Using Delay Tolerant Networks as a Backbone for Low-cost Smart Cities

Rapid urbanization burdens city infrastructure and creates the need for local governments to maximize the usage of resources to serve its citizens. Smart city projects aim to alleviate the urbanization problem by deploying a vast amount of Internet-of-things (IoT) devices to monitor and manage environmental conditions and infrastructure. However, smart city projects can be extremely expensive to deploy and manage. A significant portion of the expense is a result of providing Internet connectivity via 5G or WiFi to IoT devices. This paper proposes the use of delay tolerant networks (DTNs) as a backbone for smart city communication; enabling developing communities to become smart cities at a fraction of the cost. A model is introduced to aid policy makers in designing and evaluating the expected performance of such networks. Preliminary results are presented based on a public transit network data-set from Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Finally, innovative ways of improving network performance in a low-cost smart city is discussed.Comment: 3 pages, accepted to IEEE SmartComp 201

The Road Ahead for Networking: A Survey on ICN-IP Coexistence Solutions

In recent years, the current Internet has experienced an unexpected paradigm shift in the usage model, which has pushed researchers towards the design of the Information-Centric Networking (ICN) paradigm as a possible replacement of the existing architecture. Even though both Academia and Industry have investigated the feasibility and effectiveness of ICN, achieving the complete replacement of the Internet Protocol (IP) is a challenging task. Some research groups have already addressed the coexistence by designing their own architectures, but none of those is the final solution to move towards the future Internet considering the unaltered state of the networking. To design such architecture, the research community needs now a comprehensive overview of the existing solutions that have so far addressed the coexistence. The purpose of this paper is to reach this goal by providing the first comprehensive survey and classification of the coexistence architectures according to their features (i.e., deployment approach, deployment scenarios, addressed coexistence requirements and architecture or technology used) and evaluation parameters (i.e., challenges emerging during the deployment and the runtime behaviour of an architecture). We believe that this paper will finally fill the gap required for moving towards the design of the final coexistence architecture.Comment: 23 pages, 16 figures, 3 table

Wireless industrial monitoring and control networks: the journey so far and the road ahead

While traditional wired communication technologies have played a crucial role in industrial monitoring and control networks over the past few decades, they are increasingly proving to be inadequate to meet the highly dynamic and stringent demands of today’s industrial applications, primarily due to the very rigid nature of wired infrastructures. Wireless technology, however, through its increased pervasiveness, has the potential to revolutionize the industry, not only by mitigating the problems faced by wired solutions, but also by introducing a completely new class of applications. While present day wireless technologies made some preliminary inroads in the monitoring domain, they still have severe limitations especially when real-time, reliable distributed control operations are concerned. This article provides the reader with an overview of existing wireless technologies commonly used in the monitoring and control industry. It highlights the pros and cons of each technology and assesses the degree to which each technology is able to meet the stringent demands of industrial monitoring and control networks. Additionally, it summarizes mechanisms proposed by academia, especially serving critical applications by addressing the real-time and reliability requirements of industrial process automation. The article also describes certain key research problems from the physical layer communication for sensor networks and the wireless networking perspective that have yet to be addressed to allow the successful use of wireless technologies in industrial monitoring and control networks

Content storage and retrieval mechanisms for vehicular delay-tolerant networks

Vehicular delay-tolerant networks (VDTNs) were proposed as a novel disruptive network concept based on the delay tolerant networking (DTN) paradigm. VDTN architecture uses vehicles to relay messages, enabling network connectivity in challenging scenarios. Due to intermittent connectivity, network nodes carry messages in their buffers, relaying them only when a proper contact opportunity occurs. Thus, the storage capacity and message retrieving of intermediate nodes directly affects the network performance. Therefore, efficient and robust caching and forwarding mechanisms are needed. This dissertation proposes a content storage and retrieval (CSR) solution for VDTN networks. This solution consists on storage and retrieval control labels, attached to every data bundle of aggregated network traffic. These labels define cacheable contents, and apply cachecontrol and forwarding restrictions on data bundles. The presented mechanisms gathered several contributions from cache based technologies such as Web cache schemes, ad-hoc and DTN networks. This solution is fully automated, providing a fast, safe, and reliable data transfer and storage management, while improves the applicability and performance of VDTN networks significantly. This work presents the performance evaluation and validation of CSR mechanisms through a VDTN testbed. Furthermore it presents several network performance evaluations and results using the well-known DTN routing protocols, Epidemic and Spray and Wait (including its binary variant). The comparison of the network behavior and performance on both protocols, with and without CSR mechanisms, proves that CSR mechanisms improve significantly the overall network performance

Remote Collaboration on Task Scheduling for Humans at Mars

As humans venture farther from Earth for longer durations, it will become essential for those on the journey to have significant control over the scheduling of their own activities as well as the activities of their companion systems and robots. However, the crew will not do all the scheduling; timelines will be the result of collaboration with ground personnel. Emerging technologies such as in-space message buses, delay-tolerant networks, and in-space internet will be the carriers on which the collaboration rides. Advances in scheduling technology, in the areas of task modeling, scheduling engines, and user interfaces will allow the crew to become virtual scheduling experts. New concepts of operations for producing the timeline will allow the crew and the ground support to collaborate while providing safeguards to ensure that the mission will be effectively accomplished without endangering the systems or personnel

A critical analysis of research potential, challenges and future directives in industrial wireless sensor networks

In recent years, Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks (IWSNs) have emerged as an important research theme with applications spanning a wide range of industries including automation, monitoring, process control, feedback systems and automotive. Wide scope of IWSNs applications ranging from small production units, large oil and gas industries to nuclear fission control, enables a fast-paced research in this field. Though IWSNs offer advantages of low cost, flexibility, scalability, self-healing, easy deployment and reformation, yet they pose certain limitations on available potential and introduce challenges on multiple fronts due to their susceptibility to highly complex and uncertain industrial environments. In this paper a detailed discussion on design objectives, challenges and solutions, for IWSNs, are presented. A careful evaluation of industrial systems, deadlines and possible hazards in industrial atmosphere are discussed. The paper also presents a thorough review of the existing standards and industrial protocols and gives a critical evaluation of potential of these standards and protocols along with a detailed discussion on available hardware platforms, specific industrial energy harvesting techniques and their capabilities. The paper lists main service providers for IWSNs solutions and gives insight of future trends and research gaps in the field of IWSNs