Context aware building energy management system with heterogeneous wireless network architecture

Energy wastage in buildings is to be minimized to reduce the carbon footprint of electricity. Wireless sensor and actor networks (WSAN) have been providing solutions for effective energy management within buildings. In this paper, we present a decisive server based context aware energy management system for smart buildings through Cyber Physical System (CPS) models. A layered architecture for building energy management is proposed to enhance scalability of the system. Heterogeneous wireless network based multiple radio gateway is proposed and implemented to make the system more adaptive to different applications catering to variable data rates. A smart room test bed is deployed in the IIT Hyderabad campus, where the decisive server collects various physical parameters through sensors, and based on the context generates wireless control messages to power electronics based actuators. Integrating context awareness into the system increases the efficiency in terms of energy savings and was observed to be significant, around 30%. The paper also presents a detailed analysis on the turnaround time required to realise the real saving after recovering investments. Applications are developed to integrate smart phones and tabloids providing web enablement to the end user. In this paper, each of the sensors and actuators in the smart room are associated with a state machine, which enables modelling of the system using Hybrid automata for future scope of applications

gvSOS: a new client for the OGC® Sensor Obseration Service Interface standard

A key problem with sensor networks is achieving interoperability between different networks potentially built using different software and hardware platforms. Services interfaced by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) specifications allow GIS clients to access geospatial data without knowing the details about how these data are gathered or stored. Currently, OGC is working on a set of interoperable interfaces and metadata encodings known as Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) that enables the integration of heterogeneous sensor systems and measurements into geospatial information infrastructures. In this article we present the implementation of gvSOS, a new module for gvSIG to connect to Sensor Observation Services (SOS). The gvSOS client module allows gvSIG users to interact with SOS servers, displaying the information gathered by sensors as a layer composed by features. We present the software engineering development process followed to build the module. For each step of the process we specify the main obstacles found during the development such as restrictions of the gvSIG architecture, inaccuracies in the OGC specifications, and a set of common problems found in current SOS server implementations available on the Internet. For most of the problems found we propose a solution, or at least we present a path that might lead to i

Using SWE Standards for Ubiquitous Environmental Sensing: A Performance Analysis

Although smartphone applications represent the most typical data consumer tool from the citizen perspective in environmental applications, they can also be used for in-situ data collection and production in varied scenarios, such as geological sciences and biodiversity. The use of standard protocols, such as SWE, to exchange information between smartphones and sensor infrastructures brings benefits such as interoperability and scalability, but their reliance on XML is a potential problem when large volumes of data are transferred, due to limited bandwidth and processing capabilities on mobile phones. In this article we present a performance analysis about the use of SWE standards in smartphone applications to consume and produce environmental sensor data, analysing to what extent the performance problems related to XML can be alleviated by using alternative uncompressed and compressed formats

The Importance of Being Thing:Or the Trivial Role of Powering Serious IoT Scenarios

In this article, we call for a "Walk Before You Run" adjustment in the Internet-of-Things (IoT) research and development exercise. Without first settling the quest for what thing is or could be or do, we run the risk of presumptuous visions, or hypes, that can only fail the realities and limits of what is actually possible, leading to customers and consumers confusion as well as market hesitations. Specifically, without a carefully-designed Thing architecture in place, it will be very difficult to find the “magic” we are so addicted and accustomed to – programming! Programming the IoT, as we once programmed the mainframe, the workstation, the PC and the mobile devices, is the natural way to realize a fancy IoT scenario or an application. Without Thing architectures and their enablement of new programming models for IoT – we will continue to only envision fancy scenarios but unable to unleash the IoT full potential. This article raises these concerns and provides a view into the future by first looking back into our short history of pervasive computing. The article focuses on the domain of “Personal” IoT and will address key new requirements for such Thing architecture. Also, practicing what we preach, we present our ongoing efforts on the Atlas Thing Architecture showing how it supports a variety of thing notions, and how it enables novel models for programmability

Service-Relationship Programming Framework for the Social IoT

We argue that for a true realization of innovative programming opportunities for smart spaces, the developers should be equipped with informative tools that assist them in building domain-related applications. Such tools should utilize the services offered by the space's smart things and consider the different relationships that may tie these services opportunistically to build applications. In this paper, we utilize our Inter-thing relationships programming framework to present a distributed programming ecosystem. The framework broadens the restricted set of thing-level relationships of the evolving social IoT paradigm with a set of service-level relationships. Such relationships provide guidance into how services belonging to different things can be combined to build meaningful applications. We also present a uniform way of describing the thing services and the service-level relationships along with new capabilities for the things to dynamically generate their own services, formulate the corresponding programmable interfaces (APIs) and create an ad-hoc network of socially related smart things at runtime. We then present the semantic rules that guide the establishment of IoT applications and finally demonstrate the features of the framework through a proof-of-concept application

To Walk the Earth in Safety 12th Edition (FY2012)

In 2013, we celebrate 20 years of U.S. Government agencies working together to lead the international donor community in supporting the clearance of landmines and explosive remnants of war (ERW), as well as the destruction of at-risk and unsecured weapons and munitions. The United States first became involved in humanitarian demining in 1988 by sending a team to assess the landmine situation in Afghanistan. In 1993, U.S. assistance took an important step forward when the Department of State (DOS), Department of Defense (DOD), and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) formed an interagency partnership to coordinate U.S. humanitarian demining programs globally. U.S. efforts have helped numerous countries reduce the impact of landmines and unexploded ordnance (UXO), contributed to a dramatic reduction in the worldwide annual casualty rate from these threats, allowed refugees and internally displaced persons to return safely to their homes, enhanced the political and economic stability of nations affected by landmines, and increased international security. This edition of our annual report, To Walk the Earth in Safety, examines how far we have come in two decades of sustained support for humanitarian mine action (HMA) and details the programs and partnerships that comprise the U.S. Conventional Weapons Destruction (CWD) Program, which includes HMA. Since 1993, the U.S. has contributed over $2 billion to more than 90 countries around the world to reduce the harmful worldwide effects of at-risk, illicitly proliferated, and indiscriminately used conventional weapons of war