May 2022

Written by Claude Ziad El-Bayeh, Mohamed Zellagui, Khaled Alzaareer, and Flah Aymen

Unexpected power outages in a part or over the whole electrical network are one of the main challenges that face modern times. Power failure in some regions has become more frequent in the last decades due to many factors such as but not limited to climate change and global warming, natural disasters, extreme weather conditions, wars, cyber-attacks on the network, and high-power demand. These factors and many others can occur at any moment, with and without prior notice. Therefore, they lead to electricity shortages in a small or large population for a short or a long period.

Written by Simon Chege

With the current trends that shape various types of wireless systems into a smart city infrastructure, the question of what would constitute efficient multi-radio access protocols for the networking architectures deployed in smart cities becomes an important consideration when integrating into the core city network. Smart cities are required to provide services such as intelligent transportation services that can be used to enhance route planning and congestion avoidance in city streets, intelligent traffic light controls and parking services, enhance vehicular safety, and enable self-driving cars. Such services present diverse quality of service (QoS) application requirements of ultra-low latency, ultra-reliability and enhanced data rates for the surging number of massively connected devices.

Written by Ramon Sanchez-Iborra, Jorge Gallego-Madrid, and Antonio Skarmeta

Recent advances in networking and computation technologies are facilitating the resurge of a hyper-connected vehicular ecosystem. First, the flexibilities provided by related technologies such as Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) permit the rapid reconfiguration of communication infrastructures by means of virtualization techniques. Besides, the availability of multiple Radio Access Technologies (RATs) expands the range of vehicular applications that can be supported in a plethora of scenarios. However, the arrival of new applications calls for the development of novel architectures capable of orchestrating both communication and computation resources to cope with their stringent requirements. This article presents a novel holistic architecture that provides support to next-generation vehicular applications. It encompasses multiple communication technologies such as 5G, as well as others related to the vehicular and Internet of Things (IoT) paradigms. Besides, it also presents multiple distributed processing sites which enables a flexible fog-edge-core-cloud configuration making such implementation particularly suited for supporting vehicular communications. This testbed aims to be a reference in its class as a living lab, open to support state-of-the-art experiments and innovations.

Written by Ananya Chattopadhyay and Aniruddha Chandra

Smart transportation covers a broad spectrum: automatic toll collection, navigational aids, smart parking, driver assistance, emergency warning, collision avoidance and autonomous driving. Using high-data-rate millimetre wave (mmWave) band for vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication can substantially accelerate the growth of smart transportation projects. However, V2I link designers need to solve some new challenges such as beamforming, beam alignment, tracking, and coverage/ connectivity issues, before fully utilizing the mmWave potential.