SmartSantander: Internet of Things research and innovation through citizen participation

The Smart City concept relates to improving efficiency of city services and facilitating a more sustainable development of cities. However, it is important to highlight that, in order to effectively progress towards such smart urban environments, the people living in these cities must be tightly engaged in this endeavour. This paper presents two novel services that have been implemented in order to bring the Smart City closer to the citizen. The Participatory Sensing service we are proposing exploits the advanced features of smartphones to make the user part of the ubiquitous sensing infrastructure over which the Smart City concept is built. The Augmented Reality service is connected to the smart city platform in order to create an advanced visualization tool where the plethora of available information is presented to citizens embedded in their natural surroundings. A brief description of the smart city platform on top of which these services are built is also presented.Although only a few names appear in this paper’s list of authors, this work would not have been possible without the contribution and encouragement of the enthusiastic team of the SmartSantander project which has been partially funded by the European Commission under the contract number FP7-ICT-257992

Iot-enabled smart cities: evolution and outlook

For the last decade the Smart City concept has been under development, fostered by the growing urbanization of the world’s population and the need to handle the challenges that such a scenario raises. During this time many Smart City projects have been executed–some as proof-of-concept, but a growing number resulting in permanent, production-level deployments, improving the operation of the city and the quality of life of its citizens. Thus, Smart Cities are still a highly relevant paradigm which needs further development before it reaches its full potential and provides robust and resilient solutions. In this paper, the focus is set on the Internet of Things (IoT) as an enabling technology for the Smart City. In this sense, the paper reviews the current landscape of IoT-enabled Smart Cities, surveying relevant experiences and city initiatives that have embedded IoT within their city services and how they have generated an impact. The paper discusses the key technologies that have been developed and how they are contributing to the realization of the Smart City. Moreover, it presents some challenges that remain open ahead of us and which are the initiatives and technologies that are under development to tackle them.This research was partially funded by Spain State Research Agency (AEI) by means of the project FIERCE: Future Internet Enabled Resilient CitiEs (RTI2018-093475-A-I00). Prof. Song was supported by Smart City R&D project of the Korea Agency for Infrastructure Technology Advancement (KAIA) grant funded by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport (MOLIT), Ministry of Science and ICT (MSIT) (Grant 18NSPS-B149386-01)

Design and analysis of LTE and wi-fi schemes for communications of massive machine devices

Existing communication technologies are designed with speciÿc use cases in mind, however, ex-tending these use cases usually throw up interesting challenges. For example, extending the use of existing cellular networks to emerging applications such as Internet of Things (IoT) devices throws up the challenge of handling massive number of devices. In this thesis, we are motivated to investigate existing schemes used in LTE and Wi-Fi for supporting massive machine devices and improve on observed performance gaps by designing new ones that outperform the former. This thesis investigates the existing random access protocol in LTE and proposes three schemes to combat massive device access challenge. The ÿrst is a root index reuse and allocation scheme which uses link budget calculations in extracting a safe distance for preamble reuse under vari-able cell size and also proposes an index allocation algorithm. Secondly, a dynamic subframe optimization scheme that combats the challenge from an optimisation solution perspective. Thirdly, the use of small cells for random access. Simulation and numerical analysis shows performance improvements against existing schemes in terms of throughput, access delay and probability of collision. In some cases, over 20% increase in performance was observed. The proposed schemes provide quicker and more guaranteed opportunities for machine devices to communicate. Also, in Wi-Fi networks, adaptation of the transmission rates to the dynamic channel condi-tions is a major challenge. Two algorithms were proposed to combat this. The ÿrst makes use of contextual information to determine the network state and respond appropriately whilst the second samples candidate transmission modes and uses the e˛ective throughput to make a deci-sion. The proposed algorithms were compared to several existing rate adaptation algorithms by simulations and under various system and channel conÿgurations. They show signiÿcant per-formance improvements, in terms of throughput, thus, conÿrming their suitability for dynamic channel conditions