Laura Garcia

An IoT service-oriented system for agriculture monitoring

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), Internet of things (IoT) and aerial mapping are nowadays being used very much in agriculture. The challenge of joining those technologies requires a new and smart wireless network topology for devices communication. Problems like scalability and manageability are important challenges when there are many devices. This paper presents the design of a smart IoT communication system manager used as a low cost irrigation controller. The proposal is a powerful irrigation tool that uses real time data such as the variable rate irrigation and some parameters taken from the field. The field parameters, the index vegetation (estimated using aerial images) and the irrigation events, such as flow level, pressure level or wind speed, are periodically sampled. Data is processed in a smart cloud service based on the Drools Guvnor (a Business Rules Manager). The developed multimedia platform can be controlled remotely by a mobile phone. Finally, we measured the bandwidth consumed when the system is sending different kinds of commands and data.

System to Recommend the Best Place to Live Based on Wellness State of the User Employing the Heart Rate Variability

The conditions of the environment where a person lives have a great impact on his wellness state. When buying a new house, it is important to select a place that aids in improving the wellness state of the buyer or, at least, keeps it at the same level. A deficient wellness state implies an increase of stress and the appearance of some effects associated with it. Heart rate variability (HRV) allows measuring the stress or wellness levels of a person by measuring the difference in time between heartbeats. A low HRV is related to high stress levels whereas a high HRV is associated with a high wellness state. In this paper, we present a system that measures the wellness and stress levels of home buyers by employing sensors that measure the HRV. Our system is able to process the data and recommend the best neighborhood to live in considering the wellness state of the buyer. Several tests were performed utilizing different locations. In order to determine the best neighborhood, we have developed an algorithm that assigns different values to the area in accordance with the HRV measures. Results show that the system is effective in providing the recommendation of the place that would allow the person to live with the highest wellness state.

Design and Deployment of Low-Cost Sensors for Monitoring the Water Quality and Fish Behavior in Aquaculture Tanks during the Feeding Process

The monitoring of farming processes can optimize the use of resources and improve its sustainability and profitability. In fish farms, the water quality, tank environment, and fish behavior must be monitored. Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are a promising option to perform this monitoring. Nevertheless, its high cost is slowing the expansion of its use. In this paper, we propose a set of sensors for monitoring the water quality and fish behavior in aquaculture tanks during the feeding process. The WSN is based on physical sensors, composed of simple electronic components. The system proposed can monitor water quality parameters, tank status, the feed falling and fish swimming depth and velocity. In addition, the system includes a smart algorithm to reduce the energy waste when sending the information from the node to the database. The system is composed of three nodes in each tank that send the information though the local area network to a database on the Internet and a smart algorithm that detects abnormal values and sends alarms when they happen. All the sensors are designed, calibrated, and deployed to ensure its suitability. The greatest efforts have been accomplished with the fish presence sensor. The total cost of the sensors and nodes for the proposed system is less than 90 €.

Wireless Technologies for IoT in Smart Cities

As cities continue to grow, numerous initiatives for Smart Cities are being conducted. The concept of Smart City encompasses several concepts being governance, economy, management, infrastructure, technology and people. This means that a Smart City can have different communication needs. Wireless technologies such as WiFi, ZigBee, Bluetooth, WiMax, 4G or LTE have presented themselves as solutions to the communication needs of Smart City initiatives. However, as most of them employ unlicensed bands, interference and coexistence problems are increasing. In this paper, the wireless technologies available nowadays for IoT in Smart Cities are reviewed. Their characteristics and their adequacy to each domain is considered. The problems derived of over-crowded unlicensed spectrum and coexistence difficulties among each technology are discussed as well. Finally, power consumption concerns are addressed.

An m-health application for cerebral stroke detection and monitoring using cloud services

Abstract Over 25 million people suffered from cerebral strokes in a span of 23 years. Many systems are being developed to monitor and improve the life of patients that suffer from different diseases. However, solutions for cerebral strokes are hard to find. Moreover, due to their widespread utilization, smartphones have presented themselves as the most appropriate devices for many e-health systems. In this paper, we propose a cerebral stroke detection solution that employs the cloud to store and analyze data in order to provide statistics to public institutions. Moreover, the prototype of the application is presented. The three most important symptoms of cerebral strokes were considered to develop the tasks that are conducted. Thus, the first task detects smiles, the second task employs voice recognition to determine if a sentence is repeated correctly and, the third task determines if the arms can be raised. Several tests were performed in order to verify the application. Results show its ability to determine whether users have the symptoms of cerebral stroke or not.

Survey of Transportation of Adaptive Multimedia Streaming service in Internet

World Wide Web is the greatest boon towards the technological advancement of modern era. Using the benefits of Internet globally, anywhere and anytime, users can avail the benefits of accessing live and on demand video services. The streaming media systems such as YouTube, Netflix, and Apple Music are reining the multimedia world with frequent popularity among users. A key concern of quality perceived for video streaming applications over Internet is the Quality of Experience (QoE) that users go through. Due to changing network conditions, bit rate and initial delay and the multimedia file freezes or provide poor video quality to the end users, researchers across industry and academia are explored HTTP Adaptive Streaming (HAS), which split the video content into multiple segments and offer the clients at varying qualities. The video player at the client side plays a vital role in buffer management and choosing the appropriate bit rate for each such segment of video to be transmitted. A higher bit rate transmitted video pauses in between whereas, a lower bit rate video lacks in quality, requiring a tradeoff between them. The need of the hour was to adaptively varying the bit rate and video quality to match the transmission media conditions. Further, The main aim of this paper is to give an overview on the state of the art HAS techniques across multimedia and networking domains. A detailed survey was conducted to analyze challenges and solutions in adaptive streaming algorithms, QoE, network protocols, buffering and etc. It also focuses on various challenges on QoE influence factors in a fluctuating network condition, which are often ignored in present HAS methodologies. Furthermore, this survey will enable network and multimedia researchers a fair amount of understanding about the latest happenings of adaptive streaming and the necessary improvements that can be incorporated in future developments.

Physical Wellbeing Monitoring Employing Non-Invasive Low-Cost and Low-Energy Sensor Socks

Determining and improving the wellbeing of people is one of the priorities of the OECD countries. Nowadays many sensors allow monitoring different parameters in regard to the wellbeing of people. These sensors can be deployed in smartphones, clothes or accessories like watches. Many studies have been performed on wearable devices that monitor certain aspects of the health of people, especially for specific diseases. In this paper, we propose a non-invasive low-cost and low-energy physical wellbeing monitoring system that provides a wellness score based on the obtained data. We present the architecture of the system and the disposition of the sensors on the sock. The algorithm of the system is presented as well. The wellness threshold evaluation module allows determining if the monitored parameter is within healthy ranges. The message forwarding module allows decreasing the energy consumption of the system by detecting the presence of alerts or changes in the data. Finally, a simulation was performed in order to determine the energy consumption of the system. Results show that our algorithm allows saving 44.9% of the initial energy in 10,000 min for healthy people.

SDN-based throughput allocation in wireless networks for heterogeneous adaptive video streaming applications

Adaptive video streaming providers take advantage of the HTTP protocol to deliver video contents to the applications of the end-users. Although, these applications use bitrate adaptation to adjust video resolution to network user conditions, this mechanism is used to improve fairness. Jains algorithm has been employed to determine the increase of the Quality of Experience (QoE) of end-users. In wireless networks, performance is highly degraded when there is high number of concurrent users requesting adaptive video streaming. As a result, the QoE of some users is unpredictably degraded. In this paper, we propose an SDN-based TCP throughput management algorithm to provide fairness to competing users over a wireless network. It provides fairness among clients in order to avoid oscillation of the video quality and stable buffer length. Real measurements show an improvement of 39% of fairness among users for two competing clients, 43% for three competing clients and 46% for four.

An Intelligent handover process algorithm in 5G networks: The use case of mobile cameras for environmental surveillance

The environmental surveillance using cameras is extremely important for researchers to monitor animal behaviors and as part of an environmental awareness program for children. Cameras installed on vehicles can be used to obtain videos, however, the mobility of the vehicle impacts on the uplink data rate. The next generation of mobile networks as known fifth-generation (5G) brings high improvement for massive data rate services as Internet of Things (IoT), although, the architecture of 5G consists of various heterogeneous cells coverage. The process of handover among cells faces significant challenges, such as weakness parameters of the handover process on selecting an appropriate network destination and tradeoff the network targets. In order to provide better QoS for ultra high definition (UHD) mobile users in the handoff process, we propose an intelligent handover algorithm model to decide on the handover process and the load balance among the network devices in the coverage area.

System for monitoring the wellness state of people in domestic environments employing emoticon-based HCI

Wellness state is affected by the habitability state of the domestic environment. Monitoring it can help to discover the causes of a low wellness levels aiding people in the improvement of their quality of life. In this paper, we propose a system to monitor the wellness state of people utilizing Likert’s scale to determine the state of the user through an emoticon-based human–computer interaction. The system is intended for domestic environments and measures the habitability conditions of the dwelling (such as temperature, humidity, luminosity and noise) employing sensors. An algorithm is designed in order to establish how to measure those conditions and to calculate the statistics that allows tracking their progress. The obtained information is presented to the user to compare his/her wellness state with the habitability conditions. Measures in a real domestic environment were performed in order to determine the configuration of our system. The energy efficiency of the algorithm provides an improvement between 99.36 and 99.62% in the energy consumption depending on the selected parameters.