Towards distributed architecture for collaborative cloud services in community networks

Internet and communication technologies have lowered the costs for communities to collaborate, leading to new services like user-generated content and social computing, and through collaboration, collectively built infrastructures like community networks have also emerged. Community networks get formed when individuals and local organisations from a geographic area team up to create and run a community-owned IP network to satisfy the community’s demand for ICT, such as facilitating Internet access and providing services of local interest. The consolidation of today’s cloud technologies offers now the possibility of collectively built community clouds, building upon user-generated content and user-provided networks towards an ecosystem of cloud services. To address the limitation and enhance utility of community networks, we propose a collaborative distributed architecture for building a community cloud system that employs resources contributed by the members of the community network for provisioning infrastructure and software services. Such architecture needs to be tailored to the specific social, economic and technical characteristics of the community networks for community clouds to be successful and sustainable. By real deployments of clouds in community networks and evaluation of application performance, we show that community clouds are feasible. Our result may encourage collaborative innovative cloud-based services made possible with the resources of a community.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author’s final draft

How might technology rise to the challenge of data sharing in agri-food?

Acknowledgement This work was supported by an award made by the UKRI/EPSRC funded Internet of Food Things Network+ grant EP/R045127/1. We would also like to thank Mr Steve Brewer and Professor Simon Pearson for supporting the work presented in this paper.Peer reviewedPostprin

Enabling technologies and sustainable smart cities

The technological interventions in everyday processes has led to the rise of Smart ecosystems where all aspects of everyday life like governance, transportation, agriculture, logistics, maintenance, education and healthcare are automated in some way or the other and can be controlled, managed and accessed remotely with the help of smart devices. This has led to the concept of Smart cities where Information Communication and Technology (ICT) is merged with the existing traditional infrastructure of a city which is then coordinated and managed using digital technology. This idea of smart cities is slowly but surely coming into reality as many countries around the globe are adopting this idea and coming up with their own model of smart cities. At the core of smart city lies the sensors and actuators embedded in the smart devices that sense the environment for facilitating effective decision making. The microcontrollers available in these devices are programmed to take decisions automatically based on the information received from the sensors. This involves integration of several information and communication technologies like artificial intelligence, protocols, Internet of things (IoT), wireless sensor network (WSN) etc. This paper discusses and extensively reviews the role of enabling technologies in smart cities. The paper further highlights the challenges and limitations in the development of smart cities along with the mitigation strategies. Specifically, three categories of challenges are identified namely technical, socio-economic and environmental giving specifics of each category. Finally, some of the best practices for attaining sustainable smart cities are provided.5311-8814-F0ED | Sara Maria da Cruz Maia de Oliveira PaivaN/