In a world where resources are scarce and urban areas consume the vast majority of these resources, it is vital to make cities greener and more sustainable. Advanced systems to improve and automate processes within a city will play a leading role in smart cities. From smart design of buildings, which capture rain water for later use, to intelligent control systems, which can monitor infrastructures autonomously, the possible improvements enabled by sensing technologies are immense. Ubiquitous sensing poses numerous challenges, which are of a technological or social nature. This paper presents an overview of the state of the art with regards to sensing in smart cities. Topics include sensing applications in smart cities, sensing platforms and technical challenges associated with these technologies. In an effort to provide a holistic view of how sensing technologies play a role in smart cities, a range of applications and technical challenges associated with these applications are discussed. As some of these applications and technologies belong to different disciplines, the material presented in this paper attempts to bridge these to provide a broad overview, which can be of help to researchers and developers in understanding how advanced sensing can play a role in smart cities.

The Role of Advanced Sensing in Smart Cities

Smart City represents one of the most promising, prominent and challenging Internet of Things (IoT) applications. In the last few years, indeed, the smart city concept has played an important role in academic and industry fields, with the development and deployment of various middleware platforms and IoT-based infrastructures. However, this expansion has followed distinct approaches creating, therefore, a fragmented scenario, in which different IoT ecosystems are not able to communicate between them. To fill this gap, there is a need to re-visit the smart city IoT semantic and offer a global common approach. To this purpose, this paper browses the semantic annotation of the sensors in the cloud, and innovative services can be implemented and considered by bridging Cloud and Internet of Things. Things-like semantic will be considered to perform the aggregation of heterogeneous resources by defining the Cloud of Things (CoT) paradigm. We survey the smart city vision, providing information on the main requirements and highlighting the benefits of integrating different IoT ecosystems within the cloud under this new CoT vision. This paper also discusses relevant challenges in this research area.

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Towards a smart city based on cloud of things, a survey on the smart city vision and paradigms

This paper proposes an innovative Internet of Things (IoT) architecture that allows real time interaction between mobile clients and smart/legacy things (sensors and actuators) via a wireless gateway. The novel services provided are: (i) dynamic discovery of M2M device and endpoints by the clients, (ii) managing connection with non-smart things connected over modbus, (iii) associate metadata to sensor and actuator measurements using Sensor Markup Language (SenML) representation and (iv) extending the current capabilities of SenML to support actuator control from mobile clients. These clients are equipped with an end-user application that initiates the discovery phase to learn about the devices and endpoints (sensors and actuators) connected to the wireless gateway. Then the user can select desired sensors to receive and display sensor metadata and control actuators from the mobile device. Prototypes of the mobile application and the wireless gateway have been implemented to validate the entire architecture. The gateway is implemented using RESTful web services and currently runs in a Google App Engine. Two real life scenarios are discussed that can be implemented using the architecture. Finally overall contributions and future research scopes are summarized.

/pdf/an-iot-gateway-centric-architecture-to-provide-novel-m2m-5aq9gb7phk.pdf

An IoT gateway centric architecture to provide novel M2M services

Smart City represents one of the most promising and prominent Internet of Things (IoT) applications. In the last few years, smart city concept has played an important role in academic and industry fields, with the development and deployment of various middleware platforms. However, this expansion has followed distinct approaches creating a fragmented scenario, in which different IoT ecosystems are not able to communicate between them. To fill this gap, there is a need to revisit the smart city IoT semantic and offer a global common approach. To this purpose, this paper browses the semantic annotation of the sensors in the cloud, and innovative services can be implemented and considered by bridging Clouds and IoT. Things-like semantic will be considered to perform the aggregation of heterogeneous resources by defining the Clouds of Things (CoT) paradigm. We survey the smart city vision, providing information on the main requirements and highlighting the benefits of integrating different IoT ecosystems within the cloud under this new CoT vision and discuss relevant challenges in this research area.

/pdf/towards-a-smart-city-based-on-cloud-of-things-2efr5tf3pa.pdf

Towards a smart city based on cloud of things

The Internet of Things (IoT) is intended for ubiquitous connectivity among different entities or "things". While its purpose is to provide effective and efficient solutions, security of the devices and network is a challenging issue. The number of devices connected along with the ad-hoc nature of the system further exacerbates the situation. Therefore, security and privacy has emerged as a significant challenge for the IoT. In this paper,we aim to provide a thorough survey related to the privacy and security challenges of the IoT. This document addresses these challenges from the perspective of technologies and architecture used. This work focuses also in IoT intrinsic vulnerabilities as well as the security challenges of various layers based on the security principles of data confidentiality, integrity and availability. This survey analyzes articles published for the IoT at the time and relates it to the security conjuncture of the field and its projection to the future.

Internet of Things: Survey on Security and Privacy

In the Internet of Things (IoT) the edge devices often rely on gateways to connect to the Internet, to reduce costs and energy consumption. For those scenarios where the gateway itself does not have a wired Internet connection, LTE is a candidate solution due to its high spectral efficiency, bandwidth, and coverage. In this paper, the suitability of LTE for the interconnection of aggregated edge devices is investigated. The study is carried out under the assumption that the Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP), which is becoming increasingly popular, is used. The performance analysis is carried out through packet-level simulation with the open source simulator ns3.

Performance analysis of an LTE gateway for the IoT

Due to the growing market and research interests on communication protocols for applications that require little or no human intervention, called Machine-to-Machine (M2M) applications, the European Telecommunications Standardization Institute (ETSI) founded in 2009 a Technical Committee on the topic, which has released its first complete set of technical recommendations in October 2011 as ETSI M2M Release 1. The standard is agnostic with respect to both the application domains in which it can be used, ranging from, e.g., smart grid to personal health systems, and the underlying data transport and access technologies. We demonstrate the feasibility of an ETSI-compliant complete end-to-end system, which uses the Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) protocol under definition at the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), showing its potential to meet the expectations of M2M applications of practical interest.

ETSI M2M release 1 demonstration

In recent years there has been a huge increase of personal and enterprise services relying on the interconnection of embedded devices, often called Machine-to-Machine (M2M) applications. Nowadays, components are interconnected through a custom and proprietary networking tier prohibiting their re-use across different applications. The closed design and use case specific architecture of current solutions excludes the sharing of many generic functions, or the reuse of solutions for the same application. ETSI recently founded a Technical Committee on M2M communication, which aims at defining a common architecture to achieve a fully horizontal view, where a common network and application infrastructure can connect different M2M domains and can be shared by different applications. The Release 1 of the functional architecture has been published in October 2011 and, at the same time, Intecs and other partners were demonstrating publicly its main functions by means of a working prototype, with several use cases of business and social interest.

Novella Buonaccorsi

Papers

Performance analysis of an LTE gateway for the IoT

ETSI M2M release 1 demonstration

Experience on the demonstration of the ETSI M2M architecture release 1