System Design of Internet-of-Things for Residential Smart Grid

Internet-of-Things (IoTs) envisions to integrate, coordinate, communicate, and collaborate real-world objects in order to perform daily tasks in a more intelligent and efficient manner. To comprehend this vision, this paper studies the design of a large scale IoT system for smart grid application, which constitutes a large number of home users and has the requirement of fast response time. In particular, we focus on the messaging protocol of a universal IoT home gateway, where our cloud enabled system consists of a backend server, unified home gateway (UHG) at the end users, and user interface for mobile devices. We discuss the features of such IoT system to support a large scale deployment with a UHG and real-time residential smart grid applications. Based on the requirements, we design an IoT system using the XMPP protocol, and implemented in a testbed for energy management applications. To show the effectiveness of the designed testbed, we present some results using the proposed IoT architecture.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures, journal pape

An energy-aware mobile gateway for Bluetooth low energy-powered Internet of Things devices

The term of Internet of Things (IoT) has currently become a novelty in the Internet as an innovation to connect things from all around the world where various sensors are connected using gateways. However, it is not a straightforward task to design such gateways owing to several problems. For instance, there typically exist severe energy consumption constraints due to the limited power source. In most cases, a gateway has to spend an amount of energy for processing the collected data in the network. Additionally, there are myriad of different user interface functions for various services, which in turn raises the question about the reliability and scalability of such gateways. To support the IoT vision, many people have recently used smart mobile devices, e.g., smartphones, tablets, PDA, and laptops, as a gateway for data acquisition in IoT so that these IoT devices can be used in a broader scope. This concept of exploiting our smart devices emerges thanks to their ability to connect things to the cloud via the Internet. In fact, there exist a communication gap between the things implemented with limited power sources to sense the environmental data and the cloud services. Fortunately, this gap can be bridged by adopting smartphones for forwarding the collected data using their wireless connection technologies. One of the critical technologies that can be used to bridge this communication gap while also still maintaining low energy consumption is Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE). As leverage from the original Bluetooth technology, BLE or known as Bluetooth Smart was initially designed as a power-friendly wireless technology aimed for some novel applications in many industries. To save energy, BLE can be set in a sleep mode and wake up only to receive or send possible packet periodically. By the usage of BLE in modern smartphones, a mobile gateway system can be made in a way that data from the sensors can be passed to the cloud while also considering the energy efficiency in the mobile gateway itself. In this thesis, we propose a software architecture of energy-aware mobile gateways for IoT applications. The proposed architecture makes continual and efficient data transmission from a set of predefined devices. Moreover, the gateway architecture implements several scheduling algorithms used to efficiently control the sleep mode operations besides handle the simultaneous connection to several BLE sensors. The presented scheduling algorithms comprise Semaphore, Round Robin, Exhaustive Polling and Fair Exhaustive Polling algorithms. To implement the BLE device priority-based approach, several multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) algorithms are also implemented to prioritize the device based on several criteria, such as device power usage, received signal strength indication and the device state. Examples of such MCDM algorithms that have been implemented in this work are the Analytic Hierarchy Process and the Weighted Sum Model. Furthermore, the algorithms implemented are then evaluated based on two quality of service(QoS) metrics, including the power consumption of the mobile gateway and the throughput defined regarding the number of packets received per second. The evaluation results showed that Fair Exhaustive Polling (FEP) consumes the lowest energy consumption compared to all other scheduling algorithms with only 12,79 mW. On the other hand, Exhaustive Polling with Analytical Hierarchy Process (EPAHP) has the worst energy consumption among the examined algorithms with 49,14 mW. Concerning the throughput, the Exhaustive Polling combined with Weighted Sum Model (EPWSM) has the most prominent data throughput compared to all other algorithms with 101.18 packets/s while Fair Exhaustive Polling (FEP) has the lowest throughput value with 50.98 packets/s. To sum up, the proposed mobile gateway architecture is exceptionally efficient for handling data forwarding from multiple BLE sensors to the cloud services with energy awareness

Recent advances in industrial wireless sensor networks towards efficient management in IoT

With the accelerated development of Internet-of- Things (IoT), wireless sensor networks (WSN) are gaining importance in the continued advancement of information and communication technologies, and have been connected and integrated with Internet in vast industrial applications. However, given the fact that most wireless sensor devices are resource constrained and operate on batteries, the communication overhead and power consumption are therefore important issues for wireless sensor networks design. In order to efficiently manage these wireless sensor devices in a unified manner, the industrial authorities should be able to provide a network infrastructure supporting various WSN applications and services that facilitate the management of sensor-equipped real-world entities. This paper presents an overview of industrial ecosystem, technical architecture, industrial device management standards and our latest research activity in developing a WSN management system. The key approach to enable efficient and reliable management of WSN within such an infrastructure is a cross layer design of lightweight and cloud-based RESTful web service

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

Experimental Study on Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN) for Mobile Internet of Things

In the past decade, we have witnessed explosive growth in the number of low-power embedded and Internet-connected devices, reinforcing the new paradigm, Internet of Things (IoT). The low power wide area network (LPWAN), due to its long-range, low-power and low-cost communication capability, is actively considered by academia and industry as the future wireless communication standard for IoT. However, despite the increasing popularity of `mobile IoT', little is known about the suitability of LPWAN for those mobile IoT applications in which nodes have varying degrees of mobility. To fill this knowledge gap, in this paper, we conduct an experimental study to evaluate, analyze, and characterize LPWAN in both indoor and outdoor mobile environments. Our experimental results indicate that the performance of LPWAN is surprisingly susceptible to mobility, even to minor human mobility, and the effect of mobility significantly escalates as the distance to the gateway increases. These results call for development of new mobility-aware LPWAN protocols to support mobile IoT.Comment: To appear at 2017 IEEE 85th Vehicular Technology Conference (VTC'17 Spring

Middleware Technologies for Cloud of Things - a survey

The next wave of communication and applications rely on the new services provided by Internet of Things which is becoming an important aspect in human and machines future. The IoT services are a key solution for providing smart environments in homes, buildings and cities. In the era of a massive number of connected things and objects with a high grow rate, several challenges have been raised such as management, aggregation and storage for big produced data. In order to tackle some of these issues, cloud computing emerged to IoT as Cloud of Things (CoT) which provides virtually unlimited cloud services to enhance the large scale IoT platforms. There are several factors to be considered in design and implementation of a CoT platform. One of the most important and challenging problems is the heterogeneity of different objects. This problem can be addressed by deploying suitable "Middleware". Middleware sits between things and applications that make a reliable platform for communication among things with different interfaces, operating systems, and architectures. The main aim of this paper is to study the middleware technologies for CoT. Toward this end, we first present the main features and characteristics of middlewares. Next we study different architecture styles and service domains. Then we presents several middlewares that are suitable for CoT based platforms and lastly a list of current challenges and issues in design of CoT based middlewares is discussed.Comment: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352864817301268, Digital Communications and Networks, Elsevier (2017

Middleware Technologies for Cloud of Things - a survey

The next wave of communication and applications rely on the new services provided by Internet of Things which is becoming an important aspect in human and machines future. The IoT services are a key solution for providing smart environments in homes, buildings and cities. In the era of a massive number of connected things and objects with a high grow rate, several challenges have been raised such as management, aggregation and storage for big produced data. In order to tackle some of these issues, cloud computing emerged to IoT as Cloud of Things (CoT) which provides virtually unlimited cloud services to enhance the large scale IoT platforms. There are several factors to be considered in design and implementation of a CoT platform. One of the most important and challenging problems is the heterogeneity of different objects. This problem can be addressed by deploying suitable "Middleware". Middleware sits between things and applications that make a reliable platform for communication among things with different interfaces, operating systems, and architectures. The main aim of this paper is to study the middleware technologies for CoT. Toward this end, we first present the main features and characteristics of middlewares. Next we study different architecture styles and service domains. Then we presents several middlewares that are suitable for CoT based platforms and lastly a list of current challenges and issues in design of CoT based middlewares is discussed.Comment: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352864817301268, Digital Communications and Networks, Elsevier (2017