Resumen de Experimentation as a service over Internet of Things enabled smart cities: philosophiae
- español
Uno de los problemas más acuciantes a los que se enfrenta el planeta Tierra actualmente es la superpoblación, problema especialmente relevante en los núcleos urbanos, dónde la densidad de población ha crecido enormemente, reduciendo paulatinamente de la calidad de vida de sus habitantes. Con el fin de abordar esta situación, las Ciudades Inteligentes emergen como un nuevo paradigma, apoyándose en el uso de nuevas Tecnologías de la Información y la Comunicación (TIC) para la mejora de la calidad de vida a través de la optimización de los servicios. Particularmente, gracias a la irrupción de la Internet de las Cosas (IoT, Internet of Things), que proporciona una nueva vía para la obtención de información sobre el estado de la ciudad en todos sus aspectos. A lo largo de esta tesis se abordan las cuestiones subyacentes dentro de las Ciudades Inteligentes basadas en la IoT, a través de tres pilares fundamentales para presentar una visión holística de las mismas: “Despliegue, Provisión y Experimentación”. En primer lugar, se presenta en detalle el despliegue de una infraestructura IoT a gran escala, SmartSantander, así como la revisión completa de los aspectos prácticos relacionados con despliegues IoT de esta naturaleza, allanando el camino como guía para futuros despliegues en otras ciudades. En segundo lugar, se profundiza en modelos de Experimentación como Servicio (EaaS, Experimentation as a Service), para habilitar el acceso a la información de los despliegues IoT para el desarrollo de experimentos y servicios innovadores, enfatizando en la interoperabilidad de los datos con otras plataformas IoT. Finalmente, en tercer y último lugar, se presenta un caso de uso de experimentación para la gestión de multitudes, a través de un sistema para la localización y conteo de personas mediante el análisis de las tramas Wi-Fi emitidas por dispositivos móviles, con especial énfasis en la privacidad.
- English
During the last decade, the great evolution of Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) and the continuous development and miniaturization of computers, have made possible the emergence of a new global paradigm: the Internet of Things (IoT). This new paradigm has removed from the equation the human-to-human or human-to-machine interactions, triggering the creation of a new myriad of applications without the need of human intervention. From home automation to service provision in cities and communities, such novel technologies represent an outstanding evolution for many traditional services.
At the same time, the rapid increase of world population living in urban areas required the implementation of new services so as to keep current living standards. Therefore, this situation has led to an increased coexistence between novel IoT deployments and cities, boosting the development of new services based on such relationship, the so-called Smart City revolution. Furthermore, the scientific community has been benefited by the introduction of new technologies in scenarios that were not accessible before, such as cities and urban areas. From laboratories to the urban scenario, the time to develop new solutions for cities worldwide has been shortened, as the possibility of deploying new pilots in them has become a reality.
There are several services where this evolution is more visible, like urban mobility, or the continuous environmental monitoring of certain parameters. Hereof, services regarding crowd management in cities are particularly relevant nowadays. Unexpected events, such as terrorist attacks or the recent emergency due to highly contagious diseases, has made crowd management an essential part of the Smart City.
However, despite the benefits associated to IoT-based deployments in cities, they have brought to light new issues that were not faced before in controlled environments. Just to mention a few, we can highlight the difficulties associated to the introduction of constantly evolving technologies in cities; the use of different information data models, that hinders the adoption of successful services from other cities; or the increased difficulty while dealing with an infrastructure that is usually difficult to access, limiting the experimentation possibilities. In this context, the concept of Experimentation as a Service (EaaS) emerges as a solution to enable the experimentation over IoT-enabled Smart Cities, providing an interoperable framework to carry out the experiments in multiple IoT deployments.
Throughout this dissertation, the author presents the contributions carried out on three main pillars, namely deployment, provision and experimentation, that underpin the design and implementation of an EaaS solution for the development of IoT-based Smart City services and applications. These contributions are: 1) a thorough description of the Smart City deployment which has been carried out in the city of Santander, including the discussion of the lessons learned elicited from the experience working with IoT devices in an urban environment; (2) the development and provision of EaaS models to enable third-parties such as citizens, service providers and the scientific community, with the means to access the Smart City IoT resources, through semantic-enabled federation with other international IoT testbeds; (3) the implementation of an experiment on top of the experimentation framework, the Crowd Counting and Location System (CCLS), a privacy-aware solution for crowd management in the Smart City.
In a nutshell, the aforementioned contributions conform a holistic view of an IoT-enabled Smart City for the support of an EaaS model, from the perspective of three key-role players in its development: the deployment manager; the Smart City experimentation and service provider; and the researcher. Each of them related to the work presented in this dissertation.
