José Antonio Galache

Smart cities at the forefront of the future internet

Smart cities have been recently pointed out by M2M experts as an emerging market with enormous potential, which is expected to drive the digital economy forward in the coming years. However, most of the current city and urban developments are based on vertical ICT solutions leading to an unsustainable sea of systems and market islands. In this work we discuss how the recent vision of the Future Internet (FI), and its particular components, Internet of Things (IoT) and Internet of Services (IoS), can become building blocks to progress towards a unified urban-scale ICT platform transforming a Smart City into an open innovation platform. Moreover, we present some results of generic implementations based on the ITU-Ts Ubiquitous Sensor Network (USN) model. The referenced platform model fulfills basic principles of open, federated and trusted platforms (FOTs) at two different levels: the infrastructure level (IoT to support the complexity of heterogeneous sensors deployed in urban spaces), and at the service level (IoS as a suit of open and standardized enablers to facilitate the composition of interoperable smart city services). We also discuss the need of infrastructures at the European level for a realistic large-scale experimentally-driven research, and present main principles of the unique-in-the-world experimental test facility under development within the SmartSantander EU project.

SmartSantander: Internet of Things Research and Innovation through Citizen Participation

The Smart City concept relates to improving efficiency of city services and facilitating a more sustainable development of cities. However, it is important to highlight that, in order to effectively progress towards such smart urban environments, the people living in these cities must be tightly engaged in this endeavour. This paper presents two novel services that have been implemented in order to bring the Smart City closer to the citizen. The Participatory Sensing service we are proposing exploits the advanced features of smartphones to make the user part of the ubiquitous sensing infrastructure over which the Smart City concept is built. The Augmented Reality service is connected to the smart city platform in order to create an advanced visualization tool where the plethora of available information is presented to citizens embedded in their natural surroundings. A brief description of the smart city platform on top of which these services are built is also presented.

Unified Link Layer API: A generic and open API to manage wireless media access

We present the Unified Link Layer API (ULLA) framework: an open and extensible API framework that incorporates a number of requirements related to a wide range of applications, including multi-mode and cross-layer optimisation scenarios. This work has been mainly motivated by the complexity and interoperability problems related to the large number of wireless APIs available today. ULLA provides database and object oriented service abstractions to applications through a generic query mechanism, a method to setup asynchronous notifications and a command interface. It encapsulates link level heterogeneity by defining a unified model for link technologies. We describe design details, various implementation options and discuss how the proposed ULLA design provides an extensible, scalable and platform independent framework, enabling seamless link access and control in various types of device platforms. Application programming using ULLA is illustrated using code examples. Numerous usage scenarios for ULLA are presented, highlighting unified access to heterogeneous link standards while encouraging application innovation.

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.

A citizen-centric approach towards global-scale smart city platform

In order to help smart cities to provide responsive services to improve the quality of life of their citizens, a global-scale platform relying on Cloud computing as an enabler to bridge the Internet of Things with Internet of People via Internet of Services, is presented in this paper. This platform will focus on a citizen-centric approach, offering to end-users the possibility of creating their own Cloud services and share them with other citizens, as well as involving other city stakeholders ranging from municipalities to service developers and application integrators. The definition, design and development of the aforementioned platform has been carried out within ClouT project (still ongoing), framed into a joint European-Japanese initiative, where different field trials developed on top of the developed platform, have been deployed in the four cities that take part of the project: Mitaka and Fujisawa in Japan, and Santander and Genova in Europe.

Towards experimentation-service duality within a Smart City scenario

Smart City concept and applications domains are taking a prominent position in nowadays innovation trends. Future Internet and ICT in general are considering the Smart City as the key concept for the future technological developments. In particular, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) and Machine to Machine (M2M) communications are some of the basic enablers for fulfilling the Smart City concept requirements. In this paper we are describing the SmartSantander experimental facility. This Smart City testbed has been envisioned on a twofold approach: experimentation support experimentation and service provision. The paper not only describes the main features of the deployed testbed but also showcases the supported experimentation-service duality by showing how it is possible to run a routing protocol experiment while a service is provided to the citizens over the same network.

ClouT: Leveraging Cloud Computing Techniques for Improving Management of Massive IoT Data

The Smart City concept relates to improve efficiency of city services and facilitate a more sustainable development of cities, as well as standing as the key concept for the future technological developments in Future Internet, IoT and, for the great quantity of information stored, big data and cloud computing. In this sense, this paper presents the ClouT project, a joint European-Japanese project, whose main aim is making citizens aware of city resources and helping them to use and care these resources by mean of smart IoT services in the Cloud. This objective is addressed through the definition of a three layer architecture composed of: CIaaS, CPaaS and CSaaS layers. On top of this architecture, different use cases associated to different application domains will be developed, mainly within the four cities that take part of the consortium: Mitaka and Fujisawa in Japan, and Santander and Genova in Europe.

The Advantages of IoT and Cloud Applied to Smart Cities

The European Commission and the Japanese National Institute of Information and Communication Technologies (NICT) have made a big effort to promote collaboration between the IoT and Cloud communities and define a common baseline for future research. ClouT (Cloud+IoT) project is co-funded as part of the first FP7 EU-Japan cooperation call and gives life to a fruitful collaboration between six European and seven Japanese organizations. The overarching objective is to provide enhanced solutions for smarter cities by using cloud computing to overcome some of the current challenges and limitations in the IoT domain. Through the combination of IoT and cloud computing, smart cities will be able to build new and enhanced services by using the large amounts of data stored in the cloud and by processing it in quasi-real time. This paper describes ClouT Reference Architecture which was outlined by leveraging on existing works performed by established IoT and cloud Research Communities both in Europe and Japan. ClouT Reference Architecture establishes a common ground of objects, definitions and rules mapping the IoT and cloud advantages into a unique context.

Using SNR to Improve Multi-Hop Routing

This paper analyzes the use of link quality, based on the signal to noise ratio, as a metric to improve routing in multi-hop wireless networks. We compare the behavior and performance with those of other approaches, namely a simple minimum-hop selection process, as well as the expected transmission count (ETX) metric, which has recently gathered relevant attention from the scientific community. We use a simulation based analysis, but we account for a realistic channel model, able to mimic the Gray Zones effect, which has been proven to have a great impact on wireless-based communications in general and over multi-hop topologies in particular. The results show that important improvements can be brought about by making use of the proposed metric to enhance route selection procedures.

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.