Internet of Things-aided Smart Grid: Technologies, Architectures, Applications, Prototypes, and Future Research Directions

Traditional power grids are being transformed into Smart Grids (SGs) to address the issues in existing power system due to uni-directional information flow, energy wastage, growing energy demand, reliability and security. SGs offer bi-directional energy flow between service providers and consumers, involving power generation, transmission, distribution and utilization systems. SGs employ various devices for the monitoring, analysis and control of the grid, deployed at power plants, distribution centers and in consumers' premises in a very large number. Hence, an SG requires connectivity, automation and the tracking of such devices. This is achieved with the help of Internet of Things (IoT). IoT helps SG systems to support various network functions throughout the generation, transmission, distribution and consumption of energy by incorporating IoT devices (such as sensors, actuators and smart meters), as well as by providing the connectivity, automation and tracking for such devices. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey on IoT-aided SG systems, which includes the existing architectures, applications and prototypes of IoT-aided SG systems. This survey also highlights the open issues, challenges and future research directions for IoT-aided SG systems

Understanding the limits of LoRaWAN

The quick proliferation of LPWAN networks, being LoRaWAN one of the most adopted, raised the interest of the industry, network operators and facilitated the development of novel services based on large scale and simple network structures. LoRaWAN brings the desired ubiquitous connectivity to enable most of the outdoor IoT applications and its growth and quick adoption are real proofs of that. Yet the technology has some limitations that need to be understood in order to avoid over-use of the technology. In this article we aim to provide an impartial overview of what are the limitations of such technology, and in a comprehensive manner bring use case examples to show where the limits are

A Survey on Long-Range Wide-Area Network Technology Optimizations

Long-Range Wide-Area Network (LoRaWAN) enables flexible long-range service communications with low power consumption which is suitable for many IoT applications. The densification of LoRaWAN, which is needed to meet a wide range of IoT networking requirements, poses further challenges. For instance, the deployment of gateways and IoT devices are widely deployed in urban areas, which leads to interference caused by concurrent transmissions on the same channel. In this context, it is crucial to understand aspects such as the coexistence of IoT devices and applications, resource allocation, Media Access Control (MAC) layer, network planning, and mobility support, that directly affect LoRaWAN’s performance.We present a systematic review of state-of-the-art works for LoRaWAN optimization solutions for IoT networking operations. We focus on five aspects that directly affect the performance of LoRaWAN. These specific aspects are directly associated with the challenges of densification of LoRaWAN. Based on the literature analysis, we present a taxonomy covering five aspects related to LoRaWAN optimizations for efficient IoT networks. Finally, we identify key research challenges and open issues in LoRaWAN optimizations for IoT networking operations that must be further studied in the future

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This article presents a novel centrality-driven gateway designation framework for the improved real-time performance of low-power wireless sensor networks (WSNs) at system design time. We target time-synchronized channel hopping (TSCH) WSNs with centralized network management and multiple gateways with the objective of enhancing traffic schedulability by design. To this aim, we propose a novel network centrality metric termed minimal-overlap centrality that characterizes the overall number of path overlaps between all the active flows in the network when a given node is selected as gateway. The metric is used as a gateway designation criterion to elect as a gateway the node leading to the minimal number of overlaps. The method is then extended to multiple gateways with the aid of the unsupervised learning method of spectral clustering. Concretely, after a given number of clusters are identified, we use the new metric at each cluster to designate as cluster gateway the node with the least overall number of overlaps. Extensive simulations with random topologies under centralized earliest-deadline-first (EDF) scheduling and shortest-path routing suggest our approach is dominant over traditional centrality metrics from social network analysis, namely, eigenvector, closeness, betweenness, and degree. Notably, our approach reduces by up to 40% the worst-case end-to-end deadline misses achieved by classical centrality-driven gateway designation methods.This work was partially supported by National Funds through FCT/MCTES (Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology), within the CISTER Research Unit (UIDB/04234/2020); by the Operational Competitiveness Programme and Internationalization (COMPETE 2020) under the PT2020 Agreement, through the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF); also by FCT and the ESF (European Social Fund) through the Regional Operational Programme (ROP) Norte 2020, under PhD grant 2020.06685.BD.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

IETF standardization in the field of the Internet of Things (IoT): a survey

Smart embedded objects will become an important part of what is called the Internet of Things. However, the integration of embedded devices into the Internet introduces several challenges, since many of the existing Internet technologies and protocols were not designed for this class of devices. In the past few years, there have been many efforts to enable the extension of Internet technologies to constrained devices. Initially, this resulted in proprietary protocols and architectures. Later, the integration of constrained devices into the Internet was embraced by IETF, moving towards standardized IP-based protocols. In this paper, we will briefly review the history of integrating constrained devices into the Internet, followed by an extensive overview of IETF standardization work in the 6LoWPAN, ROLL and CoRE working groups. This is complemented with a broad overview of related research results that illustrate how this work can be extended or used to tackle other problems and with a discussion on open issues and challenges. As such the aim of this paper is twofold: apart from giving readers solid insights in IETF standardization work on the Internet of Things, it also aims to encourage readers to further explore the world of Internet-connected objects, pointing to future research opportunities

SymbioCity: Smart Cities for Smarter Networks

The "Smart City" (SC) concept revolves around the idea of embodying cutting-edge ICT solutions in the very fabric of future cities, in order to offer new and better services to citizens while lowering the city management costs, both in monetary, social, and environmental terms. In this framework, communication technologies are perceived as subservient to the SC services, providing the means to collect and process the data needed to make the services function. In this paper, we propose a new vision in which technology and SC services are designed to take advantage of each other in a symbiotic manner. According to this new paradigm, which we call "SymbioCity", SC services can indeed be exploited to improve the performance of the same communication systems that provide them with data. Suggestive examples of this symbiotic ecosystem are discussed in the paper. The dissertation is then substantiated in a proof-of-concept case study, where we show how the traffic monitoring service provided by the London Smart City initiative can be used to predict the density of users in a certain zone and optimize the cellular service in that area.Comment: 14 pages, submitted for publication to ETT Transactions on Emerging Telecommunications Technologie