A solution for tracking visitors in Smart Shopping environments: A real platform implementation based on Raspberry Pi

In parallel to the explosion of the use of wireless technologies to connect devices, the scientific community is continually aiming to take advantage of such technologies to provide new services. In this sense, there have been many attempts to exploit the information provided by IEEE802.11 and Bluetooth interfaces, commonly found in most of the smartphones that are being used at the time of writing. In this paper we describe a novel deployment that fosters such approach. Furthermore, the measurements that are gathered are made available, thanks to its integration within the SmartSantander testbed, and to the federation with complementary testbeds. The federation platform and the described deployment are outcomes of the FESTIVAL collaborative project (Europe-Japan). Besides depicting the corresponding software architecture, the paper also discusses some preliminary results that are used to assess the feasibility of the proposed scheme.This work was funded in part by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Programme of the FESTIVAL project (Federated Interoperable Smart ICT Services Development and Testing Platforms) under grant agreement 643275, and from the Japanese National Institute of Information and Communications Technology. This work has been also supported by the Spanish Government (Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad, Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional, FEDER) by means of the project ADVICE (TEC2015-71329-C2-1-R)

Integrating a smart city testbed into a large-scale heterogeneous federation of future internet experimentation facilities: the SmartSantander approach

For some years already, there has been a plethora of research initiatives throughout the world that have deployed diverse experimentation facilities for Future Internet technologies research and development. While access to these testbeds has been sometimes restricted to the specific research community supporting them, opening them to different communities can not only help those infrastructures to achieve a wider impact, but also to better identify new possibilities based on novel considerations brought by those external users. On top of the individual testbeds, supporting experiments that employs several of them in a combined and seamless fashion has been one of the main objectives of different transcontinental research initiatives, such as FIRE in Europe or GENI in United States. In particular, Fed4FIRE project and its continuation, Fed4FIRE+, have emerged as "best-in-town" projects to federate heterogeneous experimentation platforms. This paper presents the most relevant aspects of the integration of a large scale testbed on the IoT domain within the Fed4FIRE+ federation. It revolves around the adaptation carried out on the SmartSantander smart city testbed. Additionally, the paper offers an overview of the different federation models that Fed4FIRE+ proposes to testbed owners in order to provide a complete view of the involved technologies. The paper is also presenting a survey of how several specific research platforms from different experimentation domains have fulfilled the federation task following Fed4FIRE+ concepts.This work was partially funded by the European project Federation for FIRE Plus (Fed4FIRE+) from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Programme with the Grant Agreement No. 732638 and by the Spanish Government (MINECO) by means of the projects ADVICE: Dynamic provisioning of connectivity in high density 5G wireless scenarios (TEC2015-71329-C2-1-R) and Future Internet Enabled Resilient Cities (FIERCE)

Practical Lessons from the Deployment and Management of a Smart City Internet-of-Things Infrastructure: The SmartSantander testbed case

The smart cities vision is inexorably turning into a reality. Among the different approaches used to realize more intelligent and sustainable environments, a common denominator is the role that information and communication technologies will play. Moreover, if there is one of these technologies that emerges among the rest, it is the Internet-of-Things (IoT). The ability to ubiquitously embed sensing and actuating capabilities that this paradigm enables is at the forefront of the technologies driving the urban environments transformation. However, there are very little practical experiences of the IoT infrastructure deployment at a large scale. This paper presents practical solutions to the main challenges faced during the deployment and management of a city-scale IoT infrastructure, which encompasses thousands of sensors and other information sources. The experience we have gained during the deployment and operation of the IoT-based smart city infrastructure carried out at Santander (Spain) has led to a number of practical lessons that are summarized in this paper. Moreover, the challenges and problems examples, excerpted from our own real-life experience, are described as motivators for the adopted solutions.This work was supported in part by the research project SmartSantander through the 7th Framework Programme of the European Commission under Grant FP7-ICT-2009-5 and in part by the Spanish Government by means of the project ADVICE "Dynamic provisioning of connectivity in high density 5G wireless scenarios" under Grant TEC2015-71329-C2-1-R

On the use of information and infrastructure technologies for the smart city research in Europe: a survey

The Smart City paradigm has become one of the most important research topics around the globe. Particularly in Europe, it is considered as a solution for unstoppable increase of high density urban environments and the European Commission has included the Smart City research as one of the key objectives for the FP7 (Seventh Framework Program) and H2020 (Horizon 2020) research initiatives. As a result, a considerable amount of quality research, with particular emphasis on information and communication technologies, has been produced. In this paper, we review the current efforts dedicated in Europe to this research topic. Particular attention is paid in the review to the platforms and infrastructure technologies adopted to introduce the Internet of Things into the city, taking into account the constraints and harshness of urban environments. Furthermore, this paper also considers the efforts in the experimental perspective, which includes the review of existing Smart City testbeds, part of wider European initiatives such as FIRE (Future Internet Research and Experimentation) and FIWARE. Last but not least, the main efforts in providing interoperability between the different experimental facilities are also presented.This work was funded in part by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Programme of the FESTIVAL project (Federated Interoperable Smart ICT Services Development and Testing Platforms) under grant agreement 643275, and from the Japanese National Institute of Information and Communications Technology

FESTIVAL: towards an intercontinental federation approach

In the last years, in both Europe and Japan, several initiatives have been started with the aim of building and testing Internet of Things and Smart ICT architectures and platforms to address specific domain issues through designed solutions. FESTIVAL EU-Japan collaborative project aims at federating these testbeds, making them interoperable, allowing centralized data collection and analyzing societal issues in both cultures, all of it under a user privacy-preserving context. In this sense, FESTIVAL pursues a twofold approach: firstly, the intercontinental federation of testbeds in Japan and Europe using existing tools as well as developing new ones; and secondly, the creation of new services and experiments, to be performed on top of the FESTIVAL testbeds and experimentation facilities, associated to three different smart city domains: smart energy, smart building and smart shopping. Throughout this article the current status of the project (in its first year) is shown, describing the Experimentation as a Service federation approach to be implemented, with a first analysis of the platforms and testbeds that are included within the project. Furthermore, the paper also describes the services and use cases that will be conducted within FESTIVAL lifespan. Finally, next steps to be carried out in the coming years of the project are indicated.This work was funded in part by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Programme of the FESTIVAL project (Federated Interoperable Smart ICT Services Development and Testing Platforms) under grant agreement 643275, and from the Japanese National Institute of Information and Communications Technolog

FESTIVAL: heterogeneous testbed federation across Europe and Japan

FESTIVAL is an H2020 EU-Japan collaborative project that aims to federate heterogeneous testbeds, making them interoperable and building an “Experimentation as a Service” (EaaS) model. Going beyond the traditional nature of experimental facilities, related to computational and networking large scale infrastructures, FESTIVAL testbeds have heterogeneous nature and in order to be federated they have been clustered in four categories: “Open Data” (i.e. open datasets), “IoT” (i.e. sensors and actuators), “IT” (i.e. computational resources) and “Living Labs” (i.e. people). Considering that every testbed category provides specific resources, the main challenge for FESTIVAL is to develop a platform that can allow experimenters to access very different assets in an homogeneous and transparent way, supporting them in the phases of the experiments. The FESTIVAL architecture, based on a multi-level federation approach, proposes a solution to this problem providing also a set of functionalities to manage and monitor the experiments. FESTIVAL tools, also, include the possibility to access FIWAREGeneric Enablers allowing to deploy predefined components to address specific needs in the experimentation (e.g. data analysis, big data management etc.). The FESTIVAL platform will be tested on three different smart city domains across Japan and Europe: smart energy, smart building and smart shopping.This work was funded in part by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Programme of the FESTIVALproject (Federated Interoperable Smart ICT Services Development and Testing Platforms) under grant agreement no. 643275, and by the Japanese National Institute of Information and Communications Technology

A privacy-aware crowd management system for smart cities and smart buildings

Cities are growing at a dizzying pace and they require improved methods to manage crowded areas. Crowd management stands for the decisions and actions taken to supervise and control densely populated spaces and it involves multiple challenges, from recognition and assessment to application of actions tailored to the current situation. To that end, Wi-Fi-based monitoring systems have emerged as a cost-effective solution for the former one. The key challenge that they impose is the requirement to handle large datasets and provide results in near real-time basis. However, traditional big data and event processing approaches have important shortcomings while dealing with crowd management information. In this paper, we describe a novel system architecture for real-time crowd recognition for smart cities and smart buildings that can be easily replicated. The described system proposes a privacy-aware platform that enables the application of artificial intelligence mechanisms to assess crowds' behavior in buildings employing sensed Wi-Fi traces. Furthermore, the present paper shows the implementation of the system in two buildings, an airport and a market, as well as the results of applying a set of classification algorithms to provide crowd management information.This work was supported in part by the Spanish Government (MINECO) by means of the Project Future Internet Enabled Resilient CitiEs (FIERCE) under Grant RTI2018-093475-A-I00, and in part by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Programme through the European project Federated CPS Digital Innovation Hubs for the Smart Anything Everywhere Initiative (FED4SAE) under Grant 761708

Toward understanding crowd mobility in smart cities through the Internet of Things

Understanding crowd mobility behaviors would be a key enabler for crowd management in smart cities, benefiting various sectors such as public safety, tourism and transportation. This article discusses the existing challenges and the recent advances to overcome them and allow sharing information across stakeholders of crowd management through Internet of Things (IoT) technologies. The article proposes the usage of the new federated interoperable semantic IoT platform (FIESTA-IoT), which is considered as "a system of systems". The platform can support various IoT applications for crowd management in smart cities. In particular, the article discusses two integrated IoT systems for crowd mobility: 1) Crowd Mobility Analytics System, 2) Crowd Counting and Location System (from the SmartSantander testbed). Pilot studies are conducted in Gold Coast, Australia and Santander, Spain to fulfill various requirements such as providing online and offline crowd mobility analyses with various sensors in different regions. The analyses provided by these systems are shared across applications in order to provide insights and support crowd management in smart city environments.The pilot study in Gold Coast is conducted in collaboration with NEC Australia. This work has been partially funded by the Spanish Government (MINECO) under Grant Agreement No. TEC2015-71329-C2-1-R ADVICE (Dynamic Provisioning of Connectivity in High Density 5G Wireless Scenarios) project and by the EU Horizon 2020 Programme under Grant Agreements No. 731993 AUTOPILOT (Automated Driving Progressed by Internet Of Things), 643943 FIESTAIoT (Federated Interoperable Semantic IoT Testbeds and Applications), and 643275 FESTIVAL (Federated Interoperable Smart ICT Services Development and Testing Platforms) projects and the joint project by NEC Laboratories Europe and Technische Universität Dortmund. The content of this paper does not reflect the official opinion of the Spanish Government or European Union. Responsibility for the information and views expressed therein lies entirely with the authors

Managing large amounts of data generated by a Smart City internet of things deployment

The Smart City concept is being developed from a lot of different axes encompassing multiple areas of social and technical sciences. However, something that is common to all these approaches is the central role that the capacity of sharing information has. Hence, Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) are seen as key enablers for the transformation of urban regions into Smart Cities. Two of these technologies, namely Internet of Things and Big Data, have a predominant position among them. The capacity to "sense the city" and access all this information and provide added-value services based on knowledge derived from it are critical to achieving the Smart City vision. This paper reports on the specification and implementation of a software platform enabling the management and exposure of the large amount of information that is continuously generated by the IoT deployment in the city of Santander.This work has been partially funded by the research project SmartSantander, under FP7- ICT-2009-5 of the 7th Framework Programme of the European Community. The authors would also like to express their gratitude to the Spanish government for the funding in the following project: "Connectivity as a Service: Access for the Internet of the Future", COSAIF (TEC2012-38574-C02-01)

Large-scale mobile sensing enabled internet-of-things testbed for smart city services

Smart cities are one of the key application domains for the Internet-of-Things paradigm. Extending the Web into the physical realm of a city, by means of the widespread deployment of spatially distributed Internet-addressable devices with sensing and/or actuation capabilities, allows improving efficiency of city services. Vehicles moving around the city become excellent probes when the objective is to gather information across the city in a cost effective manner. Public transportation fleets, taxis, or vehicles such as waste collection trucks cover most of the urban areas with a limited number of vehicles. This paper presents the deployment of a large scale Internet-of-Things testbed that has been carried out in the city of Santander. It extends previous descriptions by providing a specification of one of the unique features of the testbed, namely, the devices that have been installed on 140 buses, taxis, and vans that every day drive around the city. Besides the physical characteristics of the devices installed and the lessons learnt during the deployment, the paper introduces the three mobile sensing network strategies used for distributing the data gathered. Finally, the paper sketches some of smart city services which might be provided using the information coming from the mobile IoT devices.This work has been partially funded by Research Project SmartSantander, under FP7-ICT-2009-5 of the 7th Framework Programme of the European Community. The authors would like to acknowledge the collaboration with the rest of partners within the consortium leading to the results presented in this paper.The authors would also like to express their gratitude to the Spanish government for the funding in the following project: “Connectivity as a Service: Access for the Internet of the Future,” COSAIF (TEC2012-38574-C02- 01)