The Internet has made several giant leaps over the years, from a fixed to a mobile Internet, then to the Internet of Things, and now to a Tactile Internet. The Tactile Internet goes far beyond data, audio and video delivery over fixed and mobile networks, and even beyond allowing communication and collaboration among things. It is expected to enable haptic communications and allow skill set delivery over networks. Some examples of potential applications are tele-surgery, vehicle fleets, augmented reality and industrial process automation. Several papers already cover many of the Tactile Internet-related concepts and technologies, such as haptic codecs, applications, and supporting technologies. However, none of them offers a comprehensive survey of the Tactile Internet, including its architectures and algorithms. Furthermore, none of them provides a systematic and critical review of the existing solutions. To address these lacunae, we provide a comprehensive survey of the architectures and algorithms proposed to date for the Tactile Internet. In addition, we critically review them using a well-defined set of requirements and discuss some of the lessons learned as well as the most promising research directions.

https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02963827/document

A Comprehensive Survey of the Tactile Internet: State-of-the-Art and Research Directions

Internet of things (IoT) is going to be ubiquitous in the next few years. In the smart city initiative, millions of sensors will be deployed for the implementation of IoT related services. Even in the normal cellular architecture, IoT will be deployed as a value added service for several new applications. Such massive deployment of IoT sensors and devices would certainly cost a large sum of money. In addition to the cost of deployment, the running costs or the operational expenditure of the IoT networks will incur huge power bills and spectrum license charges. As IoT is going to be a pervasive technology, its sustainability and environmental effects too are important. Energy efficiency and overall resource optimization would make it the long term technology of the future. Therefore, green IoT is essential for the operators and the long term sustainability of IoT itself. In this article we consider the green initiatives being worked out for IoT. We also show that narrowband IoT as the greener version right now.

Green initiatives in IoT

Due to the fast development in communication technology and the emerging usage of Internet of Things (IoT) devices that produce a huge amount of data, the fifth generation (5G) mobile network is introduced to support this development. This mobile network can provide many advanced communication features in cellular phones. But unfortunately, this technology faces many challenges. One of its defective challenges is the management of a massive number of devices running different services, so Software Defined Network (SDN) is proposed as a key technology to overcome this drawback. SDN architecture provides higher flexibility, scalability, cost-effectiveness, and energy efficiency in 5G mobile networks. There are usually different architectures for the SDN control plane. We study some of these architectures, and we conciliate the usage of Logically Centralized-Physically Distributed (LC-PD) controller management architecture in 5G networks. This architecture enables providing higher throughput, and lower latency compared to other control plane architectures. In this paper, we focus on the demonstration that the LC-PD control plane architecture improves communication efficiency and the Quality of Services (QoS) of running internet services in the 5G mobile network. We use the Mininet-WIFI emulator in our simulation tests. Our conducted simulations show that employing the LC-PD control plane architecture in 5G networks enhances the QoS of Internet services compared to other SDN implementations.

/pdf/software-defined-network-based-management-for-enhanced-5g-4gl73izfvl.pdf

Software Defined Network-Based Management for Enhanced 5G Network Services

This paper introduces a new way of managing water in irrigation systems, which can be applied to gardens or agricultural fields, replacing human intervention with Wireless Sensor Networks. A typical irrigation system wastes on average 30% of the water used, due to poor management and configuration. This sustainable irrigation system allows a better efficiency in the process of irrigation that can lead to savings for the end user, not only monetary but also in natural resources, such as water and energy, leading to a more sustainable environment. The system can retrieve real time data and use them to determinate the correct amount of water to be used in a garden. With this solution, it is possible to save up to 34% of water when using sensor data from temperature, humidity and soil moisture, or up to 26% when using only temperature inputs. Besides a detailed system architecture, this paper includes a real case scenario implementation and results discussion.

Water Management for Sustainable Irrigation Systems Using Internet-of-Things.

The Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm plays a vital role for improving smart city applications by tracking and managing city processes in real-time. One of the most significant issues associated with smart city applications is solid waste management, which has a negative impact on our society’s health and the environment. The traditional waste management process begins with waste created by city residents and disposed of in garbage bins at the source. Municipal department trucks collect garbage and move it to recycling centers on a fixed schedule. Municipalities and waste management companies fail to keep up with outdoor containers, making it impossible to determine when to clean them or when they are full. This work proposes an IoT-enabled solid waste management system for smart cities to overcome the limitations of the traditional waste management systems. The proposed architecture consists of two types of end sensor nodes: PBLMU (Public Bin Level Monitoring Unit) and HBLMU (Home Bin Level Monitoring Unit), which are used to track bins in public and residential areas, respectively. The PBLMUs and HBLMUs measure the unfilled level of the trash bin and its location data, process it, and transmit it to a central monitoring station for storage and analysis. An intelligent Graphical User Interface (GUI) enables the waste collection authority to view and evaluate the unfilled status of each trash bin. To validate the proposed system architecture, the following significant experiments were conducted: (a) Eight trash bins were equipped with PBLMUs and connected to a LoRaWAN network and another eight trash bins were equipped with HBLMUs and connected to a Wi-Fi network. The trash bins were filled with wastes at different levels and the corresponding unfilled levels of every trash bin were monitored through the intelligent GUI. (b) An experimental setup was arranged to measure the sleep current and active current contributions of a PBLMU to estimate its average current consumption. (c) The life expectancy of a PBLMU was estimated as approximately 70 days under hypothetical conditions.

https://www.mdpi.com/2624-6511/4/3/53/pdf

IoT-Enabled Solid Waste Management in Smart Cities

5G networks will have several advanced features. Starting from the physical layer to all the way to the upper layers, there will be several new technologies and techniques. 5G will have gigantic data rates and many different data formats. In addition the devices and platforms for 5G will be very diverse and heterogeneous. There will be massive carrier aggregation and dynamic bandwidth provisioning. Optical integration with the wireless at both the fronthaul and backhaul looks eminent. Elastic optical networking will be used at the core to optimize the resource allocations. Massive MIMO and digital beam-forming techniques too need a lot of computing in 5G. All these applications and services cannot be handled without distributed software management which can be controlled from a few centralized locations in the network. Overall, the network and its elements have to be software defined in order to provide agile and flexible services. In this article, we show the needs and ways for software defined networking in 5G.

Software defined networking for 5G

The proposed fifth generation of mobile communications (5G) has several advanced features. The data rates and throughputs are much larger than 4G. In addition to these high performances, 5G will incorporate device-to-device communication in a very high density heterogeneous mobile environment. Normal battery fed hand-held devices and sensors are thus expected to be replaced by energy harvesting mechanisms. Overall, the success of 5G substantially depends on the energy efficiency of the whole system. In this article, we present the energy saving initiatives of 5G which are thought to be quite instrumental in its overall success.

Green initiatives in 5G

The Internet of things (IoT) is one of the emerging technologies which promises a lot of solutions in almost all the fields of engineering. Its applications are very attractive for complex situations. In defense, several complex problems and situations are encountered. These problems and situations haw to be resolved in a short span of time. Several mission-critical situations are very common in the defense sectors. IoT also provides solutions to these mission-critical problems. Integration of satellites with the IoTs is a win-win combination for many complex problems. In this article, the hybridization of IoTs and satellite networks can provide excellent results which were not possible in the past is shown. The utilities of this elegant combination are provided for handling the complex problems of the defense sectors. A few practical cases are also provided where satellite-based IoTs play critical and valuable roles. Finally, for the long term sustainability of this combination, one of the resource-efficient versions of the IoTs, mainly narrowband IoT (NBIoT) is focused on. NBIoT and satellite combination can be sustainable in the long term is shown.

Military Applications of Satellite Based IoT

Since 1980s, in every decade, a new generation of mobile communication appears with new features and characteristics. The performance indicators in every such new system are better than the previous. In between the two full consecutive generations, there exist incremental hybrid systems which is normally better than their predecessors. It has been observed in 1990s as 2.5G (also several other versions commonly known as 2.xG) which was better than 2G; and in 2000s as 3.xG versions which were incremental upgradations over 3G. In case of 4G too, such incremental upgradations has been observed. Recently proposed 4.5G cellular communication system is better than 4G in several aspects. 4.5G is the outcome of the LTE evolution whose legacy is LTE Advanced (commonly known as 4G). It is now considered as a version closer to 5G in terms of performance metrics. In this article, we present the features and characteristics of 4.5G cellular communication system and discuss its proximity with 5G.

K. P. Sharmila

Papers

Green initiatives in IoT

Software defined networking for 5G

Green initiatives in 5G

Military Applications of Satellite Based IoT

4.5G: A milestone along the road to 5G