The role of advanced sensing in smart cities Hancke, Gerhard P; Silva, Bruno de Carvalho E; Hancke, Jr, Gerhard P
Sensors,
01/2013, 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.
In today's competitive industry marketplace, the companies face growing demands to improve process efficiencies, comply with environmental regulations, and meet corporate financial objectives. Given ...the increasing age of many industrial systems and the dynamic industrial manufacturing market, intelligent and low-cost industrial automation systems are required to improve the productivity and efficiency of such systems. The collaborative nature of industrial wireless sensor networks (IWSNs) brings several advantages over traditional wired industrial monitoring and control systems, including self-organization, rapid deployment, flexibility, and inherent intelligent-processing capability. In this regard, IWSN plays a vital role in creating a highly reliable and self-healing industrial system that rapidly responds to real-time events with appropriate actions. In this paper, first, technical challenges and design principles are introduced in terms of hardware development, system architectures and protocols, and software development. Specifically, radio technologies, energy-harvesting techniques, and cross-layer design for IWSNs have been discussed. In addition, IWSN standards are presented for the system owners, who plan to utilize new IWSN technologies for industrial automation applications. In this paper, our aim is to provide a contemporary look at the current state of the art in IWSNs and discuss the still-open research issues in this field and, hence, to make the decision-making process more effective and direct.
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.
For 100 years, there has been no change in the basic structure of the electrical power grid. Experiences have shown that the hierarchical, centrally controlled grid of the 20th Century is ill-suited ...to the needs of the 21st Century. To address the challenges of the existing power grid, the new concept of smart grid has emerged. The smart grid can be considered as a modern electric power grid infrastructure for enhanced efficiency and reliability through automated control, high-power converters, modern communications infrastructure, sensing and metering technologies, and modern energy management techniques based on the optimization of demand, energy and network availability, and so on. While current power systems are based on a solid information and communication infrastructure, the new smart grid needs a different and much more complex one, as its dimension is much larger. This paper addresses critical issues on smart grid technologies primarily in terms of information and communication technology (ICT) issues and opportunities. The main objective of this paper is to provide a contemporary look at the current state of the art in smart grid communications as well as to discuss the still-open research issues in this field. It is expected that this paper will provide a better understanding of the technologies, potential advantages and research challenges of the smart grid and provoke interest among the research community to further explore this promising research area.
Information and communication technologies (ICT) represent a fundamental element in the growth and performance of smart grids. A sophisticated, reliable and fast communication infrastructure is, in ...fact, necessary for the connection among the huge amount of distributed elements, such as generators, substations, energy storage systems and users, enabling a real time exchange of data and information necessary for the management of the system and for ensuring improvements in terms of efficiency, reliability, flexibility and investment return for all those involved in a smart grid: producers, operators and customers. This paper overviews the issues related to the smart grid architecture from the perspective of potential applications and the communications requirements needed for ensuring performance, flexible operation, reliability and economics.
This review article discusses various techniques of environmental monitoring (EM) systems and what is required for the variations in hardware implementation and/or algorithmic logic. This review ...presents an overview of the existing state-of-the-art practices of environmental monitoring systems and is mainly focused on energy-efficient and low-cost environment monitoring systems. The following are some of the major factors that usually rule the development of EM systems, namely, energy efficiency, cost of the overall system, response time of the sensor module, good accuracy of the system, adequate signal-to-noise ratio, radio frequency interference/electromagnetic interference (RFI/EMI) rejection during varying atmospheric conditions and in inhomogeneous environments, a user friendly interface with the computer, and complexity of computation. The above concerns are also recognized by reference to research articles on environmental monitoring systems. Emphasis is on the necessity of robust systems that address all or most of the above mentioned criteria.
Contactless and contact smart card systems use the physical constraints of the communication channel to implicitly prove the proximity of a token. These systems, however, are potentially vulnerable ...to an attack where the attacker relays communication between the reader and a token. Relay attacks are not new but are often not considered a major threat, like eavesdropping or skimming attacks, even though they arguably pose an equivalent security risk. In this paper we discuss the feasibility of implementing passive and active relay attacks against smart tokens and the possible security implications if an attacker succeeds. Finally, we evaluate the effectiveness of time-out constraints, distance bounding and the use of a additional verification techniques for making systems relay-resistant and explain the challenges still facing these mechanisms.
Topology control plays an important role in the design of wireless ad hoc and sensor networks; it is capable of constructing networks that have desirable characteristics such as sparser connectivity, ...lower transmission power, and a smaller node degree. In this research, a new distributed topology control technique is presented that enhances energy efficiency and reduces radio interference in wireless sensor networks. Each node in the network makes local decisions about its transmission power and the culmination of these local decisions produces a network topology that preserves global connectivity. Central to this topology control technique is the novel Smart Boundary Yao Gabriel Graph (SBYaoGG) and optimizations to ensure that all links in the network are symmetric and energy efficient. Simulation results are presented demonstrating the effectiveness of this new technique as compared to other approaches to topology control.
Internet of things (IoT) is a concept that is currently gaining a lot of popularity as a result of its potential to be incorporated into many heterogeneous systems. Because of its diversity, ...integrating IoT is conceivable in almost all fields, including the healthcare sector. For instance, a promising technology in the healthcare sector known as wireless body area network (WBAN) could be integrated with the IoT to enhance its productivity. However, in order to guarantee the optimization of the operation of the healthcare applications facilitated by the WBAN-enabled IoT technology, there must be enough support from all the different protocol stack layers so as to satisfy the critical quality-of-service (QoS) requirements of the WBAN systems. Consequently, the medium access control (MAC) protocol has recently been gaining lots of attention in the area of WBANs due to its ability to manage and coordinate when a shared communication channel can be accessed. For the purpose of achieving efficient MAC protocols for WBAN-enabled IoT technology, this paper investigates some key MAC protocols that could be exploited in WBANs based on their characteristics, service specifications, technical issues such as energy wastage issues, and possible technical solutions were provided to enhance energy efficiency, channel utilization, data transmission rate, and dealy rate. Also, these MAC protocols were grouped and compared based on short- and long-range communication standards. Following this, future directions and open research issues are pointed out.
The papers in this special section focus on sustainable and intelligent precision agriculture. Human society has experienced three industrial revolutions from mechanization, and electricity to ...information automation. Every industrial revolution significantly alters the form of agricultural industry from labor-intensive farming, mechanized production, precision agriculture to large-scale fine grained industrial agriculture. However, the agricultural industry at current stage still faces many challenges, such as global food security, food safety, poverty reduction, and sustainable natural resource management. Now the fourth industrial revolution is ongoing, that is characterized by a fusion of emerging technologies such as Industry 4.0, Internet of Things, Cloud/Edge Computing, Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, and Blockchain.
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