Abstract: Smart cities are becoming a vibrant application domain for a number of science fields. As such, service providers and stakeholders are beginning to integrate co-creation aspects into current implementations to shape the future smartcity solutions. In this context, holistic solutions are required to test such aspects in real city-scale IoT deployments, considering the complex city ecosystems. In this work, we discuss OrganiCityĒs implementation of an Experimentation-as-a-Service framework, presenting a toolset that allows developing, deploying and evaluating smartcity solutions in a one-stop shop manner. This is the first time such an integrated toolset is offered in the context of a large-scale IoT infrastructure, which spans across multiple European cities. We discuss the design and implementation of the toolset, presenting our view on what Experimentation-as-a-Service should provide, and how it is implemented. We present initial feedback from 25 experimenter teams that have utilized this toolset in the OrganiCity project, along with a discussion on two detailed actual use cases to validate our approach. Learnings from all experiments are discussed as well as architectural considerations for platform scaling. Our feedback from experimenters indicates that Experimentation-as-a-Service is a viable and useful approach.
Abstract: In recent years, the evolution of urban environments, jointly with the progress of the Information and Communication sector, have enabled the rapid adoption of new solutions that contribute to the growth in popularity of Smart Cities. Currently, the majority of the world population
lives in cities encouraging different stakeholders within these innovative ecosystems to seek new solutions guaranteeing the sustainability and efficiency of such complex environments. In this work, it is discussed how the experimentation with IoT technologies and other data sources form the cities can be utilized to co-create in the OrganiCity project, where key actors like citizens, researchers and other stakeholders shape smartcity services and applications in a collaborative fashion. Furthermore,
a novel architecture is proposed that enables this organic growth of the future cities, facilitating the experimentation that tailors the adoption of new technologies and services for a better quality of life, as well as agile and dynamic mechanisms for managing cities. In this work, the different components and enablers of the OrganiCity platform are presented and discussed in detail and include, among others, a portal to manage the experiment life cycle, an Urban Data Observatory to explore data assets,
and an annotations component to indicate quality of data, with a particular focus on the city-scale opportunistic data collection service operating as an alternative to traditional communications.
Abstract: In this paper, we discuss key findings, technological challenges and socioeconomic opportunities in SmartCity era. Most of the conclusions were gathered during SmartSantander project, an EU project that is developing a city-scale testbed for IoT and Future Internet experimentation, providing an integrated framework for implementing SmartCity services.
Abstract: The domain of smart cities is currently burgeoning, with a lot of potential for scientific and socio-economic innovation gradually being revealed. It is also becoming apparent that cross-discipline research will be instrumental in designing and building smarter cities, where IoT technology is becoming omnipresent. SmartSantander is an FP7 project that built a massive
city-scale IoT testbed aiming to provide both a tool for the research community and a functional system for the local government to implement operational city
services. In this work, we present key smart cities projects, main application domains and representative smartcity frameworks that reflect the latest advances in the smart cities domain and our own experience through SmartSantander. The project has deployed 51.910 IoT endpoints, offering a massive infrastructure to the community, as well as functional system services and a number of end-user applications. Based on these aspects, we identify and
discuss a number of key scientific and technological challenges. We also present an overview of the developed system components and applications, and
discuss the ways that current smartcity challenges were handled in the project.
Abstract: Several networking technologies targeting the IoT application space currently compete within the smartcity domain, both in outdoor and indoor deployments. However, up till now, there is no clear winner, and results from real-world deployments have only recently started to surface. In this paper, we present a comparative study of 2 popular IoT networking technologies, LoRa and IEEE 802.15.4, within the context of a research-oriented IoT deployment inside school buildings in Europe, targeting energy efficiency in education. We evaluate the actual performance of these two technologies in real-world settings, presenting a comparative study on the effect of parameters like the built environment, network quality, or data rate. Our results indicate that both technologies have their advantages, and while in certain cases both are perfectly adequate, in our use case LoRa exhibits a more robust behavior. Moreover, LoRaĒs characteristics make it a very good choice for indoor IoT deployments such as in educational buildings, and especially in cases where there are low bandwidth requirements.
Abstract: We discuss key findings and technological challenges related to SmartSantander, an EU project that is developing a city-scale experimental facility for Internet of Things and Future Internet experimentation. The main goal of the project is to design and construct a city scale lab for experimentation and provide an integrated framework for implementing SmartCity services.
Abstract: A number of infrastructures are being deployed for Future Internet experimentation purposes, providing access to large-scale IoT resources to researchers and industry. SmartSantander is among the largest ones, deployed at the city center of Santander. We discuss SmartSantanderĒs augmentation using smartphones provided by volunteers, in order to increase sensing resources and ubiquity. Our system allows developers to write code for Android and automatically deploy their experiments to Android devices, alongside the SmartSantander platform. Initial results produced by experiments with a small number of volunteers show that the system provides meaningful extensions to the existing platform.
Abstract: Abstract— Numerous smartcity testbeds and system deployments have surfaced around the world, aiming to provide services over unified large heterogeneous IoT infrastructures. Although we have achieved new scales in smartcity installations and systems, so far the focus has been to provide diverse sources of data to smartcity services consumers, while neglecting to provide ways to simplify making good use of them. We believe that knowledge creation in smart cities through data annotation, supported in both an automated and a crowdsourced manner, is an aspect that will bring additional value to smart cities. We present here our approach, aiming to utilize an existing smartcity deployment and the OrganiCity software ecosystem. We discuss key challenges along with characteristic use cases, and report on our design and implementation, along with preliminary results.
Abstract: A number of Future Internet testbeds are being deployed around the world for research experimentation and development. SmartSantander
is an infrastructure of massive scale deployed inside a city centre. We argue that utilising the concept of participatory sensing can augment the functionality and potential use-cases of such a system and be beneficiary in a number of scenarios. We discuss
the concept of extending SmartSantander with participatory sensing through the use of volunteersĒ smartphones. We report on our design and implementation, which allows for developers to write
their code for Android devices and then deploy and execute on the devices automatically through our system. We have tested our implementation in a number of scenarios in two cities with the help
of volunteers with promising results; the data collected enhance the ones by fixed infrastructure both quantitatively and qualitatively across the cities, while also engaging citizens more directly.
Abstract: Although we have reached new levels in smartcity installations and systems, efforts so far have focused on providing diverse sources of data to smartcity services consumers while neglecting to provide ways to simplify making good use of them. In this context, one first step that will bring added value to smart cities is knowledge creation in smart cities through anomaly detection and data annotation, supported in both an automated and a crowdsourced manner. We present here LearningCity, our solution that has been validated over an existing smartcity deployment in Santander, and the OrganiCity experimentation-as-a-service ecosystem. We discuss key challenges along with characteristic use cases, and report on our design and implementation, together with some preliminary results derived from combining large smartcity datasets with machine learning.
Abstract: The adoption of technologies like the IoT in urban environments, together with the intensive use of smartphones, is driving transformation towards smart cities. Under this perspective, Experimentation-as-a-Service within OrganiCity aims to create an experimental facility with technologies, services, and applications that simplify innovation within urban ecosystems. We discuss here tools that facilitate experimentation, implementing ways to organize, execute, and administer experimentation campaigns in a smartcity context. We discuss the benefits of our framework, presenting some preliminary results. This is the first time such tools are paired with large-scale smartcity infrastructures, enabling both city-scale experimentation and cross-site experimentation.
Abstract: We briefly present the design and architecture of a system that aims to simplify the process of organizing, executing and administering crowdsensing campaigns in a smartcity context over smartphones volunteered by citizens. We built our system on top of an Android app substrate on the end-user level, which enables us to utilize smartphone resources. Our system allows researchers and other developers to manage and distribute their “mini” smartcity applications, gather data and publish their results through the Organicitysmartcity platform. We believe this is the first time such a tool is paired with a large scale IoT
infrastructure, to enable truly city-scale IoT and smartcity experimentation.
Abstract: In this work, we explore context-aware application scenarios that become possible utilizing semantically-rich information derived from real-world mobility and presence traces. Traces produced by people carrying personal mobile devices, capturing social and contextual interactions, serve as enables for Future Internet applications. We discuss the fundamental concepts, technical issues and related research challenges. We propose a reference architecture for setting up a system that collects such traces in a SmartCity environment. We present the algorithms used to process the traces and infer interactions and interests for the observed populations. We conduct two 3-day trial deployments: one in an office environment and the other in the context of a Smart Conference application. We discuss our findings regarding the system's capability to track interactions and the overall efficacy of the application.
Abstract: A collection of pervasive street games is presented in this paper, that constitute a new social form of play taking place in public spaces, such as city parks, public spaces and streets. The main characteristic of these games is the ability to scale to a large number of players (in some cases involving more than 40 players) and can engage players located simultaneously in dispersed areas. Players interact with each other using a wide range of hardware devices that are either generic (such as smart phones) or specific (such as wireless sensor devices). We discuss a set of fundamental issues related to game design emphasizing on the one hand the interaction of the players with the ubiquitous computing environment and on the other hand the embedding of the game rules within the environment. The games are developed using open source technologies and evaluated in a series of events such as the Athens Plaython 2012 festival. The feedback received from the players indicates that this new form of gaming is indeed very promising.
Abstract: The Internet of Things (IoT) and smart cities are two of the most popular directions the research community is pursuing very actively. But although we have made great progress in many fields, we are still trying to figure out how we can utilize our smartcity and IoT infrastructures, in order to produce reliable, economically sustainable solutions that create public value, and even more so in the field of education.
GAIA1, a Horizon2020 EC-funded project, has developed an IoT infrastructure across school buildings in Europe. Its primary aim has been to raise awareness about energy consumption and sustainability, based on real-world sensor data produced inside the school buildings where students and teachers live and work. Today's students are the citizens of tomorrow, and they should have the skills to understand and respond to challenges like climate change. Currently, 25 educational building sites participate in GAIA, located in Sweden, Italy, and Greece. An IoT infrastructure [1] is installed in these buildings, monitoring in real-time their power consumption, as well as several indoor and outdoor environmental parameters.