1,021 research outputs found

    Goodbye, ALOHA!

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    ©2016 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.The vision of the Internet of Things (IoT) to interconnect and Internet-connect everyday people, objects, and machines poses new challenges in the design of wireless communication networks. The design of medium access control (MAC) protocols has been traditionally an intense area of research due to their high impact on the overall performance of wireless communications. The majority of research activities in this field deal with different variations of protocols somehow based on ALOHA, either with or without listen before talk, i.e., carrier sensing multiple access. These protocols operate well under low traffic loads and low number of simultaneous devices. However, they suffer from congestion as the traffic load and the number of devices increase. For this reason, unless revisited, the MAC layer can become a bottleneck for the success of the IoT. In this paper, we provide an overview of the existing MAC solutions for the IoT, describing current limitations and envisioned challenges for the near future. Motivated by those, we identify a family of simple algorithms based on distributed queueing (DQ), which can operate for an infinite number of devices generating any traffic load and pattern. A description of the DQ mechanism is provided and most relevant existing studies of DQ applied in different scenarios are described in this paper. In addition, we provide a novel performance evaluation of DQ when applied for the IoT. Finally, a description of the very first demo of DQ for its use in the IoT is also included in this paper.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

    Security, privacy and safety evaluation of dynamic and static fleets of drones

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    Inter-connected objects, either via public or private networks are the near future of modern societies. Such inter-connected objects are referred to as Internet-of-Things (IoT) and/or Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). One example of such a system is based on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). The fleet of such vehicles are prophesied to take on multiple roles involving mundane to high-sensitive, such as, prompt pizza or shopping deliveries to your homes to battlefield deployment for reconnaissance and combat missions. Drones, as we refer to UAVs in this paper, either can operate individually (solo missions) or part of a fleet (group missions), with and without constant connection with the base station. The base station acts as the command centre to manage the activities of the drones. However, an independent, localised and effective fleet control is required, potentially based on swarm intelligence, for the reasons: 1) increase in the number of drone fleets, 2) number of drones in a fleet might be multiple of tens, 3) time-criticality in making decisions by such fleets in the wild, 4) potential communication congestions/lag, and 5) in some cases working in challenging terrains that hinders or mandates-limited communication with control centre (i.e., operations spanning long period of times or military usage of such fleets in enemy territory). This self-ware, mission-focused and independent fleet of drones that potential utilises swarm intelligence for a) air-traffic and/or flight control management, b) obstacle avoidance, c) self-preservation while maintaining the mission criteria, d) collaboration with other fleets in the wild (autonomously) and e) assuring the security, privacy and safety of physical (drones itself) and virtual (data, software) assets. In this paper, we investigate the challenges faced by fleet of drones and propose a potential course of action on how to overcome them.Comment: 12 Pages, 7 Figures, Conference, The 36th IEEE/AIAA Digital Avionics Systems Conference (DASC'17

    Trends in Smart City Development

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    This report examines the meanings and practices associated with the term 'smart cities.' Smart city initiatives involve three components: information and communication technologies (ICTs) that generate and aggregate data; analytical tools which convert that data into usable information; and organizational structures that encourage collaboration, innovation, and the application of that information to solve public problems

    Internet of Things: Current Technological Review and New Low Power Wireless Sensor Network Protocol Proposal

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    This paper addresses Internet of Things (IoT) with state-of-art approach. The purpose is to give insight into concept of “smart living”, a concept that meets requirements of today’s modern society. Implementation of this new technology requires new hardware and software installed and run on devices (“things”) connected to the Internet anytime and anywhere. In order to make possible this new technology for wide use, few technological, standards and legal issues need to be solved. In a view of this a new low power wireless sensor network protocol is proposed in the IoT spirit

    Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. Strategic Corporate Research Report

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    [Excerpt] Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. (hereinafter Wal-Mart) is the second-largest company in the world. It has more annual revenue than the GDP of Switzerland. It sells more DVDs, magazines, books, CDs, dog food, diapers, bicycles, toys, toothpaste, jewelry, and groceries than any other retailer does worldwide. It is the largest retailer in the United States, Mexico, and Canada, the second-largest in the United Kingdom, and the third largest in Brazil, With its partners, it is the largest retailer in Central America. Wal-Mart is also the largest private employer in the United States, Mexico, and Canada, and it has 1.8 million employees around the globe. Wal-Mart is so huge that it effectively sets the terms for large swaths of the global economy, from retail wages to apparel prices to transoceanic shipping rates to the location of toy factories. Indeed, if there is one single aspect to understand about the company, it is the fact that Wal-Mart is transforming the relations of production in virtually every product category it sells, through its relationships with suppliers. But its influence goes far beyond the economy. It sets social policy by refusing to sell certain types of birth control. Its construction of supercenters molds the landscape, shapes traffic patterns, and alters the local commercial mix. The retail goliath shapes culture by selling the music of patriotic country singer Garth Brooks but not the critical (and hilarious) The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Presents America (the Book): A Citizen’s Guide to Democracy Inaction. It influences politics by donating millions to conservative politicians and think tanks. Wal-Mart is, in short, one of the most powerful entities in the world. Not surprisingly, Wal-Mart has developed a long list of critics, including unions, human rights organizations, religious groups, environmental activists, community organizations, small business groups, academics, children’s rights groups, and even institutional investors. These groups have exposed the company’s illegal union-busting tactics, its many violations of overtime laws, its abuse of child labor, its egregious healthcare policies, its super-exploitation of immigrant workers, its rampant gender discrimination, the horrific labor conditions at its suppliers’ factories, and its unlawful environmental degradation. They have also chronicled the deleterious effect Wal-Mart has on the public coffers and the quality of community life. New Wal-Mart stores and distribution centers often swallow up government subsidies and tax breaks, take public land, create more congestion, reduce overall wages, destroy retail variety, and increase public outlays for healthcare. To its critics, Wal-Mart represents the worst aspects of 21st-eentury capitalism. Wal-Mart usually counters any criticism with two words: low prices. It is a powerful mantra in a consumerist world. The company does make more products affordable to more people, and that is nothing to sneeze at when wages are stagnant, jobs insecure, pensions disappearing, and health coverage shrinking. With low prices, Wal-Mart helps working men and women get more from their meager paychecks, more necessities like bread, and more luxuries, like roses, too. It is a brilliant and incontrovertible argument, and Wal-Mart’s most ardent defenders take it even farther. They say its obsession with low prices makes the entire economy more efficient and more productive. Suppliers and competitors have to produce more and better products with the same resources, and that redounds to everyone. In the micro, it means falling prices and rising product quality. In the macro, it means economic growth, more jobs, and higher tax revenues. To its defenders, Wal-Mart represents the best aspects of 21st-century capitalism. Despite their radical opposition, critics and defenders of the world’s largest corporation agree on one thing: Wal-Mart represents 21st-century capitalism. It symbolizes a system of increasing market penetration and decreasing social regulation, where more and more aspects of life around the world are subject to economic competition. Wal-Mart’s success rests upon the ongoing destruction of social power in favor of corporate power. It takes advantage of the conditions of the neo-liberal world, from the availability of instant and inexpensive global communication to the continuing collapse of agricultural employment around the world to the rapid diffusion of technological innovation to the oversupply of subjugated migrant labor in nearly every country to the continued existence of undemocratic and corporate-dominated governments. For some, this is as it should be, all part of capitalism’s natural and ultimately benign development. For the rest of us, Wal-Mart is at the heart of what is wrong with the world

    High-level Architecture and Compelling Technologies for an Advanced Web-based Vehicle Routing and Scheduling System for Urban Freight Transportation

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    The search for a more efficient routing and scheduling, the improvement of service’s level and the increasing complexity of real-world distributive contexts are contingent variables that generate the need for a system’s architecture that may be holistic, innovative, scalable and reliable. Hence, new technologies and a lucid awareness of involved actors and infrastructures, provide the basis to create a more efficient routing and scheduling architecture for enterprises

    Real-time localisation system for GPS denied open areas using smart street furniture

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    Real-time measurement of crowd dynamics has been attracting significant interest, as it has many applications including real-time monitoring of emergencies and evacuation plans. To effectively measure crowd behaviour, an accurate estimate for pedestrians’ locations is required. However, estimating pedestrians’ locations is a great challenge especially for open areas with poor Global Positioning System (GPS) signal reception and/or lack of infrastructure to install expensive solutions such as video-based systems. Street furniture assets such as rubbish bins have become smart, as they have been equipped with low-power sensors. Currently, their role is limited to certain applications such as waste management. We believe that the role of street furniture can be extended to include building real-time localisation systems as street furniture provides excellent coverage across different areas such as parks, streets, homes, universities. In this thesis, we propose a novel wireless sensor network architecture designed for smart street furniture. We extend the functionality of sensor nodes to act as soft Access Point (AP), sensing Wifi signals received from surrounding Wifi-enabled devices. Our proposed architecture includes a real-time and low-power design for sensor nodes. We attached sensor nodes to rubbish bins located in a busy GPS denied open area at Murdoch University (Perth, Western Australia), known as Bush Court. This enabled us to introduce two unique Wifi-based localisation datasets: the first is the Fingerprint dataset called MurdochBushCourtLoC-FP (MBCLFP) in which four users generated Wifi fingerprints for all available cells in the gridded Bush Court, called Reference Points (RPs), using their smartphones, and the second is the APs dataset called MurdochBushCourtLoC-AP (MBCLAP) that includes auto-generated records received from over 1000 users’ devices. Finally, we developed a real-time localisation approach based on the two datasets using a four-layer deep learning classifier. The approach includes a light-weight algorithm to label the MBCLAP dataset using the MBCLFP dataset and convert the MBCLAP dataset to be synchronous. With the use of our proposed approach, up to 19% improvement in location prediction is achieved

    Image recognition-based architecture to enhance inclusive mobility of visually impaired people in smart and urban environments

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    The demographic growth that we have witnessed in recent years, which is expected to increase in the years to come, raises emerging challenges worldwide regarding urban mobility, both in transport and pedestrian movement. The sustainable development of cities is also intrinsically linked to urban planning and mobility strategies. The tasks of navigation and orientation in cities are something that we resort to today with great frequency, especially in unknown cities and places. Current navigation solutions refer to the precision aspect as a big challenge, especially between buildings in city centers. In this paper, we focus on the segment of visually impaired people and how they can obtain information about where they are when, for some reason, they have lost their orientation. Of course, the challenges are different and much more challenging in this situation and with this population segment. GPS, a technique widely used for navigation in outdoor environments, does not have the precision we need or the most beneficial type of content because the information that a visually impaired person needs when lost is not the name of the street or the coordinates but a reference point. Therefore, this paper includes the proposal of a conceptual architecture for outdoor positioning of visually impaired people using the Landmark Positioning approach.5311-8814-F0ED | Sara Maria da Cruz Maia de Oliveira PaivaN/

    Costs and benefits of superfast broadband in the UK

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    This paper was commissioned from LSE Enterprise by Convergys Smart Revenue Solutions to stimulate an open and constructive debate among the main stakeholders about the balance between the costs, the revenues, and the societal benefits of ‘superfast’ broadband. The intent has been to analyse the available facts and to propose wider perspectives on economic and social interactions. The paper has two parts: one concentrates on superfast broadband deployment and the associated economic and social implications (for the UK and its service providers), and the other considers alternative social science approaches to these implications. Both parts consider the potential contribution of smart solutions to superfast broadband provision and use. Whereas Part I takes the “national perspective” and the “service provider perspective”, which deal with the implications of superfast broadband for the UK and for service providers, Part II views matters in other ways, particularly by looking at how to realise values beyond the market economy, such as those inherent in neighbourliness, trust and democrac
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