The role of advanced sensing in smart cities Hancke, Gerhard P; Silva, Bruno de Carvalho E; Hancke, Jr, Gerhard P
Sensors,
12/2012, Volume:
13, Issue:
1
Journal Article, Book Review
Peer reviewed
Open access
In a world where resources are scarce and urban areas consume the vast majority of these resources, it is vital to make cities greener and more sustainable. Advanced systems to improve and automate ...processes within a city will play a leading role in smart cities. From smart design of buildings, which capture rain water for later use, to intelligent control systems, which can monitor infrastructures autonomously, the possible improvements enabled by sensing technologies are immense. Ubiquitous sensing poses numerous challenges, which are of a technological or social nature. This paper presents an overview of the state of the art with regards to sensing in smart cities. Topics include sensing applications in smart cities, sensing platforms and technical challenges associated with these technologies. In an effort to provide a holistic view of how sensing technologies play a role in smart cities, a range of applications and technical challenges associated with these applications are discussed. As some of these applications and technologies belong to different disciplines, the material presented in this paper attempts to bridge these to provide a broad overview, which can be of help to researchers and developers in understanding how advanced sensing can play a role in smart cities.
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Nowadays, the number of vehicles has increased exponentially, but the bedrock capacities of roads and transportation systems have not developed in an equivalent way to efficiently cope with the ...number of vehicles traveling on them. Due to this, road jamming and traffic correlated pollution have increased with the associated adverse societal and financial effect on different markets worldwide. A static control system may block emergency vehicles due to traffic jams. Wireless Sensor networks (WSNs) have gained increasing attention in traffic detection and avoiding road congestion. WSNs are very trendy due to their faster transfer of information, easy installation, less maintenance, compactness and for being less expensive compared to other network options. There has been significant research on Traffic Management Systems using WSNs to avoid congestion, ensure priority for emergency vehicles and cut the Average Waiting Time (AWT) of vehicles at intersections. In recent decades, researchers have started to monitor real-time traffic using WSNs, RFIDs, ZigBee, VANETs, Bluetooth devices, cameras and infrared signals. This paper presents a survey of current urban traffic management schemes for priority-based signalling, and reducing congestion and the AWT of vehicles. The main objective of this survey is to provide a taxonomy of different traffic management schemes used for avoiding congestion. Existing urban traffic management schemes for the avoidance of congestion and providing priority to emergency vehicles are considered and set the foundation for further research.
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Vehicular traffic is endlessly increasing everywhere in the world and can cause terrible traffic congestion at intersections. Most of the traffic lights today feature a fixed green light sequence, ...therefore the green light sequence is determined without taking the presence of the emergency vehicles into account. Therefore, emergency vehicles such as ambulances, police cars, fire engines, etc. stuck in a traffic jam and delayed in reaching their destination can lead to loss of property and valuable lives. This paper presents an approach to schedule emergency vehicles in traffic. The approach combines the measurement of the distance between the emergency vehicle and an intersection using visual sensing methods, vehicle counting and time sensitive alert transmission within the sensor network. The distance between the emergency vehicle and the intersection is calculated for comparison using Euclidean distance, Manhattan distance and Canberra distance techniques. The experimental results have shown that the Euclidean distance outperforms other distance measurement techniques. Along with visual sensing techniques to collect emergency vehicle information, it is very important to have a Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol to deliver the emergency vehicle information to the Traffic Management Center (TMC) with less delay. Then only the emergency vehicle is quickly served and can reach the destination in time. In this paper, we have also investigated the MAC layer in WSNs to prioritize the emergency vehicle data and to reduce the transmission delay for emergency messages. We have modified the medium access procedure used in standard IEEE 802.11p with PE-MAC protocol, which is a new back off selection and contention window adjustment scheme to achieve low broadcast delay for emergency messages. A VANET model for the UTMS is developed and simulated in NS-2. The performance of the standard IEEE 802.11p and the proposed PE-MAC is analysed in detail. The NS-2 simulation results have shown that the PE-MAC outperforms the IEEE 802.11p in terms of average end-to-end delay, throughput and energy consumption. The performance evaluation results have proven that the proposed PE-MAC prioritizes the emergency vehicle data and delivers the emergency messages to the TMC with less delay compared to the IEEE 802.11p. The transmission delay of the proposed PE-MAC is also compared with the standard IEEE 802.15.4, and Enhanced Back-off Selection scheme for IEEE 802.15.4 protocol EBSS, an existing protocol to ensure fast transmission of the detected events on the road towards the TMC and the comparative results have proven the effectiveness of the PE-MAC over them. Furthermore, this research work will provide an insight into the design of an intelligent urban traffic management system for the effective management of emergency vehicles and will help to save lives and property.
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Using a single sensor to determine the pose estimation of a device cannot give accurate results. This paper presents a fusion of an inertial sensor of six degrees of freedom (6-DoF) which comprises ...the 3-axis of an accelerometer and the 3-axis of a gyroscope, and a vision to determine a low-cost and accurate position for an autonomous mobile robot. For vision, a monocular vision-based object detection algorithm speeded-up robust feature (SURF) and random sample consensus (RANSAC) algorithms were integrated and used to recognize a sample object in several images taken. As against the conventional method that depend on point-tracking, RANSAC uses an iterative method to estimate the parameters of a mathematical model from a set of captured data which contains outliers. With SURF and RANSAC, improved accuracy is certain; this is because of their ability to find interest points (features) under different viewing conditions using a Hessain matrix. This approach is proposed because of its simple implementation, low cost, and improved accuracy. With an extended Kalman filter (EKF), data from inertial sensors and a camera were fused to estimate the position and orientation of the mobile robot. All these sensors were mounted on the mobile robot to obtain an accurate localization. An indoor experiment was carried out to validate and evaluate the performance. Experimental results show that the proposed method is fast in computation, reliable and robust, and can be considered for practical applications. The performance of the experiments was verified by the ground truth data and root mean square errors (RMSEs).
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Autonomous mobile robots are becoming more prominent in recent time because of their relevance and applications to the world today. Their ability to navigate in an environment without a need for ...physical or electro-mechanical guidance devices has made it more promising and useful. The use of autonomous mobile robots is emerging in different sectors such as companies, industries, hospital, institutions, agriculture and homes to improve services and daily activities. Due to technology advancement, the demand for mobile robot has increased due to the task they perform and services they render such as carrying heavy objects, monitoring, search and rescue missions, etc. Various studies have been carried out by researchers on the importance of mobile robot, its applications and challenges. This survey paper unravels the current literatures, the challenges mobile robot is being faced with. A comprehensive study on devices/sensors and prevalent sensor fusion techniques developed for tackling issues like localization, estimation and navigation in mobile robot are presented as well in which they are organised according to relevance, strengths and weaknesses. The study therefore gives good direction for further investigation on developing methods to deal with the discrepancies faced with autonomous mobile robot.
Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), in recent times, have become one of the most promising network solutions with a wide variety of applications in the areas of agriculture, environment, healthcare and ...the military. Notwithstanding these promising applications, sensor nodes in WSNs are vulnerable to different security attacks due to their deployment in hostile and unattended areas and their resource constraints. One of such attacks is the DoS jamming attack that interferes and disrupts the normal functions of sensor nodes in a WSN by emitting radio frequency signals to jam legitimate signals to cause a denial of service. In this work we propose a step-wise approach using a statistical process control technique to detect these attacks. We deploy an exponentially weighted moving average (EWMA) to detect anomalous changes in the intensity of a jamming attack event by using the packet inter-arrival feature of the received packets from the sensor nodes. Results obtained from a trace-driven simulation show that the proposed solution can efficiently and accurately detect jamming attacks in WSNs with little or no overhead.
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Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are becoming increasingly popular with the advent of the Internet of things (IoT). Various real-world applications of WSNs such as in smart grids, smart farming and ...smart health would require a potential deployment of thousands or maybe hundreds of thousands of sensor nodes/actuators. To ensure proper working order and network efficiency of such a network of sensor nodes, an effective WSN management system has to be integrated. However, the inherent challenges of WSNs such as sensor/actuator heterogeneity, application dependency and resource constraints have led to challenges in implementing effective traditional WSN management. This difficulty in management increases as the WSN becomes larger. Software Defined Networking (SDN) provides a promising solution in flexible management WSNs by allowing the separation of the control logic from the sensor nodes/actuators. The advantage with this SDN-based management in WSNs is that it enables centralized control of the entire WSN making it simpler to deploy network-wide management protocols and applications on demand. This paper highlights some of the recent work on traditional WSN management in brief and reviews SDN-based management techniques for WSNs in greater detail while drawing attention to the advantages that SDN brings to traditional WSN management. This paper also investigates open research challenges in coming up with mechanisms for flexible and easier SDN-based WSN configuration and management.
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Long-Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN) is a fast-growing communication system for Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN) in the Internet of Things (IoTs) deployments. LoRaWAN is built to optimize ...LPWANs for battery lifetime, capacity, range, and cost. LoRaWAN employs an Adaptive Data Rate (ADR) scheme that dynamically optimizes data rate, airtime, and energy consumption. The major challenge in LoRaWAN is that the LoRa specification does not state how the network server must command end nodes pertaining rate adaptation. As a result, numerous ADR schemes have been proposed to cater for the many applications of IoT technology, the quality of service requirements, different metrics, and radio frequency (RF) conditions. This offers a challenge for the reliability and suitability of these schemes. This paper presents a comprehensive review of the research on ADR algorithms for LoRaWAN technology. First, we provide an overview of LoRaWAN network performance that has been explored and documented in the literature and then focus on recent solutions for ADR as an optimization approach to improve throughput, energy efficiency and scalability. We then distinguish the approaches used, highlight their strengths and drawbacks, and provide a comparison of these approaches. Finally, we identify some research gaps and future directions.
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Introduction to Industrial Control Networks Galloway, B.; Hancke, G. P.
IEEE Communications surveys and tutorials,
2013-Second Quarter, Volume:
15, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
An industrial control network is a system of interconnected equipment used to monitor and control physical equipment in industrial environments. These networks differ quite significantly from ...traditional enterprise networks due to the specific requirements of their operation. Despite the functional differences between industrial and enterprise networks, a growing integration between the two has been observed. The technology in use in industrial networks is also beginning to display a greater reliance on Ethernet and web standards, especially at higher levels of the network architecture. This has resulted in a situation where engineers involved in the design and maintenance of control networks must be familiar with both traditional enterprise concerns, such as network security, as well as traditional industrial concerns such as determinism and response time. This paper highlights some of the differences between enterprise and industrial networks, presents a brief history of industrial networking, gives a high level explanation of some operations specific to industrial networks, provides an overview of the popular protocols in use and describes current research topics. The purpose of this paper is to serve as an introduction to industrial control networks, aimed specifically at those who have had minimal exposure to the field, but have some familiarity with conventional computer networks.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is a promising technology which tends to revolutionize and connect the global world via heterogeneous smart devices through seamless connectivity. The current demand for ...machine-type communications (MTC) has resulted in a variety of communication technologies with diverse service requirements to achieve the modern IoT vision. More recent cellular standards like long-term evolution (LTE) have been introduced for mobile devices but are not well suited for low-power and low data rate devices such as the IoT devices. To address this, there is a number of emerging IoT standards. Fifth generation (5G) mobile network, in particular, aims to address the limitations of previous cellular standards and be a potential key enabler for future IoT. In this paper, the state-of-the-art of the IoT application requirements along with their associated communication technologies are surveyed. In addition, the third generation partnership project cellular-based low-power wide area solutions to support and enable the new service requirements for Massive to Critical IoT use cases are discussed in detail, including extended coverage global system for mobile communications for the Internet of Things, enhanced machine-type communications, and narrowband-Internet of Things. Furthermore, 5G new radio enhancements for new service requirements and enabling technologies for the IoT are introduced. This paper presents a comprehensive review related to emerging and enabling technologies with main focus on 5G mobile networks that is envisaged to support the exponential traffic growth for enabling the IoT. The challenges and open research directions pertinent to the deployment of massive to critical IoT applications are also presented in coming up with an efficient context-aware congestion control mechanism.
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