Effect of event-based sensing on IoT node power efficiency. Case study: air quality monitoring in smart cities

The predicted growth of urban populations has prompted researchers and administrations to improve services provided to citizens. At the heart of these services are wireless networks of multiple different sensors supported by the Internet of Things. The main purpose of these networks is to provide sufficient information to achieve more intelligent transport, energy supplies, social services, public environments (indoor and outdoor) and security, etc. Two major technological advances would improve such networks in Smart Cities: efficient communication between nodes and a reduction in each node's power consumption. The present paper analyses how event-based sampling techniques can address both challenges. We describe the fundamentals of the triggering mechanisms that characterise Send-on-Delta, Send-on-Area, Send-on-Energy and Send-on-Prediction techniques to restrict the number of transmissions between the sensor node and the supervision or monitoring node without degrading tracking of the sensed variable. At the same time, these aperiodic techniques reduce consumption by sensor node electronic devices. In order to quantify the energy savings, we evaluate the increase achieved in the average lifetime of sensor node batteries. The data provided by Smart City tools in the city of Santander (Spain) were selected to conduct a case study of the main pollutants that determine city air quality: SO2 , NO2 , O3 and PM10 . We conclude that event-based sensing techniques can yield up to 50% savings in sensor node consumption compared to classical periodic sensing techniques

Una aproximación basada en metamodelado del área de proceso de Validación del CMMI: un caso de estudio

En el presente artículo se establece una aproximación para la mejora de procesos a través del área de proceso de validación del CMMI, mediante un enfoque basado en metamodelado. Se consideró el área de proceso de Validación, específicamente la meta SG1 preparar la validación. Mediante el metamodelo, se definen una taxonomía de proyectos, la caracterización de pruebas, plantillas de pruebas para el producto a validar, para el entorno de validación, para los procedimientos y criterios de prueba, y un plan de pruebas. La aproximación fue sometida a evaluación, por medio de un caso de estudio. El caso de estudio se llevó a cabo en la Dirección de Informática, de una institución de educación superior pública. La aproximación demostró su validez, ya que, los probadores consideran que les aporta las pruebas específicas para el desarrollo del proceso de validación y es permite preparar la validación para un proyecto determinado

Estrategias Mercadológicas para Enfrentar el Covid-19, Ixtapaluca, Nezahualcóyotl e Iztapalapa, México

Las empresas y la sociedad en México y el mundo han tenido que enfrentar la Pandemia del Covid-19, adentrándolas en la búsqueda por las mejores estrategias; así como, en la investigación por conocer cuáles se han usado, planteándose como objetivos: 1. conocer las estrategias mercadológicas, específicamente del marketing directo y digital, que usan las empresas de los Municipios de Ixtapaluca, Nezahualcóyotl y la Alcaldía de Iztapalapa en México; 2. conocer las Apps que los estudiantes usaban antes y durante la pandemia. Para cumplir con los objetivos planteados, el marco teórico se fundamenta en la revisión de los conceptos de Marketing directo y marketing digital conceptualizados por Kotler (2017), Fischer y Espejo (2017). El método de investigación utilizado está divido en dos partes, en el primero se aplica una investigación cuantitativa a través de un cuestionario de 37 preguntas aplicado a 78 estudiantes residentes del Municipio de Nezahualcóyotl, para conocer el uso de las Apps antes y durante la pandemia del Covid-19 y en la segunda parte se aplica el método descriptivo usando la observación y recolección de fotografías. Los resultados fueron presentados en la selección de algunas gráficas y con lista de las diferentes estrategias mercadológicas que usaron las empresas. Básicamente con el uso de las redes sociales como el Facebook y el WhatsApp, o herramientas como catálogos digitales y el asistente virtual. En la sección de la discusión y las conclusiones 3 se sabe que la Pandemia no termina y es necesario continuar con el apoyo a empresas y la sociedad en general.   Companies and society in Mexico and the world had to face the Covid19 pandemic. This has made them to carry out various investigation with the aim to: 1. Know the marketing strategies, specifically direct and digital marketing, used by the companies of the Municipalities of Ixtapaluca, Nezahualcóyotl and the Mayor of Iztapalapa in Mexico; 2. Know the apps students used before and during the pandemic. To achieve the objectives set out, the theoretical framework was based on the revision of the concept of Direct Marketing and Digital Marketing conceptualized by Kotler (2017) and Fischer and Espejo (2017). The research method used is divided into two parts. The first part applies a quantitative research through a 37-item questionnaire distributed to 78 students residing in the Municipality of Nezahualcóyotl to understand the use of the apps before and during the Covid-19 pandemic. For the second part, the descriptive method is applied using observation and collection of photographs. The results were presented in the selection of some graphs and with a list of the different marketing strategies used by the companies. This includes the use of social networks like Facebook and WhatsApp, or tools like digital catalogs and virtual assistant. The discussion section and conclusions shows that the pandemic has not ended, and it is necessary to continue to support businesses and society at large using the different digital marketing channels

A review of software project testing

In this article a review of software projects based on a taxonomy project is established, allowing the development team or testing personnel to identify the tests to which the project must be subjected for validation. The taxonomy is focused on identifying software projects according to their technology. To establish the taxonomy, a development method comprised of 5 phases was applied

The NWP Activities at AEMET (Spain): 28th ALADIN Workshop & HIRLAM ASM

Póster presentado en: Joint 28th ALADIN Workshop & HIRLAM All Staff Meeting, celebrado del 16 al 20 de abril de 2018 en Toulouse (Francia)

Graphics Processing Unit–Enhanced Genetic Algorithms for Solving the Temporal Dynamics of Gene Regulatory Networks

Understanding the regulation of gene expression is one of the key problems in current biology. A promising method for that purpose is the determination of the temporal dynamics between known initial and ending network states, by using simple acting rules. The huge amount of rule combinations and the nonlinear inherent nature of the problem make genetic algorithms an excellent candidate for finding optimal solutions. As this is a computationally intensive problem that needs long runtimes in conventional architectures for realistic network sizes, it is fundamental to accelerate this task. In this article, we study how to develop efficient parallel implementations of this method for the fine-grained parallel architecture of graphics processing units (GPUs) using the compute unified device architecture (CUDA) platform. An exhaustive and methodical study of various parallel genetic algorithm schemes—master-slave, island, cellular, and hybrid models, and various individual selection methods (roulette, elitist)—is carried out for this problem. Several procedures that optimize the use of the GPU’s resources are presented. We conclude that the implementation that produces better results (both from the performance and the genetic algorithm fitness perspectives) is simulating a few thousands of individuals grouped in a few islands using elitist selection. This model comprises 2 mighty factors for discovering the best solutions: finding good individuals in a short number of generations, and introducing genetic diversity via a relatively frequent and numerous migration. As a result, we have even found the optimal solution for the analyzed gene regulatory network (GRN). In addition, a comparative study of the performance obtained by the different parallel implementations on GPU versus a sequential application on CPU is carried out. In our tests, a multifold speedup was obtained for our optimized parallel implementation of the method on medium class GPU over an equivalent sequential single-core implementation running on a recent Intel i7 CPU. This work can provide useful guidance to researchers in biology, medicine, or bioinformatics in how to take advantage of the parallelization on massively parallel devices and GPUs to apply novel metaheuristic algorithms powered by nature for real-world applications (like the method to solve the temporal dynamics of GRNs)

A 2.5MHz bandpass active complex filter With 2.4MHz bandwidth for wireless communications

This paper presents a fully differential 8thorder transconductor-based active complex filter with 2.4MHz bandwidth and centered at 2.5MHz, designed in a 90nm 2.5V 7M and MIM capacitors CMOS process technology. The filter compliants with the requirements of the IEEE802.15.4 standard. Simulation results including mismatching and process variations over the extracted view of the circuit are shown. The filter has a nominal gain of 12dB, good selectivity (20dB@2MHz offset), high image rejection (51dB nominal) and low power consumption (3.6mA @2.5V).Junta de Andalucía TIC-927Gobierno de España TEC2007-6807

Aperiodic two-layer energy management system for community microgrids based on blockchain strategy

Regulatory changes in different countries regarding self-consumption and growing public concern about the environment are encouraging the establishment of community microgrids. These community microgrids integrate a large number of small-scale distributed energy resources and offers a solution to enhance power system reliability and resilience. This work proposes a geographically-based split of the community microgrids into clusters of members that tend to have similar consumption and generation profiles, mimicking the most typical layout of cities. Assuming a community microgrid divided into clusters, a two-layer architecture is developed to facilitate the greater penetration of distributed energy resources in an efficient way. The first layer, referred as the market layer, is responsible for creating local energy markets with the aim of maximising the economic benefits for community microgrid members. The second layer is responsible for the network reconfiguration, which is based on the energy balance within each cluster. This layer complies with the IEC 61850 communication standard, in order to control commercial sectionalizing and tie switches. This allows the community microgrid network to be reconfigured to minimise energy exchanges with the main grid, without requiring interaction with the distributed system operator. To implement this two-layer energy management strategy, an aperiodic market approach based on Blockchain technology, and the additional functionality offered by Smart Contracts is adopted. This embraces the concept of energy communities since it decentralizes the control and eliminates intermediaries. The use of aperiodic control techniques helps to overcome the challenges of using Blockchain technology in terms of storage, computational requirements and member privacy. The scalability and modularity of the Smart Contract-based system allow each cluster of members to be designed by tailoring the system to their specific needs. The implementation of this strategy is based on low-cost off-the-shelf devices, such as Raspberry Pi 4 Model B boards, which operate as Blockchain nodes of community microgrid members. Finally, the strategy has been validated by emulating two use cases based on the IEEE 123-node system network model highlighting the benefits of the proposal.Comunidad de Madri

A Taxonomy for software testing projects

This article establishes taxonomy for software testing projects, allowing the development team or testing personnel to identify the tests to which the project must be subjected for validation. The taxonomy is focused on identifying software projects according to their technology. To establish the taxonomy, a development method comprised of 5 phases was applied. The developed taxonomy is comprised of 9 categories and 27 subcategories and was validated by a group of information technology (IT) managers and professionals in the field of IT through the use of a survey. The results obtained from the survey are subjected to the Mann-Whitney U test, which indicates that the taxonomy is validated. The taxonomy can be implemented in development organizations with or without a testing team that provides a classification for technology projects