A Multi-Technology Communication Platform for Urban Mobile Sensing.

Rodrigo Almeida,Carlos Senna,Rui Oliveira,Miguel Luís,Susana Sargento

doi:10.3390/s18041184

Rodrigo Almeida, Carlos Senna + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/s18041184

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Abstract

A common concern in smart cities is the focus on sensing procedures to provide city-wide information to city managers and citizens. To meet the growing demands of smart cities, the network must provide the ability to handle a large number of mobile sensors/devices, with high heterogeneity and unpredictable mobility, by collecting and delivering the sensed information for future treatment. This work proposes a multi-wireless technology communication platform for opportunistic data gathering and data exchange with respect to smart cities. Through the implementation of a proprietary long-range (LoRa) network and an urban sensor network, our platform addresses the heterogeneity of Internet of Things (IoT) devices while conferring communications in an opportunistic manner, increasing the interoperability of our platform. It implements and evaluates a medium access communication (MAC) protocol for LoRa networks with multiple gateways. It also implements mobile Opportunistic VEhicular (mOVE), a delay-tolerant network (DTN)-based architecture to address the mobility dimension. The platform provides vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication with support for highly reliable and actionable information flows. Moreover, taking into account the high mobility pattern that a smart city scenario presents, we propose and evaluate two forwarding strategies for the opportunistic sensor network.

Highlights

Technological progress over the recent decades, favored by developments in information and communication technology (ICT), has revolutionized the way people live their everyday lives
Making use of the developed network elements and the multi-technology employment, it leverages the multi-gateway medium access communication (MAC) in the LoRa protocol in order to ensure reliable communications within this technology, and the WiFi opportunistic and delay-tolerant network to increase the heterogeneity of the platform
Versatility and adaptability denote core characteristics of the described platform. Its implementation endows it with a modular design capable of integrating new features, e.g., new communication technologies, additional sensory equipment, new network functionalities, and new mobile entities, conferring a dynamic nature to it

Summary

Introduction

Technological progress over the recent decades, favored by developments in information and communication technology (ICT), has revolutionized the way people live their everyday lives. IoT is a paradigm where any everyday object can be equipped with both processing and communication capabilities in order to collect and exchange information between things, or the Internet [1]. One domain of particular interest is the urban context, since the paradigm tries to address the problems caused by the rapid increase in population density. To confront this adversity, the availability of public resources as well as the quality of services offered to the citizens should increase, while the operational costs of public administration should tend to decrease, encouraging the fast deployment of the smart city concept [2,3].

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