Experimentation management in the co-created smart-city: Incentivization and citizen engagement

Under the smart city paradigm, cities are changing at a rapid pace. In this context, it is necessary to develop tools that allow service providers to perform rapid deployments of novel solutions that can be validated by citizens. In this sense, the OrganiCity experimentation-as-a-service platform brings about a unique solution to experiment with new urban services in a co-creative way, among all the involved stakeholders. On top of this, it is also necessary to ensure that users are engaged in the experimentation process, so as to guarantee that the resulting services actually fulfill their needs. In this work, we present the engagement monitoring framework that has been developed within the OrganiCity platform. This framework permits the tailored definition of metrics according to the experiment characteristics and provides valuable information about how citizens react to service modifications and incentivization campaigns.This research was funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Framework Programme grant number 645198

Resource management for QoS support in cognitive radio networks

Cognitive radio technology is a key enabler to reuse a finite, scarce, and expensive resource: the radio spectrum. Guaranteeing required levels of QoS to cognitive users and ensuring necessary protection to incumbent users are the two main challenges in opportunistic spectrum access. This article identifies the main requirements and challenges for QoS support in cognitive radio networks. A framework for a twofold cognitive manager is presented; one part managing spectrum availability on longer timescales and the other handling resource management on shorter timescales. This article gives particular focus to the functionalities of the latter cognitive manager related to resource management. Finally, we present a few key scenarios and describe how QoS can be managed with the proposed approach without disturbing the communications of incumbent users

FLEXNET: Flexible Networks for IoT based services

Internet of Things is becoming one of the main triggers in designing and deploying new services aiming at fulfilling the wide demand imposed by end-users. Usually, concrete solutions addressing the optimization of the wireless segment are found in the literature. However, it is much less frequent to find end-to-end solutions to be easily adopted by the corresponding stakeholders. It is in this context that FLEXNET brings an integrated solution, relying on cutting-edge technologies, dealing with a wide set of technical requirements imposed by the different applications and services.This work was supported by FLEXNET Project: "Flexible IoT Networks for Value Creators" (Celtic 2016/3), in the Eureka Celtic-Next Cluster

Cloudification of Public Services in Smart Cities: the CLIPS project

Cities are seeking new innovative approaches to deliver public services by involving their community in a co-creation process. The main innovation of CLIPS is to provide a usable methodology with a toolkit that enables civil servants and other external stakeholders to collaborate in new designs and delivery of services, starting from a set of basic building blocks available in the cloud. This offers the ability to respond faster, reduce costs of service delivery and be more responsive to end user needs. CLIPS offers this change in paradig

Resource management of centrally controlled cognitive radio networks

The realization of cognitive radio networks is a key solution to meet the raising expectations for high data rates and quality of service in mobile communications. This implies the design of a two-fold cognitive manager for resource management (CM-RM), to manage an opportunistic use of the whitespaces as introduced in this paper, and for Spectrum Management (CM-SM). The proposed CM-RM has been designed to be applicable to all kinds of control topologies (centralised/distributed). This paper presents the study of CM-RM functionalities for several scenarios based on a centralized management of the resources. The scenarios that have been selected are: cognitive ad hoc networks, cognitive femtocells, and cellular extension in TV white spaces. Each of them is introduced, specific mechanisms implemented in the CM-RM are proposed, and performance results are presented for validation purpose