Laissez-faire does not mandate any specific routing protocol, but requires that each node implement tit-for-tat by keeping track of the data exchanged with other trusted nodes. We propose several strategies for valuing and retrieving content within a CTN. We build a prototype BlackBerry implementation and conduct both controlled lab and field trials, and show how each strategy adapts to different network conditions. We further demonstrate that, unlike existing approaches to routing, Laissez-faire prevents free-riding. We build an efficient and reliable data transport protocol on top of the Short Message Service (SMS) to serve a control channel for the CTN. We conduct a series of experiments to characterise SMS behaviour under bursty, unconventional workloads. This study examines how variables such as the transmission order, delay between transmissions, the network interface used, and the time-of-day affect the service. We present the design and implementation of our transport protocol. We show that by adapting to the unique channel conditions of SMS we can reduce message overheads by as much as 50\% and increase data throughput by as much as 545% over the approach used by existing applications. A CTN's dependency on opportunistic communication imposes a significant burden on smartphone energy resources. We conduct a large-scale user study to measure the energy consumption characteristics of 20100 smartphone users. Our dataset is two orders of magnitude larger than any previous work. We use this dataset to build the Energy Emulation Toolkit (EET) that allows developers to evaluate the energy consumption requirements of their applications against real users' energy traces. The EET computes the successful execution rate of energy-intensive applications across all users, specific devices, and specific smartphone user-types. We also consider active adaptation to energy constraints. By classifying smartphone users based on their charging characteristics we demonstrate that energy level can be predicted within 72% accuracy a full day in advance, and through an Energy Management Oracle energy intensive applications, such as CTNs, can adapt their execution to maintain the operation of the host device