Design and analysis of adaptive hierarchical low-power long-range networks

A new phase of evolution of Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communication has started where vertical Internet of Things (IoT) deployments dedicated to a single application domain gradually change to multi-purpose IoT infrastructures that service different applications across multiple industries. New networking technologies are being deployed operating over sub-GHz frequency bands that enable multi-tenant connectivity over long distances and increase network capacity by enforcing low transmission rates to increase network capacity. Such networking technologies allow cloud-based platforms to be connected with large numbers of IoT devices deployed several kilometres from the edges of the network. Despite the rapid uptake of Long-power Wide-area Networks (LPWANs), it remains unclear how to organize the wireless sensor network in a scaleable and adaptive way. This paper introduces a hierarchical communication scheme that utilizes the new capabilities of Long-Range Wireless Sensor Networking technologies by combining them with broadly used 802.11.4-based low-range low-power technologies. The design of the hierarchical scheme is presented in detail along with the technical details on the implementation in real-world hardware platforms. A platform-agnostic software firmware is produced that is evaluated in real-world large-scale testbeds. The performance of the networking scheme is evaluated through a series of experimental scenarios that generate environments with varying channel quality, failing nodes, and mobile nodes. The performance is evaluated in terms of the overall time required to organize the network and setup a hierarchy, the energy consumption and the overall lifetime of the network, as well as the ability to adapt to channel failures. The experimental analysis indicate that the combination of long-range and short-range networking technologies can lead to scalable solutions that can service concurrently multiple applications

Competition: An Adaptive Protocol Stack for High-Dependability based on the Population Protocols Paradigm

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Design and evaluation of a person-centric heart monitoring system over fog computing infrastructure

Heart disease and stroke are becoming the leading cause of death worldwide. Electrocardiography monitoring devices (ECG) are the only tool that helps physicians diagnose cardiac abnormalities. Although the design of ECGs has followed closely the electronics miniaturization evolution over the years, existing wearable ECG have limited accuracy and rely on external resources to analyze the signal and evaluate heart activity. In this paper, we work towards empowering the wearable device with processing capabilities to locally analyze the signal and identify abnormal behavior. The ability to differentiate between normal and abnormal heart activity significantly reduces (a) the need to store the signals, (b) the data transmitted to the cloud and (c) the overall power consumption. Based on this concept, the HEART platform is presented that combines wearable embedded devices, mobile edge devices, and cloud services to provide on-the-spot, reliable, accurate and instant monitoring of the heart. The performance of the system is evaluated concerning the accuracy of detecting abnormal events and the power consumption of the wearable device. Results indicate that a very high percentage of success can be achieved in terms of event detection ratio and the device being operative up to a several days without the need for a recharge

An IoT-based solution for monitoring a fleet of educational buildings focusing on energy efficiency

Raising awareness among young people and changing their behaviour and habits concerning energy usage iskey to achieving sustained energy saving. Additionally, young people are very sensitive to environmental protection so raising awareness among children is much easier than with any other group of citizens. This work examinesways to create an innovative Information & Communication Technologies (ICT) ecosystem (including web-based, mobile, social and sensing elements) tailored specifically for school environments, taking into account both theusers (faculty, staff, students, parents) and school buildings, thus motivating and supporting young citizenś behavioural change to achieve greater energy efficiency. A mixture of open-source IoT hardware and proprietary platforms on the infrastructure level, are currently being utilized for monitoring a fleet of 18 educational buildings across 3 countries, comprising over 700 IoT monitoring points. Hereon presented is the system's high-level architecture, as well as several aspects of its implementation, related to the application domain of educational building monitoring and energy efficiency. The system is developed based on open-source technologies andservices in order to make it capable of providing open IT-infrastructure and support from different commercial hardware/sensor vendors as well as open-source solutions. The system presented can be used to develop and offer newapp-based solutions that can be used either for educational purposes or for managing the energy efficiency ofthebuilding. The system is replicable and adaptable to settings that may be different than the scenarios envisionedhere (e.g., targeting different climate zones), different IT infrastructures and can be easily extended to accommodate integration with other systems. The overall performance of the system is evaluated in real-world environment in terms of scalability, responsiveness and simplicity

Enabling stream processing for people-centric IoT based on the fog computing paradigm

The world of machine-to-machine (M2M) communication is gradually moving from vertical single purpose solutions to multi-purpose and collaborative applications interacting across industry verticals, organizations and people - A world of Internet of Things (IoT). The dominant approach for delivering IoT applications relies on the development of cloud-based IoT platforms that collect all the data generated by the sensing elements and centrally process the information to create real business value. In this paper, we present a system that follows the Fog Computing paradigm where the sensor resources, as well as the intermediate layers between embedded devices and cloud computing datacenters, participate by providing computational, storage, and control. We discuss the design aspects of our system and present a pilot deployment for the evaluating the performance in a real-world environment. Our findings indicate that Fog Computing can address the ever-increasing amount of data that is inherent in an IoT world by effective communication among all elements of the architecture

Delivering elder-care environments utilizing TV-channel based mechanisms

In this paper, we present a smart environment for elderly. What makes the development of such system challenging is that the concept of smartness for elderly brings to the extreme the idea of invisibility of the technology. In our experience, elders are well-disposed to new technologies, provided that those will not require significant changes - namely, they are invisible - to their habits. Starting from this consideration, 200 caregivers responses were collected by questionnaire, so as to better understand elders' needs and habits. A system was subsequently developed allowing elders to access a number of "modern web services" as standard TV channels: at channel 43 there is the health status, at channel 45 the photos of the family, at 46 the agenda of the week, just to mention few of the available services. The content of such services is automatically generated by the smart devices in the environment and is managed by the caregivers (e.g., family members) by simple web apps. Fourteen families were asked to install the system in their house. The results of these experiments confirm that the proposed system is considered effective and user-friendly by elders

NETCS: A New Simulator of Population Protocols and Network Constructors

Network Constructors are an extension of the standard population protocol model in which finite-state agents interact in pairs under the control of an adversary scheduler. In this work we present NETCS, a simulator designed to evaluate the performance of various network constructors and population protocols under different schedulers and network configurations. Our simulator provides researchers with an intuitive user interface and a quick experimentation environment to evaluate their work. It also harnesses the power of the cloud, as experiments are executed remotely and scheduled through the web interface provided. To prove the validity and quality of our simulator we provide an extensive evaluation of multiple protocols with more than 100000 experiments for different network sizes and configurations that validate the correctness of the theoretical analysis of existing protocols and estimate the real values of the hidden asymptotic coefficients. We also show experimentally (with more than 40000 experiments) that a probabilistic algorithm is capable of counting the actual size of the network in bounded time given a unique leader

Empowering citizens towards the co-creation of sustainable cities

Urban ecosystems are becoming one of the most potentially attractive scenarios for innovating new services and technologies. In parallel, city managers, urban utilities and other stakeholders are fostering the intensive use of advanced technologies aiming at improving present city performance and sustainability. The deployment of such technology entails the generation of massive amounts of information which in many cases might become useful for other services and applications. Hence, aiming at taking advantage of such massive amounts of information and deployed technology as well as breaking down the potential digital barrier, some easy-to-use tools have to be made available to the urban stakeholders. These tools integrated in a platform, operated directly or indirectly by the city, provide a singular opportunity for exploiting the concept of connected city whilst promoting innovation in all city dimensions and making the co-creation concept a reality, with an eventual impact on government policies.This work would not have been possible without the contribution of the OrganiCity team, which has been partially funded by the European Union, under the grant agreement No. 645198 of the Horizon 2020 research and innovation program

Using an Educational IoT Lab Kit and Gamification for Energy Awareness in European Schools

The use of maker community tools and IoT technologies inside classrooms is spreading in an increasing number of education and science fields. GAIA is a European research project focused on achieving behavior change for sustainability and energy awareness in schools. In this work, we report on how a large IoT deployment in a number of educational buildings and real-world data from this infrastructure, are utilized to support a "maker" lab kit activity inside the classroom, together with a serious game. We also provide some insights to the integration of these activities in the school curriculum, along with a discussion on our feedback so far from a series of workshop activities in a number of schools. Our initial results show strong acceptance by the school community.Comment: This is the submitted preprint version of a paper published in the FabLearn Europe'18 conferenc