10 research outputs found
The 11th International Conference on Emerging Ubiquitous Systems and Pervasive Networks ( EUSPN 2020)
The
potential of IoT in contributing towards sustainable economic development in
Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) through digital transformation and effective service
delivery is widely accepted. However, the unreliability/unavailability of
connectivity and power grid infrastructure as well as the unaffordability of
the overall system hinders the implementation of a multi-layered IoT
architecture for rural societal services in SSA. In this work, affordable IoT
architecture that operates without reliance on broadband connectivity and power
grid is developed. The architecture employs energy harvesting system and
performs data processing, actuation decisions and network management locally by
integrating a customized low-cost computationally capable device with the
gateway. The sharing of this device among the water resource and quality
management, healthcare and agriculture applications further reduces the overall
system cost. The evaluation of LPWAN technologies reveals that LoRaWAN has
lower cost with added benefits of adaptive data rate and largest community
support while providing comparable performance and communication range with the
other technologies. The relevant results of the analysis is communicated to
end-users’ mobile device via 2G/3G GPRS. Hence, the proposed IoT architecture
enables the implementation of IoT systems for improving efficiency in three key
application areas at low cost.</p
The 11th International Conference on Emerging Ubiquitous Systems and Pervasive Networks (EUSPN 2020)
 Ensuring food security has
become a challenge in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) due to combined effects of
climate change, high population growth, and relying on rainfed farming.
Governments are establishing shared irrigation infrastructure for smallholder
farmers as part of the solutions for food security. However, the irrigated
farms often failed to achieve the expected crop yield. This is partly due to
lack of water management system in the irrigation infrastructure. In this work,
IoT-based irrigation management system is proposed after investigating problems
of irrigated farmlands in three SSA countries, Ethiopia, Kenya, and South
Africa as case studies. Resource-efficient IoT architecture is developed that
monitors soil, microclimate and water parameters and performs appropriate
irrigation management. Indigenous farming and expert knowledge, regional
weather information, crop and soil specific characteristics are also provided
to the system for informed-decision making and efficient operation of the
irrigation management system. In SSA, broadband connectivity and cloud services
are either unavailable or expensive. To tackle these limitations, data
processing, network management and irrigation decisions and communication to
the farmers are carried out locally, without the involvement of any back-end
servers. Furthermore, the use of green energy sources and resource-aware
intelligent data analysis algorithm is studied. The intelligent data analysis
helps to discover new knowledge that support further development of
agricultural expert knowledge. The proposed IoT-based irrigation management
system is expected to contribute towards long term and sustainable high crop
yield with minimum resource consumption and impact to the biodiversity around
the case farmlands.</p
Affordable Connectivity and Digital Entrepreneurial Ecosystem for Rural Africa
Innovation on sustainable ICT technologies to realize affordable broadband connectivity for rural and underserved communities is a crucial component of the effort to achieve the aim of “leaving no one behind by 2030” as championed by the United Nations. Digital connectivity and the creation of a digital entrepreneurial rural ecosystem (DERE) are two interconnected interventions necessary to achieve digital inclusion with rural communities as the main target. This paper defines the ecosystem components for the DERE, which include affordable broadband, sustainable business models and co-creation of relevant ICT services involving beneficiary rural communities. This framework presents a proof of concept on rural SMEs-driven digital inclusion being implemented at four sites in South Africa
IoT Architecture for Enhancing Rural Societal Services in Sub-Saharan Africa
The potential of IoT in contributing towards sustainable economic development in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) through digital transformation and effective service delivery is widely accepted. However, the unreliability/unavailability of connectivity and power grid infrastructure as well as the unaffordability of the overall system hinders the implementation of a multi-layered IoT architecture for rural societal services in SSA. In this work, affordable IoT architecture that operates without reliance on broadband connectivity and power grid is developed. The architecture employs energy harvesting system and performs data processing, actuation decisions and network management locally by integrating a customized low- cost computationally capable device with the gateway. The sharing of this device among the water resource and quality management, healthcare and agriculture applications further reduces the overall system cost. The evaluation of LPWAN technologies reveals that LoRaWAN has lower cost with added benefits of adaptive data rate and largest community support while providing comparable performance and communication range with the other technologies. The relevant results of the analysis is communicated to end-users’ mobile device via 2G/3G GPRS. Hence, the proposed IoT architecture enables the implementation of IoT systems for improving efficiency in three key application areas at low cost
Deploying artificial intelligence in the wireless infrastructure:The challenges ahead
The adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) techniques entails a substantial change in the wireless ecosystem where data as well as their owners become crucial. As a result, the roll out of AI techniques in wireless systems raises a plethora of questions. In this context, we describe the challenges observed by the wireless stakeholders when deploying AI. Furthermore, we introduce the recent discussion in field of ethics that appear when managing wireless communications data.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version