The fifth generation of cellular communications (5G) provides enough performance to carry on scenarios that require low latency such as robot control remote computing. In this work, it is presented an experiment focused on the trajectory management of a 5G connected arm robot end-effector with image processing in the Edge. This use case, which is integrated into a Non-Public 5G network (NPN), provides several improvements in terms of network configuration to enable the development of Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) use cases by enhancing uplink throughput.

BLE-based mesh networks are based on a simple flooding algorithm with some mechanisms to reduce network saturation, called managed flooding. The operating parameters of the network establish its performance, but in an industrial environment the operating conditions are not permanent, so a system that can adjust to these changes is necessary. A global decision system is not valid since each part of the network may have different properties. An autonomous system that does not introduce an overhead of message exchange is necessary for its operation. This paper proposes an algorithm based on the information provided by a single control message exchange that allows each node to autonomously select its operating parameters to improve the quality of links with neighbouring nodes and thus improve the overall performance of the network.

The introduction of the Factory of the Future, Artificial Intelligence, Big Data and the cloud computing paradigm in industrial use cases means that new communication systems to support their requirements must be developed. The fifth generation of cellular networks (5G) has become one of the most relevant alternatives in this field. Within 5G network infrastructures, there are public networks along with private 5G networks, which allow a private entity to have its own local 5G network to cover its needs. However, the regulations in place in Europe, and the spectrum reserved for private 5G, mean that it cannot meet the requirements of some of the industrial applications for which it was intended. Therefore, it is necessary to analyze the parameters of the 5G network to find the operating thresholds according to the requirements set by 3GPP.

BLE 5.0 enables the use of a more robust coding method that allows the communication range of the nodes to be significantly increased. Moreover, using BLE it is possible to set up mesh networks where the information is transmitted from the source to the destination through relays and by flooding. However, to maintain compatibility with BLE 4.0, this coding is not permitted, limiting the range of these networks. In this work we assess the possibilities that this combination would have, and the potential savings in equipment costs, quality and communications distances.

Vehicle communications are one of the pillars of the development of Intelligent Transport Systems. This is a complex scenario, where several types of entities interact with each other, using a range of communication infrastructure. In this area there are several applicable technologies, with different advantages and disadvantages. Therefore, flexible and ubiquitous communication, capable of using any communication type, will allow Smart vehicles to use the most appropriate one to improve traffic movement systems. Although the use of Bluetooth has been considered in this field, it has normally been done in intra-vehicle communications, or if it has been done outside this field, for inter-vehicle communications, it has been done based on standard 4.2 or earlier versions. The Bluetooth BLE 5.0 standard has features that allow the use of this technology in previously unimaginable scenarios; in particular, the increase in range, and greater robustness in communications allowing the analysis of its use as an infrastructure to vehicle network. The preliminary results obtained demonstrate this viability and the potential of this technology in this field.

Governors on embedded systems have the function of regulating the voltage and frequency of the processors with the aim of satisfying the user's needs and at the same time reducing energy consumption necessary to achieve this. The most common use of these governors, from the point of view of energysaving, is in smartphones, in which the load that the system has to support is extremely variable depending on the user. In industry 4.0, and particularly in Visual Sensor Networks, the load has different characteristics from that of smartphones, and thus both the choice of governor as well as its configuration can allow significant savings in terms of energy, while still satisfying the requirements of the aplication. In this paper a methodology for configuring the Interactive governor is developed which guarantess the response time of the application but also offers energy savings around 40%, depending on the variability of the load.

Time Synchronized Channel Hopping protocol (TSCH) belongs to the new low-power MAC protocols included in IEEE 802.15.4e with better properties as a multihop network in industrial applications. An open issue in the standard is how to build and maintain the communication schedule. In this paper we have implemented a minimal recommended configuration and tested it against one proposed centralized scheduling optimization mechanism in a real WSN application.

The huge growth in the smartphones market has led to the improvement in ARM architectures, so that today there are many devices based on them, with sufficient capacity to deal with certain image processing applications. These are used in VSN (Visual Sensor Networks) and in other scenarios, where the energy used in the process is a parameter to be considered. In these scenarios, and with the HMP (Heterogeneous multi-processing) architectures on which the current platforms are based, it is necessary to determine both the core as well as the working frequency in order to achieve the application's image processing objectives with the least possible energy consumption. In this type of system, the workload is oriented towards interactive applications, so the priorities are different to those of VSN type systems. Conventional regulation algorithms do not make appropriate use of the processor's frequency range, in relation to the load. This paper analyses the influence of the maximum frequency value on system performance and power consumption.

Industrial media control applications require on-line QoS management services to dynamically allocate the bandwidth among the entities that compose the distributed application. The bandwidth distribution mechanism assigns bandwidth to each entity based on the QoS requirements and the current state of the network. However, mapping that bandwidth into operational parameters that serve the scheduling model of the network is not straightforward. Due to systems constraints, this is not a bijective function, therefore multiple solutions may mathematically represent the same bandwidth value but lead to different application performance levels. This paper presents two mapping algorithms and analyzes their performance in this context. The obtained results show that the selection of this mapping algorithm is highly relevant for the application performance.

Urban facility interconnection networks require a robustness and reliability usually found in public networks or private cable and radio networks in licensed bands. Both factors mean an increase in costs, which also increase as the size of the network increases. The recent rise in use of wireless technologies in open wavebands has attracted the interest of the industry in the spread of these types of links, even though they have a lower level of robustness and reliability, which must be improved using communication mechanisms and protocols. This aspect directly affects real time applications, such as VoIP and video-streaming, and determines the viability of these systems in real installations. This paper evaluates the performance of control and real time multimedia traffic in the 5 GHz band through the use of the SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) and RTP (Real-Time Transport Protocol) protocols, in a laboratory testbed.

In distributed multimedia applications, an information compression stage is usually necessary. The objective here is to obtain a compression rate that makes the application viable. In this stage, reductions in image quality are often produced in order to reach high rates of compression. This image degradation must be measured and known in order to ensure that it can be limited within an acceptable range of values. The most commonly used metrics are MSE and PSNR. In recent years other metrics have been developed with the aim of obtaining values closer to human subjective evaluation. In this paper, metrics of image compression degradation for image processing applications are analyzed. We propose degradation metrics when the images are used in image processing applications. These are tested on two types of application which show a more than acceptable correlation between the measures and vision algorithms.

Currently, falling prices in technologies associated with surveillance applications has led to a huge increase in their use in all types of environments, although the most common applications are monitoring of traffic and people. In surveillance applications, the majority of the algorithms and applications are based on robustness in the detection and monitoring of people, vehicles, etc., in all kind of conditions, in which power consumption is not a parameter of the system. In this work, we present the use of this technology to develop energy aware light control systems for large installations and to reduce energy consumption. Depending on the architectures and algorithms used significant power reduction is achieved.

The use of multimedia within industrial applications has become commonplace, targetting improved process monitoring and machine vision. In both cases, the multimedia information is commonly distributed and subject to time constraints that must be met across networks while avoiding untolerable interference over typical control flows. This can be achieved with Constant Bit-Rate (CBR) channels, typically supported by real-time protocols. However, the compressors used to reduce the amount of information to transfer generate Variable Bit-Rate (VBR) patterns. Adapting a VBR source to a CBR channel requires specific care in order to avoid wasting channel bandwidth or dropping video frames. This paper focuses on MJPEG transmission over Ethernet and proposes a bidimensional adaptation using the JPEG quantification factor q on the source side and frame acquisition/transmission period T on the source/network side respectively, using the FTT-SE protocol and its support for dynamic QoS management. The paper also shows several experiments with pre-recorded video streams that illustrate the advantages of the proposed approach.

The impact of the use of mobile devices by means of GPRS (general packet radio service) technology to access environmental information in real time, provided by sensors strategically placed in a metropolitan area has been studied with the objective of using this information to find out rainfall volume and phreatic levels in times of emergency. This allows the technical services to make the correct decisions in the management of a large network of pump stations, flood gates, etc. It is demonstrated that this is a reliable system with an acceptable response time. The system being tested is integrated into a powerful supervision and control system that works in the purification network of the city of Valencia. It has been developed jointly by the "Ciclo Integral del Agua" and the Technical University of Valencia

The limitation in maximum packet size of fieldbuses, is one of the characteristics that limit throughput in these networks. This restricts the range of multimedia applications viable over these infrastructures. In Ethernet, the limitation of 1500 bytes is currently being surpassed by the use of jumbo-frames, which offer a maximum frame size of 9 Kb, thus significantly improving the throughput of Ethernet. The aim of this paper is to analyze the impact of increasing frame size in traditional fieldbuses and in Ethernet, as they have a different range of multimedia applications. As typical multimedia applications in industrial environment, computer vision applications are analyzed

In this paper, a system for the transport of images across Profibus industrial networks acting as support to the monitoring and control system of industrial processes is implemented and evaluated. The capacity of Fieldbus Data Link (FDL) to support the transport of images and the impact on the performance achieved through the utilization of compressed images are analysed. A communications protocol over FDL is implemented and tests are realized with different image sizes, compression ratios and background traffic which allows for the simulation of various scenarios. Profibus networks have been shown to be capable of simultaneously transporting images with control traffic, which opens up a new range of applications.