Collaboratively assessing urban alerts in ad hoc participatory sensing

Ad hoc architectures have emerged as a valuable alternative to centralized participatory sensing systems due to their infrastructureless nature, which ensures good availability, easy maintenance and direct user communication. As a result, they need to incorporate content-aware assessment mechanisms to deal with a common problem in participatory sensing: information assessment. Easy contribution encourages users participation and improves the sensing task but may result in large amounts of data, which may not be valid or relevant. Currently, prioritization is the only totally ad hoc scheme to assess user-generated alerts. This strategy prevents duplicates from congesting the network. However, it does not include the assessment of every generated alert and does not deal with low-quality or irrelevant alerts. In order to ensure users receive only interesting alerts and the network is not compromised, we propose two collaborative alert assessment mechanisms that, while keeping the network flat, provide an effective message filter. Both of them rely on opportunistic collaboration with nearby peers. By simulating their behavior in a real urban area, we have proved them able to decrease network load while maintaining alert delivery ratio

Internet of Things for enabling smart environments: a technology-centric perspective

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a computing paradigm whereby everyday life objects are augmented with computational and wireless communication capabilities, typically through the incorporation of resource-constrained devices including sensors and actuators, which enable their connection to the Internet. The IoT is seen as the key ingredient for the development of smart environments. Nevertheless, the current IoT ecosystem offers many alternative communication solutions with diverse performance characteristics. This situation presents a major challenge to identifying the most suitable IoT communication solution(s) for a particular smart environment. In this paper we consider the distinct requirements of key smart environments, namely the smart home, smart health, smart cities and smart factories, and relate them to current IoT communication solutions. Specifically, we describe the core characteristics of these smart environments and then proceed to provide a comprehensive survey of relevant IoT communication technologies and architectures. We conclude with our reflections on the crucial features of IoT solutions in this setting and a discussion of challenges that remain open for research