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

Design of a WSN Platform for Long-Term Environmental Monitoring for IoT Applications

The Internet of Things (IoT) provides a virtual view, via the Internet Protocol, to a huge variety of real life objects, ranging from a car, to a teacup, to a building, to trees in a forest. Its appeal is the ubiquitous generalized access to the status and location of any "thing" we may be interested in. Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are well suited for long-term environmental data acquisition for IoT representation. This paper presents the functional design and implementation of a complete WSN platform that can be used for a range of long-term environmental monitoring IoT applications. The application requirements for low cost, high number of sensors, fast deployment, long lifetime, low maintenance, and high quality of service are considered in the specification and design of the platform and of all its components. Low-effort platform reuse is also considered starting from the specifications and at all design levels for a wide array of related monitoring application

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

Security Issues and Challenges for the IoT-based Smart Grid

AbstractInternet of Things (IoT) is the next step evolution of our today Internet, where any physical object/thing having/equipped with computation and communication capabilities could be seamlessly integrated, at different levels, to the Internet. The Smart Grid (SG), which is considered as one of the most critical Infrastructures, is defined as the classical power grid augmented with a large-scale ICT and renewable energy integration, can be seen as one of the largest IoT network. The SG will involve billions of smart objects/things: smart meters, smart appliances, sensors, actuators-cars, etc. in addition to several communication infrastructures whether public (most often) or private. However, security is seen as one of the major factors hampering the rapid and large scale adoption and deployment of both the IoT vision and the Smart Grid.In this paper we investigate the security issues and challenges on the IoT-based SG, and define the major security services that we should consider when dealing with SG securit

Review of Remote Terminal Unit (RTU) and Gateways for Digital Oilfield delpoyments

The increasing decline in easy oil has led to an increasing need for the optimization of oil and gas processes. Digital oilfields utilize remote operations to achieve these optimization goals and the remote telemetry unit and gateways are very critical in the realization of this objective. This paper presents a review of the RTUs and gateways utilized in digital oilfield architectures. It presents a review of the architecture, their functionality and selection criteria. It also provides a comparison of the specifications of some popular RTUs

A Measurement-Driven Approach to Understand Urban Greenhouse Gas Emissions in Nordic Cities

Cities are main drivers for climate change mitigation and emission reduction today. However, in many cases they lack reliable baselines of emissions to validate current developments over time, assess the impact of their projects, and prioritize investments and actions. They also need better data on a small geospatial and temporal scale to really understand local emissions. This paper describes the rationale and the design of the Carbon Track and Trace project (CTT) that aims to develop an automated system for greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions monitoring through a low-cost city-level sensor network. The system is based on a flexible architecture incorporating open source sensor platforms, an Internet-of-Things wireless backbone, and extensive data analytics. We describe concept, architecture, and deployment as well as initial results

A System Architecture for Software-Defined Industrial Internet of Things

Wireless sensor networks have been a driving force of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) advancement in the process control and manufacturing industry. The emergence of IIoT opens great potential for the ubiquitous field device connectivity and manageability with an integrated and standardized architecture from low-level device operations to high-level data-centric application interactions. This technological development requires software definability in the key architectural elements of IIoT, including wireless field devices, IIoT gateways, network infrastructure, and IIoT sensor cloud services. In this paper, a novel software-defined IIoT (SD-IIoT) is proposed in order to solve essential challenges in a holistic IIoT system, such as reliability, security, timeliness scalability, and quality of service (QoS). A new IIoT system architecture is proposed based on the latest networking technologies such as WirelessHART, WebSocket, IETF constrained application protocol (CoAP) and software-defined networking (SDN). A new scheme based on CoAP and SDN is proposed to solve the QoS issues. Computer experiments in a case study are implemented to show the effectiveness of the proposed system architecture.Comment: To be published by IEEE ICUWB-201

Analysis and Visualization of Urban Emission Measurements in Smart Cities

Cities worldwide aim to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions and improve air quality for their citizens. Therefore, there is a need to implement smart city approaches to monitor, model, and understand local emissions to better guide these actions. We present our approach that deploys a number of low-cost sensors through a wireless Internet of Things (IoT) backbone and is thus capable of collecting high-granular data. Based on a flexible architecture, we built an ecosystem of data management and data analytics including processing, integration, analysis, and visualization as well as decision-support systems for cities to better understand their emissions. Our prototype system has so far been tested in two Scandinavian cities. We present this system and demonstrate how to collect, integrate, analyze, and visualize real-time air quality data