Pablo Sotres

Bio: Pablo Sotres is an academic researcher from University of Cantabria. The author has contributed to research in topics: Smart city & The Internet. The author has an hindex of 10, co-authored 16 publications receiving 855 citations.

Practical Lessons From the Deployment and Management of a Smart City Internet-of-Things Infrastructure: The SmartSantander Testbed Case

Abstract: 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.

SmartSantander: Experimentation and service provision in the smart city

Abstract: This paper describes the deployment and high-level architecture of the Internet of Things experimentation facility being deployed at Santander city. SmartSantander is a unique in the world city-scale experimental research facility in support of typical applications and services for a smart city. The testbed that has been deployed has a dual purpose. On the one hand it will allow real-world experimentation on Internet-of-Things related technologies (protocols, middlewares, applications, etc.). On the other hand it is currently supporting the provision of smart city services aimed at enhancing the quality of life in the city of Santander. Tangible results are expected to greatly influence definition and specification of Future Internet architecture design from viewpoints of Internet of Things and Internet of Services. This paper presents the physical deployment carried out in the city of Santander and the high-level architecture supporting the experimentation and service provision duality. Moreover, a brief description of the mechanisms supporting the experimentation life cycle will be done. Finally, the services that are being provided to the city will also be sketched.

Toward Understanding Crowd Mobility in Smart Cities through the Internet of Things

Abstract: Understanding crowd mobility behaviors would be a key enabler for crowd management in smart cities, benefiting various sectors such as public safety, tourism and transportation. This article discusses the existing challenges and the recent advances to overcome them and allow sharing information across stakeholders of crowd management through Internet of Things (IoT) technologies. The article proposes the usage of the new federated interoperable semantic IoT platform (FIESTA-IoT), which is considered as "a system of systems." The platform can support various IoT applications for crowd management in smart cities. In particular, the article discusses two integrated IoT systems for crowd mobility: the Crowd Mobility Analytics System and the Crowd Counting and Location System (from the SmartSantander testbed). Pilot studies are conducted in the Gold Coast, Australia, and Santander, Spain, to fulfill various requirements such as providing online and offline crowd mobility analyses with various sensors in different regions. The analyses provided by these systems are shared across applications in order to provide insights and support crowd management in smart city environments.

Smart City Services over a Future Internet Platform Based on Internet of Things and Cloud: The Smart Parking Case

Abstract: Enhancing the effectiveness of city services and assisting on a more sustainable development of cities are two of the crucial drivers of the smart city concept. This paper portrays a field trial that leverages an internet of things (IoT) platform intended for bringing value to existing and future smart city infrastructures. The paper highlights how IoT creates the basis permitting integration of current vertical city services into an all-encompassing system, which opens new horizons for the progress of the effectiveness and sustainability of our cities. Additionally, the paper describes a field trial on provisioning of real time data about available parking places both indoor and outdoor. The trial has been carried out at Santander’s (Spain) downtown area. The trial takes advantage of both available open data sets as well as of a large-scale IoT infrastructure. The trial is a showcase on how added-value services can be created on top of the proposed architecture.

I and i

Abstract: There is, I think, something ethereal about i —the square root of minus one. I remember first hearing about it at school. It seemed an odd beast at that time—an intruder hovering on the edge of reality. Usually familiarity dulls this sense of the bizarre, but in the case of i it was the reverse: over the years the sense of its surreal nature intensified. It seemed that it was impossible to write mathematics that described the real world in …

Low Power Wide Area Networks: An Overview

Abstract: Low power wide area (LPWA) networks are attracting a lot of attention primarily because of their ability to offer affordable connectivity to the low-power devices distributed over very large geographical areas. In realizing the vision of the Internet of Things, LPWA technologies complement and sometimes supersede the conventional cellular and short range wireless technologies in performance for various emerging smart city and machine-to-machine applications. This review paper presents the design goals and the techniques, which different LPWA technologies exploit to offer wide-area coverage to low-power devices at the expense of low data rates. We survey several emerging LPWA technologies and the standardization activities carried out by different standards development organizations (e.g., IEEE, IETF, 3GPP, ETSI) as well as the industrial consortia built around individual LPWA technologies (e.g., LoRa Alliance, Weightless-SIG, and Dash7 alliance). We further note that LPWA technologies adopt similar approaches, thus sharing similar limitations and challenges. This paper expands on these research challenges and identifies potential directions to address them. While the proprietary LPWA technologies are already hitting the market with large nationwide roll-outs, this paper encourages an active engagement of the research community in solving problems that will shape the connectivity of tens of billions of devices in the next decade.

iFogSim: A toolkit for modeling and simulation of resource management techniques in the Internet of Things, Edge and Fog computing environments

Abstract: Summary Internet of Things (IoT) aims to bring every object (eg, smart cameras, wearable, environmental sensors, home appliances, and vehicles) online, hence generating massive volume of data that can overwhelm storage systems and data analytics applications. Cloud computing offers services at the infrastructure level that can scale to IoT storage and processing requirements. However, there are applications such as health monitoring and emergency response that require low latency, and delay that is caused by transferring data to the cloud and then back to the application can seriously impact their performances. To overcome this limitation, Fog computing paradigm has been proposed, where cloud services are extended to the edge of the network to decrease the latency and network congestion. To realize the full potential of Fog and IoT paradigms for real-time analytics, several challenges need to be addressed. The first and most critical problem is designing resource management techniques that determine which modules of analytics applications are pushed to each edge device to minimize the latency and maximize the throughput. To this end, we need an evaluation platform that enables the quantification of performance of resource management policies on an IoT or Fog computing infrastructure in a repeatable manner. In this paper we propose a simulator, called iFogSim, to model IoT and Fog environments and measure the impact of resource management techniques in latency, network congestion, energy consumption, and cost. We describe two case studies to demonstrate modeling of an IoT environment and comparison of resource management policies. Moreover, scalability of the simulation toolkit of RAM consumption and execution time is verified under different circumstances.