The ICT Health Checkup Tool: Assessing Connectivity of the National Agriculture Research System (NARS)

In the global knowledge economy, connectivity is the oxygen for any research and development institutions such as those within the National Agriculture Research System (NARS). The need to empower the NARS to assume research and development leadership requires superior information communication technology (ICT) infrastructure. Specifically, the manuscript addresses two new research questions: 1) what is the state, both quantitatively and qualitatively, of ICT at a NARS institution, and 2) what should a tool look like whereby NARS network managers can on their own benchmark and monitor the state of their ICT systems. The research team employs the case study method to measure the state of ICT connectivity for the Savanna Agricultural Research Institute (SARI), a leading station within the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research of Ghana. Additionally, the research team develops, describes, and applies a new assessment tool, the ICT Health Checkup, which NARS and higher education institutions can utilize. This research fills a void in the ICT for development literature, which to date provides no guidance for research institutions in the developing world as to how they are to access the connectivity they need to be able to provide scientific leadership at the national, regional, and international level. The  results quantify the gap between the needs of the researchers, support staff, and administration and the available service. Additionally, the ICT Health Checkup Tool not only shows NARS leadership their connectivity gaps, but also provides specific and measurable  benchmarks of the physical infrastructure, intranet services, and capacity of the ICT staff. Finally, the case study provides important insights as to the way forward. The case motivates the underlying economies of scale associated with ICT systems, and the need for NARS to leave the current model of individual contracts with telecom providers. Collaborating with like institutions aggregates demand, which in turn lowers the costs per unit of bandwidth. In this vein, the case study shows the value of the relatively new National Research and Education (NREN) model to bring much needed connectivity to the region’s agricultural researchers. Key words: Information and Communication Technology, connectivity, Ghana, National Research and Education Networ

Software Defined Networks based Smart Grid Communication: A Comprehensive Survey

The current power grid is no longer a feasible solution due to ever-increasing user demand of electricity, old infrastructure, and reliability issues and thus require transformation to a better grid a.k.a., smart grid (SG). The key features that distinguish SG from the conventional electrical power grid are its capability to perform two-way communication, demand side management, and real time pricing. Despite all these advantages that SG will bring, there are certain issues which are specific to SG communication system. For instance, network management of current SG systems is complex, time consuming, and done manually. Moreover, SG communication (SGC) system is built on different vendor specific devices and protocols. Therefore, the current SG systems are not protocol independent, thus leading to interoperability issue. Software defined network (SDN) has been proposed to monitor and manage the communication networks globally. This article serves as a comprehensive survey on SDN-based SGC. In this article, we first discuss taxonomy of advantages of SDNbased SGC.We then discuss SDN-based SGC architectures, along with case studies. Our article provides an in-depth discussion on routing schemes for SDN-based SGC. We also provide detailed survey of security and privacy schemes applied to SDN-based SGC. We furthermore present challenges, open issues, and future research directions related to SDN-based SGC.Comment: Accepte

Enabling Software-Defined Networking for Wireless Mesh Networks in Smart Environments

International audienceWireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) serve as a key enabling technology for various smart initiatives, such as Smart Power Grids, by virtue of providing a self-organized wireless communication superhighway that is capable of monitoring the health and performance of system assets as well as enabling efficient trouble shooting notifications. Despite this promise, the current routing protocols in WMNs are fairly limited, particularly in the context of smart initiatives. Additionally, managing and upgrading these protocols is a difficult and error-prone task since the configuration must be enforced individually at each router. Software-Defined Networking (SDN) shows promise in this regard since it enables creating a customizable and programmable network data plane. However, SDN research to date has focused predominantly on wired networks, e.g., in cloud computing, but seldom on wireless communications and specifically WMNs. This paper addresses the limitations in SDN for WMNs by allowing the refactoring of the wireless protocol stack so as to provide modular and flexible routing decisions as well as fine-grained flow control. To that end, we describe an intelligent network architecture comprising a three-stage routing approach suitable for WMNs in uses cases, such as Smart Grids, that provides an efficient and affordable coverage as well as scalable high bandwidth capacity. Experimental results evaluating our approach for various QoS metrics like latency and bandwidth utilization show that our solution is suitable for the requirements of mission-critical WMNs