The Internet of Drones (IoD) has become increasingly important in applications such as forest inventory, leveraging advanced sensors and internet connectivity to enable efficient data collection. Compared to traditional methods, IoD offers superior cost-effectiveness. However, its reliance on public channels, unreliable connectivity, and dynamic environments poses significant security and privacy challenges. Safeguarding forest inventory data is essential to maintaining accuracy, preventing unauthorized access, and mitigating the risk of data manipulation, which can lead to suboptimal management decisions. To address these concerns, it is essential to design a lightweight authentication protocol that secures IoD communication, accounts for network bandwidth limitations and scalability, and supports integration with emerging technologies. This manuscript introduces a new Authentication and Key Agreement (AKA) protocol specifically designed for the Internet of Drones (IoD), leveraging asymmetric cryptography and aggregate signatures to enhance security and privacy in forest inventories with fog computing. Its robustness was confirmed through informal and formal security analyses by the AVISPA tool and the ROR model, demonstrating resistance to known attacks and superior communication, computational, and energy performance compared to existing protocols.

The importance of vertical farming is increasing day by day, given its numerous benefits including the possibility to cultivate a crop in the minimum available space. Similarly, the primary sector also needs technology incorporation to ensure sustainability. Therefore, this paper presents the design and deployment of a wireless sensor network (WSN) responsible for monitoring the quality of irrigation water in terms of salinization for vertical farming. The study presents 2 prototypes of salinity sensors, based on a single coil, which can determine the salt levels of the liquid in which they are introduced. Both prototypes are tested and compared with professional equipment, and then subjected to a validation process. Finally, the network traffic generated by such an installation for different numbers of nodes is analyzed, and the results show that the bandwidth consumed by a node like ESP32 is extremely low, with average bandwidth values of around 700 Bps.

With the rise of sensor networks and the concern about how to leverage data from deployed networks in different environments, the use of storage and management platforms for these data becomes necessary. Currently, there are commercial solutions available (some of them free but with significant limitations). However, this fact forces you to always depend on this platform for the proper performance of the service or application. For this reason, this article presents a novel hierarchical system that allows the design and deployment of a customizable platform for monitoring networks and the Internet of Things (IoT) for the collection, storage, and visualization of real-time data. Throughout the article, the network architecture, as well as the protocols, tasks, and services deployed in each layer, will be presented. Finally, the platform will be tested in terms of the performance of different services and the network traffic recorded based on the number of nodes that would constitute the monitoring network.

The Internet of Vehicles (IoV) provides new opportunities for the coordination of vehicles for enhancing safety and transportation performance. Vehicles can be coordinated for avoiding collisions by communicating their positions when near to each other, in which the information flow is indexed by their geographical positions or the ones in road maps. Vehicles can also be coordinated to ameliorate traffic jams by sharing their locations and destinations. Vehicles can apply optimization algorithms to reduce the overuse of certain streets without excessively enlarging the paths. In this way, traveling time can be reduced. However, IoV also brings security challenges, such as keeping safe from virtual hijacking. In particular, vehicles should detect and isolate the hijacked vehicles ignoring their communications. The current work presents a technique for enhancing security by applying certain prioritization rules, using digital certificates, and applying trust and reputation policies for detecting hijacked vehicles. We tested the proposed approach with a novel agent-based simulator about security in Internet of Things (IoT) for vehicle-to-vehicle communications. The experiments focused on the scenario of avoidance of collisions with hijacked vehicles misinforming other vehicles. The results showed that the current approach increased the average speed of vehicles with a 64.2% when these are giving way to other vehicles in a crossing by means of IoT.

The birth of a premature baby implicitly involves a series of special care focused on the monitoring of the evolution in terms of weight gain, movements of the baby, etc. It is also important to maintain the environmental parameters of the incubator in adequate values to avoid the heat loss of babies. Therefore, this paper presents the proposal of a system for infant incubators based on the use of temperature and humidity sensors, and a set of weight sensors, which allows us to monitor the progress of the baby. Each incubator that has this system is connected to a central network based on Long Range Networks (LoRa) that allows registering the medical data in a database. Finally, the system has a Near Field Communication (NFC) interface that allows the identification of doctors, the view of the patient evolution with tablets and the introduction of new data by the doctor. Finally, the system has been tested in a laboratory environment to ensure the proper functioning of system.

The use of sensors has increased in the last years. They allow the real-time monitoring and reduce the processing cost because most of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) do not require the intervention of people to perform the measurement. Sensors are useful for industrial processes that can imply some danger for workers. These devices also make easy the development of some tasks as the ones carried out in Wastewater Treatment Plant (WWTP). This paper presents the design, deployment and calibration of a low cost sensor able to detect the concentration of solids in some phases of the water treatment. The sensor is based on 2 coils and a microprocessor module. Several models and combination of coils have been testes. The results show that our sensor is capable of measuring concentrations form 0% to 20% (0 mg/l to 200,000 mg/l) with an error lower than the 3.5%.

The urban lawns are frequently composed by different grass species to combat some problems of water scarcity and diseases. In order to maintain these lawns, high amount of water is required. Nowadays, smart cities can be understood as a new concept of city that includes, among others, efficient distribution of energy, water, and other resources by using technology. In these cases, the main challenge is to try to estimate the necessary amount of water for irrigation and the phytosanitary uses without wasting water. In this paper, we propose a method to identify the percentage of grass coverage in lawns to deduce the grass productivity and estimate the most accurate quantity of water to ensure a good production of grass. The system is based on a Smart Autonomous Vehicle (SAV) controlled by an Arduino Mega 2560. It also contains an array of 120 colour sensors used to gather the data. The selected colour sensor is a TCS3472. With these sensors, we obtain the RGB histograms of the lawns. For these experiments, we have several lawn parcels of 1.5 x 1 m. From these, a matrix of 150 x 100 RGB values is obtained. After processing the green values of matrix, we have observed a correlation between the level of coverage and these values. The grass coverage is related with values of brightness between 40 and 60 which allow us to classify the lawn as a function of its coverage and the irrigation needs.

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), Internet of things (IoT) and aerial mapping are nowadays being used very much in agriculture. The challenge of joining those technologies requires a new and smart wireless network topology for devices communication. Problems like scalability and manageability are important challenges when there are many devices. This paper presents the design of a smart IoT communication system manager used as a low cost irrigation controller. The proposal is a powerful irrigation tool that uses real time data such as the variable rate irrigation and some parameters taken from the field. The field parameters, the index vegetation (estimated using aerial images) and the irrigation events, such as flow level, pressure level or wind speed, are periodically sampled. Data is processed in a smart cloud service based on the Drools Guvnor (a Business Rules Manager). The developed multimedia platform can be controlled remotely by a mobile phone. Finally, we measured the bandwidth consumed when the system is sending different kinds of commands and data.

More than forty million people in the world are epilepsy sufferers. Epilepsy is a neurological disease. That is characterized by the presence of seizures in which the patient has convulsions, among other symptoms, that can cause damage, and even lead him to death. For this reason, it is important to develop systems for allowing early detections. Additionally, the cost of this kind of devices is usually quite high, so they are often not accessible to everyone. In this paper, a low-cost monitoring system is presented. It is able to detect early symptoms of epilepsy seizures. The system uses several corporal parameters such as temperature, heart rate, and extremities motion. The device transmits the occurrences of these seizures to a mobile phone, where an application notifies the person or institution in charge of the patient. This application also keeps a record of these parameters and events which can be viewed later by the user. Finally, the system is tested in order to check both its functionality and the correct operation of the system.

Nowadays, new technologies are focused on providing ubiquity and the possibility of accessing services from everywhere while reducing power consumption and the CO2emissions in networking. Furthermore, the process of network virtualization is more and more used. However, both concepts are not currently treated as a set. For this reason, this paper presents a practical evaluation where the power consumption in a virtualized network is measured. To do it, we have developed a topology composed by several virtual routers that emulates the core of a network through which we have sent several data flows. Measurements have been performed by using http and video streaming traffic while running Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) and Routing Information Protocol version 2 (RIPv2) as routing protocols. Result shows that both protocols present similar behavior when streaming traffic is sent while RIPv2 demands more CPU usage when http traffic is sent. Finally, the energy consumption in http traffic is always bigger.

Sensor networks can be used in many sorts of environments. The increase of pollution and carbon footprint are nowadays an important environmental problem. The use of sensors and sensor networks can help to make an early detection in order to mitigate their effect over the medium. The deployment of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) requires high-energy efficiency and secures mechanisms to ensure the data veracity. Moreover, when WSNs are deployed in harsh environments, it is very difficult to recharge or replace the sensor's batteries. For this reason, the increase of network lifetime is highly desired. WSNs also work in unattended environments, which is vulnerable to different sort of attacks. Therefore, both energy efficiency and security must be considered in the development of routing protocols for WSNs. In this paper, we present a novel Secure and Low-energy Zone-based Routing Protocol (SeLeZoR) where the nodes of the WSN are split into zones and each zone is separated into clusters. Each cluster is controlled by a cluster head. Firstly, the information is securely sent to the zone-head using a secret key; then, the zone-head sends the data to the base station using the secure and energy efficient mechanism. This paper demonstrates that SeLeZoR achieves better energy efficiency and security levels than existing routing protocols for WSNs. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

In recordings of naturals environments there is often a predominant color due to the type environment such as a forest, a desert or ocean. Currently, there are a wide range of available video codecs that provide different compression results for different types of videos based on their predominant colors. Any way to save video flows bandwidth becomes a system to save or earn money. In this paper, we propose a decision algorithm which selects the most efficient codec to compress a video as a function of its chroma characteristics. In order to do this, first we created 5 videos where the main colors were white, black, red, green and blue in order to see the compression characteristics of each codec. Then, we used 4 videos of real environments with different predominant colors in order to test the video quality of the result and the compression time. Using these results we propose an algorithm that takes into account the predominant color and the video quality to efficiently select the best codec for each case. Moreover, we also provide the protocol design for the proper operation of our system.

The sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) is an expert diagnosis when an apparently healthy baby dies without explanation. When physicians or coroners cannot explain the cause of death it is classified as sudden death. This paper reviews the related literature and proposes a mobile solution based on biofeedback monitoring that tries to prevent the sudden death in infants. The sudden death system uses real-time data collection from sensors to diagnose, in advance, baby health problems and prevent those are take care for a baby. When an issue is detected by this system (i.e., the sensors send abnormal data), it sends a warning to those responsible for the baby. It allows the access to data from sensors and their analysis in real-time (such as, the baby position and the crib). Signal processing algorithms are used in real-time to prevent a sudden death. Mobile devices (such as, smartphones or tablets) are used to process the sensed data and monitoring a baby performing alerts/warnings when an abnormal situation is detected. The proposed approach is evaluated and demonstrated through a prototype.

ABSTRACT The next‐generation networks improve people's quality of life with new services and applications. The evolution of Internet technologies also promoted the development of electronic commerce and the evolution of mobile payments. Near field communication (NFC) was proposed as a new short‐range wireless technology and can play an important role in such issues. Money transactions among mobile devices could play an important role in a near future in order to simplify and perform such operations safely. Furthermore, it is important that tasks are easy to perform. Then, this paper presents a mobile solution based on a peer‐to‐peer communication system for money transfer, based on NFC and Bluetooth communications. A hybrid communication protocol combining the security characteristics of NFC and better Bluetooth data transfer rates is proposed. The proposal was deployed in real environments, and it was evaluated, demonstrated, and validated with different NFC tags and the Bluetooth traffic was also analyzed. It was shown that system presents good response times. The solution offers a friendly user's interface and very easy to use, guaranteeing the security of money transfer, and it is ready for use. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The appearance of several IEEE 802.11 variants made possible the availability of many wireless local area network access options for end users in the same location. Network requirements for IPTV service become higher when the quality of the delivered video is higher. Moreover, in wireless networks the network performance is highly degraded when there is high number of users. In this paper, we propose a protocol and algorithm that makes to handover IPTV users to the best available WLAN when the QoS parameters received by the end user reaches a threshold. It guarantees anytime the highest QoS for the user. Real measurements show that the vertical handover performed by the user is performed without noticing it. This algorithm is highly appropriate for mobile users.

According to statistics data, the population of many countries is aging. Moreover, there is also a small sector of the population that is affected by disabilities. Researchers should develop systems to improve their quality of life. In recent years, the development of smartphones and reduced size devices, but with high processing capacity, has increased dramatically. We can take profit of the sensors and applications embedded in the smartphones in order to monitor disabled and elderly people. In this paper, we describe a smart collaborative system based on the sensors placed in the mobile devices, which allow us to monitor the status of a person based on what is happening in the group people. The network algorithm and the smart system protocol is described and simulated in order to show the performance of our proposal.

In order to have long distance underwater wireless communications, low frequencies must be used. But the main problem when using low frequencies is the lack of bandwidth to transmit high data rate. Sometimes wireless sensors must be placed quite close for taking more accurate measurements from the water, so higher frequency bands could be used in special cases. In this paper we measure the maximum coverage distance of underwater wireless sensors when they are placed at about 15 cm underneath the water surface, without having wireless coverage from the air side. Then, we measured the number of lost packets and round trip time for 1, 2, 5.5 and 11 Mbps at different frequencies for different distances.

One of the main issues in aquaculture is the high cost of the lost food when the fish are fed. Furthermore, this wasted food is deposited in the seabed and generates an environmental impact on the surrounding area. It causes failure to uphold aquaculture legislation. The authors propose a feeding control system based on groups of sensors that take the appropriate decisions when the fish are fed in marine fish farms. This system mixes data obtained from a group of sensors and performs an exhaustive control on the food offered to the fish, thus reducing costs. This will avoid wasting large quantities of food and an economic saving will be achieved. To develop the proposed system, the authors used the behaviour of the movements of the fishes and some parameters from the water. These movements are monitored strategically by a group ofunderwater transducers placed along the length, width and depth of the cage and, through data fusion, they provide the information needed in the system to continue feeding the fish or not.

Many wireless sensor network developers have adopted Bluetooth and Zigbee technologies for sensor communication. However, it has a big problem: the radio coverage is very short; so many sensors are needed to cover wide areas and sensors are expensive. On the other hand, these technologies lack a high bandwidth. IEEE 802.11a/b/g technologies have higher coverage areas and higher bandwidth, but their energy consumption is significantly higher. This paper discusses the energy consumption analytically and gives the considerations that should be taken into account in developing a wireless local area sensor network. Then, we propose a new protocol based on group collaboration to be implemented in these types of networks in order to decrease the energy consumption and save the energy wasted by the whole system. Finally, the protocol proposed is simulated and compared with other protocols available in the Ns2 simulator in order to prove that our solution is better.

A social network site (SNS) is a Web 2.0 software application used by many Internet users. These types of networks have their advantages and disadvantages. The main advantage is the degree of communication that they can bring among users. This can improve the work environment, the productivity and also the educational environment. The negative point of these networks is communication misuse. Sometimes, users can share private information that can lead them to trouble. In order to solve these problems two options could be used: (a) create a closed platform, which only feasible in working and educational environments, or (b) use a Web platform, where the data about users are anonymous. In this latter case, we present a platform to share pictures based on the Web 2.0, where user information is anonymous. In this platform, in addition to sharing photos, we can create groups, introduce comments, etc. The platform is based on PHP and MySQL. We present the evaluation of this SNS in a real environment during a month. The parameters measured show that the SNS is working fine. Nobody has measured the same parameters as the ones studied in this paper.