SmartSantander: IoT experimentation over a smart city testbed

This paper describes the deployment and experimentation architecture of the Internet of Things experimentation facility being deployed at Santander city. The facility is implemented within the SmartSantander project, one of the projects of the Future Internet Research and Experimentation initiative of the European Commission and represents a unique in the world city-scale experimental research facility. Additionally, this facility supports typical applications and services of a smart city. Tangible results are expected to influence the definition and specification of Future Internet architecture design from viewpoints of Internet of Things and Internet of Services. The facility comprises a large number of Internet of Things devices deployed in several urban scenarios which will be federated into a single testbed. In this paper the deployment being carried out at the main location, namely Santander city, is described. Besides presenting the current deployment, in this article the main insights in terms of the architectural design of a large-scale IoT testbed are presented as well. Furthermore, solutions adopted for implementation of the different components addressing the required testbed functionalities are also sketched out. The IoT experimentation facility described in this paper is conceived to provide a suitable platform for large scale experimentation and evaluation of IoT concepts under real-life conditions.This work is funded by research project SmartSantander, under FP7-ICT-2009-5 of the 7th Framework Programme of the European Community. Authors would like to acknowledge the collaboration with the rest of partners within the consortium leading to the results presented in this paper

An architecture for the future business of things

A brave new world made of interconnected smart devices will soon revolutionize the world. The application of the Internet of Things vision will foster the creation of new businesses across different industrial sectors. Communication Service Providers need to set the pace of this change if they want to lead this transformation. They need to both leverage and evolve their architectures in order to support a flexible creation of innovative services over distributed networks, linking heterogeneous sensors and actuators. This paper presents the roles of the telecoms on the upcoming machine-to-machine markets and devises an advanced architecture able to withstand the demands of a new plethora of evermore clever and useful services

MINDiT: A framework for media independent access to things

Deploying smart environments often implies a plethora of co-existing devices and services, each with their own set of features, requirements and interfacing characteristics. These intricate scenarios are further exacerbated when such devices are coupled with networking capabilities, globalizing their interaction opportunities to create the so-called Internet of Things. In such interconnected heterogeneous environments, the joint operation of entities requires a flexible framework that enables and simplifies interfacing between elements. In this paper, we propose MINDiT, a framework that provides a common abstract interface towards the communication support with different entities. It incorporates cross-layer mechanisms inspired on the existing IEEE 802.21 technology, suitably modified to facilitate and optimize deployment in scenarios featuring both high-level, and low-powered network-restricted entities. MINDiT was validated through a prototype built over an open-source IEEE 802.21 implementation. We further compared its signaling impact against other solutions, and evaluated its performance over a smart environment featuring a multimedia scenario with multiple devices and services

Smart cities at the forefront of the future internet

Smart cities have been recently pointed out by M2M experts as an emerging market with enormous potential, which is expected to drive the digital economy forward in the coming years. However, most of the current city and urban developments are based on vertical ICT solutions leading to an unsustainable sea of systems and market islands. In this work we discuss how the recent vision of the Future Internet (FI), and its particular components, Internet of Things (IoT) and Internet of Services (IoS), can become building blocks to progress towards a unified urban-scale ICT platform transforming a Smart City into an open innovation platform. Moreover, we present some results of generic implementations based on the ITU-T’s Ubiquitous Sensor Network (USN) model. The referenced platform model fulfills basic principles of open, federated and trusted platforms (FOTs) at two different levels: the infrastructure level (IoT to support the complexity of heterogeneous sensors deployed in urban spaces), and at the service level (IoS as a suit of open and standardized enablers to facilitate the composition of interoperable smart city services). We also discuss the need of infrastructures at the European level for a realistic large-scale experimentally-driven research, and present main principles of the unique-in-the-world experimental test facility under development within the SmartSantander EU project.Although only a few names appear on this paper, this work would not have been possible without the contribution and encouragement of many people, particularly all the enthusiastic team of the SmartSantander project, partially funded by the EC under contract number FP7-ICT-257992

Media independent transport service for ambient intelligence

The evolution on ambient intelligence technologies, such as sensor networks, propelled a universe of very diverse types of both data and hardware equipment creating one of the most heterogeneous network environments. This diversity brings to light the main issue we aim to address in this paper: the need for a common ground that enables communications between the different heterogeneous equipments and technologies. Starting from the well-established IEEE 802.21 Media Independent Handover standard, we propose its mechanisms and structure to be extended to provide the needed common ground for communication in ambient intelligence scenarios. In this work, we extend 802.21 to include sensor information, enabling different types of equipment and network technologies to communicate with each other under a common standard contributing to a truly heterogeneous network framework. To conclude, we address its viability through a comparison with other known solutions for communication on sensing devices

Middleware for wireless sensor network virtualization

Sensor and network virtualization technology are used in smart home, smart grid, smart city and many other applications of Internet of Things (IoT) that deploy Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) to facilitate multiple sensor data transmission over multiple networks. Existing WSNs are designed for a specific application running on low data rate network. The challenge is how to ensure multiple sensor data for multiple applications be transmitted over multiple heterogeneous networks having different transmission rates while ensuring Quality-of-Service (QoS). The research has developed a middleware that provides sensor and network virtualization with guaranteed QoS. The middleware was designed comprising of two layers: Application Dependent Layer Middleware (ADLM) and Network Dependent Layer Middleware (NDLM). The ADLM combined multiple sensor data to form services based of Service Oriented Application (SOA). It is comprised of service handling manager that combines various sensor data and form services, QoS manager that assigns priority and service scheduling manager that forwards the service frames. The NDLM facilitated seamless transmissions of various service data over multiple heterogeneous networks. It consists of hypervisor which is composed of flowvisor and the powervisor. The flowvisor is madeup of transmit and routing managers responsible for routing and transmitting service packets. The powervisor consists of a resource manager that determines and selects the node with the highest battery power. The middleware was implemented and evaluated on a real experimental testbed. The experimental results showed that the middleware increased throughput by 8.7% and reduced the numbers of packets transmissions from the node by 68.7% compared to proxy middleware using SOA. In addition, end-to-end transmission delay was reduced by 85.2% when compared to SenShare using SOA. The flowvisor at the gateway decreased the waiting time of packets in the queue by 59.8%, when the flowvisor raised the output rate up to 2.5 times the maximum arrival rate of WSN packets. The powervisor increased the node’s life time by 17.6% when compared to VITRO by limiting the transmission power to the existing battery voltage level. In brief, the middleware has provided guaranteed QoS by increasing throughput, reducing end-to-end delay and minimizing energy consumption. The middleware is highly recommended for IoT applications such as smart city and smart grid

Experimentation as a service over semantically interoperable Internet of Things testbeds

Infrastructures enabling experimental assessment of Internet of Things (IoT) solutions are scarce. Moreover, such infrastructures are typically bound to a specific application domain, thus, not facilitating the testing of solutions with a horizontal approach. This paper presents a platform that supports Experimentation as s Service (EaaS) over a federation of IoT testbeds. This platform brings two major advances. Firstly, it leverages semantic web technologies to enable interoperability so that testbed agnostic access to the underlying facilities is allowed. Secondly, a set of tools ease both the experimentation workflow and the federation of other IoT deployments, independently of their domain of interest. Apart from the platform specification, the paper presents how this design has been actually instantiated into a cloud-based EaaS platform that has been used for supporting a wide variety of novel experiments targeting different research and innovation challenges. In this respect, the paper summarizes some of the experiences from these experiments and the key performance metrics that this instance of the platform has exhibited during the experimentation

Interacção máquina-a-máquina em computação ubíqua

Mestrado em Engenharia de Computadores e TelemáticaAlthough the area of Machine-to-Machine communications and, consequently, the Internet of Things, have undergone a great improvement regarding interoperability, there is still no ’de facto’ solution proposal to achieve large scale, even global, interoperability. As a first step, this work provides a theoretical analysis of proposals relevant to the area, mainly analysing how they achieve some essential requirements for the Internet of Things, such as scalability, heterogeneity and management. Later, focusing in ETSI’s M2M standard, is first given a high-level description of its vision, approach and architecture, and then, finally, from a more practical point of view, is also presented and tested a functional implementation of an ETSI M2M compliant gateway, which provides an empirical evaluation of the standard.Apesar de a área das comunicações Máquina-a-Máquina e, consequentemente, a Internet das Coisas, terem sofrido uma grande melhoria relativamente à interoperabilidade, ainda não existe nenhuma solução considerada "dominante" que permita atingir uma interoperabilidade em larga escala, até mesmo global. Desta forma, numa primeira instância este trabalho visa fornecer uma análise teórica de propostas relevantes para a área, onde se analisa maioritariamente como é que essas propostas atingem alguns requisitos essenciais para a Internet das Coisas, como a escalabilidade, heterogeneidade e gestão. Posteriormente, focando-se no standard ETSI M2M, é dado em primeiro lugar uma descrição de alto nível da sua visão, abordagem e arquitectura, e depois, finalmente, de um ponto de vista prático, é ainda apresentada e testada uma implementação funcional de uma gateway condescendente com o standard, o que fornece uma avaliação mais empírica do mesmo