Juan R. Santana

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.

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.

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.

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.

A Living Smart City: Dynamically Changing Nodes Behavior through over the Air Programming

The Future Internet Research and Experimentation (FIRE) initiative aims at achieving experimentation and testing in large-scale environments, through the creation of a multidisciplinary research environment for investigating and experimentally validating highly innovative and revolutionary ideas for new networking and service paradigms. SmartSantander FP7 project aims at the creation of an experimental test facility for the research and experimentation of architectures, key enabling technologies, services and applications for the Internet of Things (IoT) in the context of a city. In this sense, this paper presents the deployed facility, emphasizing the capacity of experimenting over this large-scale test bed, through the reprograming of the deployed IoT devices with different code images. For this purpose, the implementation and validation of an Over the Air programming (OTAP) scheme has been carried out, coexisting with the service provision and experimentation ability simultaneously offered over the deployed facility.

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.