MONICA in Hamburg: Towards Large-Scale IoT Deployments in a Smart City

Modern cities and metropolitan areas all over the world face new management challenges in the 21st century primarily due to increasing demands on living standards by the urban population. These challenges range from climate change, pollution, transportation, and citizen engagement, to urban planning, and security threats. The primary goal of a Smart City is to counteract these problems and mitigate their effects by means of modern ICT to improve urban administration and infrastructure. Key ideas are to utilise network communication to inter-connect public authorities; but also to deploy and integrate numerous sensors and actuators throughout the city infrastructure - which is also widely known as the Internet of Things (IoT). Thus, IoT technologies will be an integral part and key enabler to achieve many objectives of the Smart City vision. The contributions of this paper are as follows. We first examine a number of IoT platforms, technologies and network standards that can help to foster a Smart City environment. Second, we introduce the EU project MONICA which aims for demonstration of large-scale IoT deployments at public, inner-city events and give an overview on its IoT platform architecture. And third, we provide a case-study report on SmartCity activities by the City of Hamburg and provide insights on recent (on-going) field tests of a vertically integrated, end-to-end IoT sensor application.Comment: 6 page

Analysis of building energy upgrade technologies for implementing the dual energy efficiency and demand response scheme for non-residential buildings

The continuous growth of renewable energy and the transition to a more de-centralised electricity generation adds significant complexity to balance power supply and demand in the grid. These imbalances are partially compensated by demand response programs, which represent a new business opportunity in the building sector, especially for ESCOs. Including demand response to their traditional energy efficiency-based business model adds an additional revenue stream that could potentially shorten payback periods of energy renovation projects. This paper introduces this new dual-services business model, and evaluates the potential suitability of HVAC, generation and storage technologies to ensure proposed energy efficiency and flexibility goals.This paper is part of a project that has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 745594. This paper reflects only the author´s views and neither the Agency nor the Commission are responsible for any use that may be made of the information contained therei

Next Generation M2M Cellular Networks: Challenges and Practical Considerations

In this article, we present the major challenges of future machine-to-machine (M2M) cellular networks such as spectrum scarcity problem, support for low-power, low-cost, and numerous number of devices. As being an integral part of the future Internet-of-Things (IoT), the true vision of M2M communications cannot be reached with conventional solutions that are typically cost inefficient. Cognitive radio concept has emerged to significantly tackle the spectrum under-utilization or scarcity problem. Heterogeneous network model is another alternative to relax the number of covered users. To this extent, we present a complete fundamental understanding and engineering knowledge of cognitive radios, heterogeneous network model, and power and cost challenges in the context of future M2M cellular networks

A study of existing Ontologies in the IoT-domain

Several domains have adopted the increasing use of IoT-based devices to collect sensor data for generating abstractions and perceptions of the real world. This sensor data is multi-modal and heterogeneous in nature. This heterogeneity induces interoperability issues while developing cross-domain applications, thereby restricting the possibility of reusing sensor data to develop new applications. As a solution to this, semantic approaches have been proposed in the literature to tackle problems related to interoperability of sensor data. Several ontologies have been proposed to handle different aspects of IoT-based sensor data collection, ranging from discovering the IoT sensors for data collection to applying reasoning on the collected sensor data for drawing inferences. In this paper, we survey these existing semantic ontologies to provide an overview of the recent developments in this field. We highlight the fundamental ontological concepts (e.g., sensor-capabilities and context-awareness) required for an IoT-based application, and survey the existing ontologies which include these concepts. Based on our study, we also identify the shortcomings of currently available ontologies, which serves as a stepping stone to state the need for a common unified ontology for the IoT domain.Comment: Submitted to Elsevier JWS SI on Web semantics for the Internet/Web of Thing

Integration of Real-Intelligence in Energy Management Systems to Enable Holistic Demand Response Optimization in Buildings and Districts

Although multiple trials have been conducted demonstrating that demand side flexibility works and even though technology roll-out progresses significantly fast, the business application of residential and small tertiary demand response has been slow to develop. This paper introduces a holistic demand response optimization framework that enables significant energy costs reduction at the consumer side, while introducing buildings as a major contributor to energy networks' stability in response to network constraints and conditions. The backbone of the solution consists in a modular interoperability and data management framework that enables open standards-based communication along the demand response value chain. The solution is validated in four large-scale pilot sites, incorporating diverse building types, heterogeneous home, building and district energy systems and devices, a variety of energy carriers and spanning diverse climatic conditions, demographic and cultural characteristics.European Commission's H2020, 76861

A gap analysis of Internet-of-Things platforms

We are experiencing an abundance of Internet-of-Things (IoT) middleware solutions that provide connectivity for sensors and actuators to the Internet. To gain a widespread adoption, these middleware solutions, referred to as platforms, have to meet the expectations of different players in the IoT ecosystem, including device providers, application developers, and end-users, among others. In this article, we evaluate a representative sample of these platforms, both proprietary and open-source, on the basis of their ability to meet the expectations of different IoT users. The evaluation is thus more focused on how ready and usable these platforms are for IoT ecosystem players, rather than on the peculiarities of the underlying technological layers. The evaluation is carried out as a gap analysis of the current IoT landscape with respect to (i) the support for heterogeneous sensing and actuating technologies, (ii) the data ownership and its implications for security and privacy, (iii) data processing and data sharing capabilities, (iv) the support offered to application developers, (v) the completeness of an IoT ecosystem, and (vi) the availability of dedicated IoT marketplaces. The gap analysis aims to highlight the deficiencies of today's solutions to improve their integration to tomorrow's ecosystems. In order to strengthen the finding of our analysis, we conducted a survey among the partners of the Finnish IoT program, counting over 350 experts, to evaluate the most critical issues for the development of future IoT platforms. Based on the results of our analysis and our survey, we conclude this article with a list of recommendations for extending these IoT platforms in order to fill in the gaps.Comment: 15 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables, Accepted for publication in Computer Communications, special issue on the Internet of Things: Research challenges and solution

An ideal IoT solution for real-time web monitoring

For the internet of things (IoT) to fully emerge, it is necessary to design a suitable system architecture and specific protocols for this environment. The former to provide horizontal solutions, breaking away the current paradigm of silos solutions, and thus, allowing the creation of open and interoperable systems; while the latter will offer efficient and scalable communications. This paper presents the latest standards and ongoing efforts to develop specific protocols for IoT. Furthermore, this paper presents a new system, with the most recent standards for IoT. Its design, implementation and evaluation will be also described. The proposed system is based on the latest ETSI M2M specification (ETSI TC M2M in ETSI TS 103 093 V2.1.1.http://www.etsi.org/deliver/etsi_ts/103000_103099/103093/02.01.01_60/ts_103093v020101p.pdf, 2013b) and the MQTT protocol (IBM, Eurotech in MQTT V3.1 Protocol Specification pp 1-42, http://public.dhe.ibm.com/software/dw/webservices/ws-mqtt/MQTT_V3.1_Protocol_Specific. pdf, 2010). With this solution it is possible to show how we can create new applications to run over it and the importance of designing specifically tailored for IoT communication protocols in order to support real-time applications.- This project was funded by Fundo Europeu de Desenvolvimento Regional (FEDER), by Programa Operacional Factores de Competitividade (POFC) - COMPETE and by Fundacao para a Ciencia eTecnologia, on the Scope of projects: PEstC/EEI/UI0319/2015 and PEstC/EEI/UI0027/2015. This paper is a result of the project "SmartEGOV: Harnessing EGOV for Smart Governance (Foundations, methods, Tools) / NORTE-01-0145-FEDER-000037", supported by Norte Portugal Regional Operational Programme(NORTE2020), under the PORTUGAL 2020 Partnership Agreement, through the European Regional Development Fund (EFDR).info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Enabling IoT ecosystems through platform interoperability

Today, the Internet of Things (IoT) comprises vertically oriented platforms for things. Developers who want to use them need to negotiate access individually and adapt to the platform-specific API and information models. Having to perform these actions for each platform often outweighs the possible gains from adapting applications to multiple platforms. This fragmentation of the IoT and the missing interoperability result in high entry barriers for developers and prevent the emergence of broadly accepted IoT ecosystems. The BIG IoT (Bridging the Interoperability Gap of the IoT) project aims to ignite an IoT ecosystem as part of the European Platforms Initiative. As part of the project, researchers have devised an IoT ecosystem architecture. It employs five interoperability patterns that enable cross-platform interoperability and can help establish successful IoT ecosystems.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Fog computing : enabling the management and orchestration of smart city applications in 5G networks

Fog computing extends the cloud computing paradigm by placing resources close to the edges of the network to deal with the upcoming growth of connected devices. Smart city applications, such as health monitoring and predictive maintenance, will introduce a new set of stringent requirements, such as low latency, since resources can be requested on-demand simultaneously by multiple devices at different locations. It is then necessary to adapt existing network technologies to future needs and design new architectural concepts to help meet these strict requirements. This article proposes a fog computing framework enabling autonomous management and orchestration functionalities in 5G-enabled smart cities. Our approach follows the guidelines of the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) NFV MANO architecture extending it with additional software components. The contribution of our work is its fully-integrated fog node management system alongside the foreseen application layer Peer-to-Peer (P2P) fog protocol based on the Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) routing protocol for the exchange of application service provisioning information between fog nodes. Evaluations of an anomaly detection use case based on an air monitoring application are presented. Our results show that the proposed framework achieves a substantial reduction in network bandwidth usage and in latency when compared to centralized cloud solutions

A middleware for creating physical mashups of things

Indexación: Scopus.Nowadays, “things” deployed in cities are crucial to gather data to support decision making systems. Unfortunately, there is a low level of reuse of “things” between smart city applications of different organizations because “things” were unknown to developers or because it was harder to reuse them than use new ones due to technical details. In this ongoing work, we propose to convert “things” into active entities capable of discovering and organizing themselves driven by the applications goals’ satisfaction. Moreover, “things” are capable of collaborating between them in order to satisfy or maintain satisfied the published goals of applications. To validate the feasibility of our proposal, we are building mashThings, an Internet of Things (IoT) platform to build smart city applications as physical mashups, where the middleware layer is augmented by a multiagent layer of broker agents representing the available “things” in the city.http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1950/paper11.pd