Industry 4.0: Industrial IoT Enhancement and WSN Performance Analysis

L'abstract è presente nell'allegato / the abstract is in the attachmen

A Densely-Deployed, High Sampling Rate, Open-Source Air Pollution Monitoring WSN

Air quality, especially particulate matter, has recently attracted a lot of attention from governments, industry, and academia, motivating the use of denser air quality monitoring networks based on low-cost sensing strategies. However, low-cost sensors are frequently sensitive to aging, environmental conditions, and pollutant cross-sensitivities. These issues have been only partially addressed, limiting their usage. In this study, we develop a low-cost particulate matter monitoring system based on special-purpose acquisition boards, deployed for monitoring air quality on both stationary and mobile sensor platforms. We explore the influence of all model variables, the quality of different calibration strategies, the accuracy across different concentration ranges, and the usefulness of redundant sensors placed in each station. The collected sensor data amounts to about 50GB of data, gathered in six months during the winter season. Tests of statically immovable stations include an analysis of accuracy and sensors’ reliability made by comparing our results with more accurate and expensive standard β radiation sensors. Tests on mobile stations have been designed to analyze the reactivity of our system to unexpected and abrupt events. These experiments embrace traffic analysis, pollution investigation using different means of transport and pollution analysis during peculiar events. With respect to other approaches, our methodology has been proved to be extremely easy to calibrate, to offer a very high sample rate (one sample per second), and to be based on an open-source software architecture. Database and software are available as open source in [1]

Wireless Sensor Networks and TSCH: a compromise between Reliability, Power Consumption and Latency

7siReliability, power consumption, and latency are the three main performance indicators of wireless sensor networks. Time slotted channel hopping (TSCH) is a promising technique introduced in the IEEE 802.15.4 standard that performs some steps ahead in the direction of the final dream to meet all the previous requirements at the same time. In this article, a simple and effective mathematical model is presented for TSCH that, starting from measurements performed on a real testbed, permits to characterize both the network and the surrounding environment. To better characterize power consumption, an experimental measurement campaign was purposely performed on OpenMote B devices. The model, which was checked against a real 6TiSCH implementation, can be employed to predict network behaviour when configuration parameters are varied, in such a way to satisfy different application contexts. Results show that, when one of the three above indices is privileged, unavoidably there is a worsening of the others.openopenScanzio, Stefano; Vakili, Mohammad Ghazi; Cena, Gianluca; Demartini, Claudio Giovanni; Montrucchio, Bartolomeo; Valenzano, Adriano; Zunino, ClaudioScanzio, Stefano; Vakili, Mohammad Ghazi; Cena, Gianluca; Demartini, Claudio Giovanni; Montrucchio, Bartolomeo; Valenzano, Adriano; Zunino, Claudi

Comparison of heuristic approaches to PCI planning for Quantum Computers

Quantum Computing (QC) provides the possibility to develop new approaches to tackle complex problems. Real-world applications, however, cannot yet be managed directly due to the limitation of present and near-future noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) computers. Decomposition into smaller and manageable subproblems is often needed to take advantage of QC even when using hybrid (classical-quantum) solvers or solvers that already apply decomposition techniques. In this paper, heuristic decomposition algorithms to solve the Physical Cell Identifier (PCI) problem in 4G cellular networks in a way suitable for QC are presented. The PCI problem can be viewed as a map coloring problem with additional constraints and has been represented in a Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO) model, a form that, for instance, a quantum annealing machine could crunch. We propose two strategies, with variable decomposition granularity. The first one solves the problem recursively through bisection (max-cut problem), to use only one qubit to represent the status of the objects, avoiding one-hot encoding and thus minimizing the qubit requirement. The second is a multi-step approach, finally solving sets of randomized modified max-k-cut problems of customizable qubit size. We executed the algorithms on real cellular networks of one of the main Italian national telecom operators (TIM). The results show that all proposed QUBO approaches can be effectively applied to very large problems with similar or better performance of the reference classical algorithm, paving the way for the use on NISQ computers

Industrial data-collector by enabling OPC-UA standard for Industry 4.0

Industrial Communication Systems have become an increasingly essential part of factory automation, motion control, networked control systems. New and real-time capable solutions are required to support the always more present Industry 4.0 paradigm: for both local and wide area networks. At the same time, standardization has also started moving in this direction: in particular, for future open and dynamic system architectures, promising activities based on OPC-UA are serious attempt to satisfy stricter requirements for interoperability and information modeling with hard real-time needs. For these reasons, in this paper the development of an OPC-UA based architecture is described: the main target is to build a “collector” able to collect data from the shop-floor and convert them in the OPC-UA standard for an agile and effective vertical integration. The subsequent analysis carried out on the testbed mainly focuses on the performance evaluation of the method. To achieve high-performance data transmission in a fair environment, a parallel communication mechanism has been proposed

Ubiquitous fridge with natural language interaction

Past years have seen a dramatic increase in the development and use of connected devices to improve life quality. The introduction of smart appliances aims at addressing everyday issues in a home environment, such as reduce power consumption and waste and automate some recurring processes. One of the main places where this ubiquitous computing revolution may take place is the home kitchen, as it requires constant attention to goods and products which may expire or run out soon. This paper analyzes the use of RFID technology as a way to enable food inventory in a smart fridge device, primarily aiming at reducing waste. By combining the use of Natural Language Interaction and product identification by means of RFID tags, the smart fridge application allows getting an instant overview of the fridge content, as well as an alert triggered by food expiring soon. Furthermore, the use of a real-time cloud database integrated with the natural language agent allows to automatically check the availability of a certain product at home and determine the feasibility of a set of recipes. The application is integrated with the Google Assistant development framework and it is released as a smart application add-on, allowing anyone who owns a smartphone to interact with the smart fridge device. Finally, the RFID reader and the microcontroller used for this application do not require a high price overhead and may be easily embedded within a newer smart fridge or integrated into a standard fridge

A Densely-Deployed, High Sampling Rate, Open-Source Air Pollution Monitoring WSN

This work contains data gathered by a series of sensors (PM 10, PM 2.5, temperature, relative humidity, and pressure) in the city of Turin in the north part of Italy (more precisely, at coordinates 45.041903N, 7.625850E). The data has been collected for a period of 5 months, from October 2018 to February 2019. The scope of the study was to address the calibration of low-cost particulate matter sensors and compare the readings against official measures provided by the Italian environmental agency (ARPA Piemonte). The database proposed has been designed as general enough to handle not only PM measures plus temperature and relative humidity but also almost any other quantity, such as altitude, wind speed and direction, radioactivity, electromagnetic pollution, etc. The total size of the database is about 50GB of time-stamped data. The directory also contains several useful scripts that can be used to perform the calibration and the analysis of the acquired data, such as plotting graphs, displaying the correlation with the reference values, printing measurement errors, etc. The scripts implement two commonly used calibration techniques, namely Multivariate Linear Regression and Random Forest, resorting to the SciKitLearn Python library. The README files included in the main subdirectories report hints and comments on the data set format and the logic of the scripts. Please refer to them for further details. Please note that, following article 18.5 of Italian Decree 155/2010 on the dissemination of air quality data, which absorbs EU directive 2008/50/CE, ARPA Piemonte (http://www.arpa.piemonte.it/english-version) can not be ascribed for any mistake in these data, that can not be considered official, unlike the ones provided by ARPA itself

Quantum Pliers Cutting the Blockchain

Recent years have seen the continuous evolution of technology, which has led to the definition of frameworks such as the internet of things (IoT) and Industry 4.0. These paradigms are producing enormous quantities of data every single day. These data are subject to data analysis, shared publicly or kept secret. Traditionally, this task was carried out using databases. With the advent of Blockchain and other distributed ledger technologies (DLTs), instead, these data have a new way of being stored and shared (or kept private). The last actor role in this play is acted by quantum computers, since sufficiently large quantum computers are expected to seriously threaten the security and integrity of DLTs thanks to their totally different way of representing information. This paper aims to investigate the real threats for blockchain due to quantum computing and review post-quantum DLT solutions for traceability applications

A fuzzy control system for energy efficient wireless devices in the Internet of Vehicles

Embedded systems are common in the Internet of Things domain: their integration in vehicles and mobile devices is being fostered in the Internet of Vehicles (IoV). IoV has direct applications on intelligent transportation systems and smart cities. Besides basic requirements, such as ease of installation, cost-effectiveness, scalability, and flexibility, IOV applications need to guarantee energy-efficient and good-quality communication. In fact, IoV implementations are commonly based on wireless nodes, which rely on a limited energy source; therefore, an efficient communication among the nodes is desirable to prolong the lifetime of the devices. In particular, the alternation of active and sleep states and the regulation of the transmission power represent two common approaches to save energy. Based on this strategy, an effective fuzzy control system is presented in the paper to manage power consumption and Quality of Services (QoS) of IoV applications. Two fuzzy controllers increase the battery life while keeping a good throughput to workload ratio. This technique has been simulated with two leading technologies in IoV: IEEE 802.11b/g/n and IEEE 802.11p. Experimental results show a network lifetime improvement ranging from 30 to 40%, according to the adopted Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol