Wireless sensors and IoT platform for intelligent HVAC control

Energy consumption of buildings (residential and non-residential) represents approximately 40% of total world electricity consumption, with half of this energy consumed by HVAC systems. Model-Based Predictive Control (MBPC) is perhaps the technique most often proposed for HVAC control, since it offers an enormous potential for energy savings. Despite the large number of papers on this topic during the last few years, there are only a few reported applications of the use of MBPC for existing buildings, under normal occupancy conditions and, to the best of our knowledge, no commercial solution yet. A marketable solution has been recently presented by the authors, coined the IMBPC HVAC system. This paper describes the design, prototyping and validation of two components of this integrated system, the Self-Powered Wireless Sensors and the IOT platform developed. Results for the use of IMBPC in a real building under normal occupation demonstrate savings in the electricity bill while maintaining thermal comfort during the whole occupation schedule.QREN SIDT [38798]; Portuguese Foundation for Science & Technology, through IDMEC, under LAETA [ID/EMS/50022/2013

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

Exploitation of Transparent Conductive Oxides in the Implementation of a Window-Integrated Wireless Sensor Node

Exploitation of transparent conductive oxides (TCO) to implement an energy-autonomous sensor node for a wireless sensor network (WSN) is studied and a practical solution presented. In the practical implementations, flexible and rigid substrates that is polyimide and glass, are coated with TCO, namely aluminum doped zinc oxide (AZO). AZO-coated flexible substrates are used to form thermoelectric generators (TEG) that produce electricity for the sensor electronics of the node from thermal gradients on a window. As the second solution to utilize AZO, its conductive properties are exploited to implement transparent antennas for the sensor node. Antennas for a UHF RFID transponder and the Bluetooth radio of the node are implemented. A prototype of a flexible transparent TEG, with the area of 67 cm2 when folded, was measured to produce power of 1.6 uW with a temperature difference of 43 K. A radiation efficiency of -9.1 dB was measured for the transparent RFID antenna prototype with the center frequency of 900 MHz. Radiation efficiencies between -3.8 dB and -0.4 dB, depending on the substrate, were obtained for the 2.45 GHz Bluetooth antenna.Comment: 10 pages, 14 figures, last author version accepted for publication in IEEE Sensors Journa

ITERL: A Wireless Adaptive System for Efficient Road Lighting

This work presents the development and construction of an adaptive street lighting system that improves safety at intersections, which is the result of applying low-power Internet of Things (IoT) techniques to intelligent transportation systems. A set of wireless sensor nodes using the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 802.15.4 standard with additional internet protocol (IP) connectivity measures both ambient conditions and vehicle transit. These measurements are sent to a coordinator node that collects and passes them to a local controller, which then makes decisions leading to the streetlight being turned on and its illumination level controlled. Streetlights are autonomous, powered by photovoltaic energy, and wirelessly connected, achieving a high degree of energy efficiency. Relevant data are also sent to the highway conservation center, allowing it to maintain up-to-date information for the system, enabling preventive maintenance.Consejería de Fomento y Vivienda Junta de Andalucía G-GI3002 / IDIOFondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional G-GI3002 / IDI

Implementation of an experimental platform for the social internet of things

The convergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) technologies with the social networking concepts has led to a new paradigm called the Social Internet of Things (SIoT), where the objects mimic the human behavior and create their own relationships based on the rules set by their owner. This is aimed at simplifying the complexity in handling the communications between billions of objects to the benefits of the humans. Whereas several IoT platforms are already available, the SIoT paradigm has represented only a field for pure research and simulations, until now. The aim of this paper is to present our implementation of a SIoT platform. We begin by analyzing the major IoT implementations, pointing out their common characteristics that could be re-used for our goal. We then discuss the major extensions we had to introduce on the existing platforms to introduce the functionalities of the SIoT. We also present the major functionalities of the proposed system: how to register a new social object to the platform, how the system manages the creation of new relationships, and how the devices create groups of members with similar characteristics. We conclude with the description of possible simple application scenarios

On the energy savings achieved through an internet of things enabled smart city trial

Improving efficiency of city services and facilitating a more sustainable development of cities are the main drivers of the smart city concept. This paper describes a field trial that instantiates a novel architecture exploiting major concepts from the Future Internet (FI) paradigm. The trial has been executed in one of the parks of the city of Santander providing an autonomous public street lighting adaptation service. The trial takes advantage of both the critical communications infrastructures already in place and owned by the utility as well as of the Internet of Things infrastructure belonging to the city municipality to accelerate efficient provision of existing and new city services. The main contribution presented in the paper is, indeed, the assessment of the energy savings achieved during the field trials and the study of key performance indicators analyzed during the trial. The paper highlights how FI technologies create the necessary glue and logic that allows the integration of current vertical and isolated city services into a holistic solution. , which enables a huge forward leap for the efficiency and sustainability of our cities. Finally, the trial is a showcase on how added-value services can be seamlessly created on top of the proposed architecture