WLAN Access Points Channel Assignment Strategy for Indoor Localization Systems in Smart Sustainable Cities

IEEE 802.11 Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) has become one of the most popular networking environments. With high density WLANs, it causes the interference among access points (APs) and degrades the performance of APs, especially in public area. To solve this problem, we design and implement a Cluster-based Channel Assignment (CCA), a combination of RSS-Aware Channel Selection Module (RCSM) and Interference-Aware Clustering Module (ICM), which is applied to a network management system (NMS) as a central coordinator. Based on the Received Signal Strength (RSS) information collected by NMS, RCSM can assign channels with less interference and ICM can reasonably partition interference domains of WLANs. The CCA leads to more efficient channel assignment in high density WLANs. We applied our scheme in a high density real Public WLANs, called Huashan. The results show it effectively increases the AP's throughput.

Due to the wide deployment of wireless local area networks (WLAN), received signal strength (RSS)-based indoor WLAN localization has attracted considerable attention in both academia and industry. In this paper, we propose a novel page rank-based indoor mapping and localization (PRIMAL) by using the gene-sequenced unlabeled WLAN RSS for simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). Specifically, first of all, based on the observation of the motion patterns of the people in the target environment, we use the Allen logic to construct the mobility graph to characterize the connectivity among different areas of interest. Second, the concept of gene sequencing is utilized to assemble the sporadically-collected RSS sequences into a signal graph based on the transition relations among different RSS sequences. Third, we apply the graph drawing approach to exhibit both the mobility graph and signal graph in a more readable manner. Finally, the page rank (PR) algorithm is proposed to construct the mapping from the signal graph into the mobility graph. The experimental results show that the proposed approach achieves satisfactory localization accuracy and meanwhile avoids the intensive time and labor cost involved in the conventional location fingerprinting-based indoor WLAN localization.

A rising number of people agree that the actions conducted in India as part of the Smart Cities project should be utilized to create models for environmentally sustainable smart cities. The circumstances in developing nations differ from those in industrialized nations, which have historically worked toward sustainable cities and are currently working toward smart sustainable cities. The Smart cities standards as they stand now seem to place more of an emphasis on governance challenges, social and economic development and the use of contemporary information and communication technology (ICT). Background: Sustainable indicators are the measures that are used to gauge the effectiveness of environmental strategies. These activities are connected to certain goals and outlined in a sustainability plan. Reducing waste during production, for instance or the carbon footprint. Their execution serves as a gauge for whether things are moving in the proper way. Methods: This study emphasizes on 20 top smart cities of India using GIS Mapping techniques and geospatial data science. Results: These indicators are often used to assess if the city of India is accomplishing its goals. If there is a deviation, remedial action may be taken. Sustainability indicators, then, assess both the performance of the city’s growth and its plan execution. Conclusions: But it's crucial to choose the appropriate parameters and make sure they're directly related to the suggested goals. If not, they will basically stop working.

The Global Positioning System (GPS) has eventually become a common positioning technology. While GPS enabled many applications, satellite signals have yet to overcome many obstacles to enable indoor positioning. Meanwhile, due to the wide deployment of Wireless Local Area Networks (WLAN) in recent years, WLAN positioning algorithms have become popular for mobile device positioning in indoor environments. The most accurate WLAN positioning algorithms exploit the so-called fingerprinting concept which consists of two stages. In the offline stage (training), the Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) from a set of available Access Points (AP) is measured for a number of reference locations and stored in a database. Due to the availability of many APs and the complex structure of indoor environments, this information is distinctive for each reference location and thus is called a position fingerprint. In the online stage (testing), a mobile device receives RSSIs from the APs and their fingerprint is compared to the fingerprints that are stored in the database for a best possible match. WLAN fingerprinting can provide high accuracy in indoor environments when there are many APs which ensure fingerprint uniqueness. This paper provides a novel approach to use WLAN multipath signals as possible fingerprints for positioning algorithms for applications with lower number of access points. The paper provides an initial study.

Building a smart city that follows sustainability goals enhances the quality of life and preserves environmental, human, and social capital. Yet, existing smart sustainable city projects have concentrated on the technological dimensions of smart cities such as using big data or smart devices to follow sustainability goals. Currently, there is no comprehensive category of smart sustainable city indicators in the literature. This paper aims to discover these indicators by considering the common features of sustainability and smart city concepts. Two rounds of the content analysis technique were employed to investigate semantic, lexical, and conceptual relationships between smart city and sustainability indicators. This paper employed the Sustainable Development Indicators suggested by OECD and the Smart City Index Master by Cohen as the two main groups of indicators. The findings offer a novel set of indicators that enables policymakers and researchers to consider the smartness and sustainability of their projects simultaneously. This includes socio-cultural, economic, environmental, and governance categories with 28 associated indicators. The outcome of this paper offers a unique combined category of smart sustainable city indicators by considering the key elements of sustainability and smart city concepts. Academics and policymakers can also employ this set of indicators as a guideline to build a smart sustainable community.

Currently, Internet of Things (IoT) has become common in various applications, including smart factories, smart cities, and smart homes. In them, wireless local-area networks (WLANs) are widely used due to their high-speed data transfer, flexible coverage ranges, and low costs. To enhance the performance, the WLAN configuration should be optimized in dense WLAN environments where multiple access points (APs) and hosts exist. Previously, we have studied the active AP configuration algorithm for dual interfaces using IEEE802.11n and 11ac protocols at each AP under non-channel bonding (non-CB). In this paper, we study the algorithm considering the channel bonding (CB) to enhance its capacity by bonding two channels together. To improve the throughput estimation accuracy of the algorithm, the reduction factor is introduced at contending hosts for the same AP. For evaluations, we conducted extensive experiments using the WIMENT simulator and the testbed system using Raspberry Pi 4B APs. The results show that the estimated throughput is well matched with the measured one, and the proposal achieves the higher throughput with a smaller number of active APs than the previous configurations.

The purpose of this paper is to provide insight into the implementation of Environmental, Social, Governance (ESG) in cities. The concept of smart city in the context of sustainable development will be presented. Smart city is an innovative concept that integrates digital infrastructure in carefully planned cities to ensure accessibility, environmental friendliness and efficient use of resources. The link between smart city and sustainable city is reflected in the concept of smart sustainable cities. It describes a city whose development is supported by modern technologies and co-created by its residents. In this article, we seek answers to the question of how non-financial reporting can be useful in the development of a smart, sustainable city. In today’s world, the concept of smart, sustainable cities is becoming a key goal for cities striving for sustainable development. Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues play an extremely important role in this concept, which provides the basis for efforts to create smart and sustainable cities. We will also address how ESG methodology can support city managers in various areas, such as managing urban transportation, organizing waste disposal, or introducing electronic citizen services. In addition, we will discuss the role of smart cities in improving the quality of life of their residents, where ESG, by optimizing environmental, social and economic management solutions, can significantly contribute to the further development of cities. We will present some examples of Polish cities and their approaches to ESG risk management.

According to United Nations estimates, about 70% of the world’s population will live in urban areas by 2050. (https://www.un.org) Smart sustainable cities technologies and approaches, including those based on information and communications technology (ICT) solutions and Internet of things (IoT), are already helping people to overcome multiple challenges of urban development and to progress towards achieving global objectives for cities, particularly Sustainable Development Goal 11 ‘Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable’ (The first United Smart Cities SMART CITY LAB opened in Vienna, supporting co-creation of solutions for smart sustainable cities worldwide 2018, [1]). The Smart Cities Mission (SCM), launched in 2015, by the Government of India, aims at building up sustainable and inclusive cities that provide core infrastructure, a clean and sustainable environment and a decent quality of life to its citizens. The strategic components of the Mission are city improvement (retrofitting), city renewal (redevelopment) and city extension (greenfield development) with smart solutions applied in service delivery and governance (SDG India Index & Dashboard 2019–2020, [2]). There are several urbanization models that incorporate digital technologies to address some of the urbanization and sustainability challenges: Digital cities feature the integration of digital technology into the city’s core infrastructure systems; intelligent cities rely on the digital city infrastructure to build intelligent buildings, transportation systems, schools, enterprises, public spaces, public services, etc., and to integrate them into intelligent urban systems; and smart cities—deploy intelligent urban systems at the service of socio-economic development and improving urban quality of life (Estevez et al, Smart sustainable cities, reconnaissance study 2016, [3]) So, here, we are trying to deal with systems of systems in physical ecosystems powered by various ICT and digital technologies. Meanwhile, the existing technological approaches tend to latch onto the most hyped technology of the year and produce many silo-ed solutions for smart cities which, although elevates technology innovation, fails to engage its citizens. Therefore, a design intervention is needed to help bridge this and make technologies work for humans, the citizens and the primary stakeholder. This interpretation paper is an inquisition into the role of design and designers, to bring the right kind of approach when it comes to sustainable smart city design. The paper first lays down the high-level role and responsibilities of designers and its various other key stakeholders in crafting a smart city. Then, it talks about the right kind of methodologies that designers bring at all levels of sustainable smart city design—from working with official bodies in co-creation and collaboration mode to the end-users—the citizens—to understand their wants, needs and desires. The paper then details out a case study of a smart campus where the aforementioned methods are applied in order to come up with the most effective designs for the smart city that meet the official bodies’ KPI requirements and at the same time, delivers best-in-class experiences to citizens.

It is usually possible to associate with more than one Access Point (AP) in IEEE 802.11 Wireless LANs. AP selection is a crucial issue because the performance achieved by a user heavily depends on the AP selected. A received signal strength (RSS)-based association mechanism is specified by the IEEE 802.11 standard. However, this does not consider the channel conditions and AP load, which leads to a low throughput and a low user transmission rate. An alternative to using the RSS is to exploit the airtime metric, which provides users with information on how busy the channel is, but the results of our simulations show that the airtime metric cannot indicate the exact status of the channel. In this paper, we present a new association framework using channel occupancy in order to provide users with exact channel status information of APs. Via the proposed scheme, users can compare the achievable throughput provided by each AP and select the best AP. We validate our proposed association method via simulation results, which show that the throughput improvement of the method is worthy of notice.

Indoor positioning methods using location-sensitive features of available wireless signals can achieve high accuracy. In particular, many state-of-the-art methods exploit quite unique sets of location-dependent received signal strength (RSS) measurements from multiple wireless local area network (WLAN) access points (APs), also called as wireless fingerprints. However, reception of signals from WLAN APs is not often stable, and RSS measurements tend to be unavailable due to WLAN card or AP transient effects, limited sensitivity of WLAN cards, and fluctuating attenuation and reflection of signals due to a multipath environment, structural changes and moving objects. In certain hostile scenarios, bogus APs may be installed to disorient WLAN localisation algorithms. In this study, two approaches are proposed to mitigate the impact of faulty signal strength measurements. Performance figures are provided for both simulated and empirical environments in order to support conclusions.

IEEE 802.11 wireless local area networks (WLANs) are widely deployed nowadays in home and urban areas. To solve the problem of radio frequency scarcity, interference minimization-oriented channel assignment has been very much explored at PHY layer. However, the effect of time domain simultaneous transmission on the neighboring interference is rarely considered. In this paper, we propose a cross-layer channel assignment algorithm for newly deployed access point (AP) initial setting up in high-density WLANs. Compared to the conventional algorithms which only focus on PHY layer, our proposed algorithm jointly analyzes the time domain overlap from MAC layer and frequency domain overlap at PHY layer to minimize the neighboring interference, which is the fatal reason of network Quality of Service (QoS) reduction. We also modify the beacon frame to support real-time information collection for channel assignment. Simulation results are provided to validate the proposed cross-layer channel assignment algorithm.

Indoor localization based on Received Signal Strengths (RSS) or on some form of power measurements is a low-cost and low-complexity solution gaining more and more interest in the research and commercial worlds. Typically, Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) signals are employed for such purpose, due to the fact that they are widely spread in indoor environments. Nevertheless, any wireless signal available in indoor scenarios can be used for positioning based on similar power measurement approaches. One example is the radio frequency identification (RFID), which enable portable localization systems in the form of wearable REID tags. Such RFID-enabled systems are highly demanded for health-state monitoring, object tracking, and security. These applications are mostly indoor applications, and thus, we can envision a near future where multiple RFID and WLAN signals will co-exist on multiple frequency bands. The existing signal diversity can offer a benefit in indoor positioning, providing that the signal propagation effects for both WLAN and RFID are well understood and taken into account. However, measurement-based studies on indoor channel modeling, including path loss and shadowing effects of RFID signals are still missing. A comparison between RFII) and WLAN channel models for positioning purpose has yet to be made. It is the purpose of our paper to address the path-loss channel models and shadowing effects for WLAN and RFID signals based on extensive measurement campaigns in an office environment.

This paper focuses on the challenges and opportunities of achieving sustainability in smart cities. It depends on maintaining the balance between energy efficiency and connectivity through energy-efficient protocols. The study surveys systems with energy-efficient protocols, emphasizing their strengths and limitations in maintaining sustainability in smart cities. The need for energy-efficient protocols in smart city settings is that these protocols dynamically adjust operations to optimize energy consumption within sensor nodes in communication networks while considering parameters: like heterogeneity, traffic patterns, and environmental factors. Evaluation against key performance metrics such as energy consumption, data delivery ratio, network lifetime, and throughput identify promising technologies to achieve an optimal balance between connectivity and energy efficiency in smart cities. It concludes by proposing future research directions and considerations to make the development of sustainable networking solutions rapidly tailored to the evolving landscape of smart cities. This paper aims to present a comprehensive overview of the pivotal role played by energy-efficient protocols in fostering sustainable networking architectures.

The evolution of smart cities represents a pivotal transformation in urban development, driven by the integration of cutting-edge technologies. Among these, blockchain and edge intelligence have emerged as pivotal forces shaping the future of smart cities. This paper presents a comprehensive review and outlook on the potential synergy between blockchain and edge intelligence, highlighting their transformative impact on sustainable smart city development. In our analysis, we delve into the key components and technologies associated with smart cities, emphasizing their goals of sustainability, efficiency, and improved quality of life. We introduce the concepts of blockchain and edge intelligence, elucidating their applications across various industries and urban domains. Moreover, we identify gaps in the existing literature and underscore the critical need for further research in the synergy of these technologies in smart cities. Our exploration extends to the significance of the study, emphasizing the timeliness of this research amidst growing interest in sustainable smart cities. We discuss the potential benefits and implications of this technological convergence for urban planning, technology adoption, and sustainability. This paper envisions smart cities that prioritize sustainability, circular economies, and data privacy, while fostering innovation and collaboration among public and private stakeholders. As we look to the future, we anticipate that this convergence will pave the way for more resilient, sustainable, and inclusive smart cities, and we outline potential areas for further research and development in this exciting field.

South Korea has a long history of the planning, development, and management of smart cities to integrate emerging technological advances into complex physical infrastructure. This article explores lessons learned from smart city programs in South Korea to better understand the challenges and opportunities of future sustainable smart city innovation and development. This article conducted a comprehensive review and analysis of South Korea's smart city programs and conceptualized a sustainable smart city framework that will assist policymakers, planners, citizens, and other key stakeholders. This research proposed Governance, Policy, and Services (GPS) as the three pillars of a successful smart city framework, in addition to integrating physical and cyber infrastructures. This article argues that a smart city should function as a service platform that incubates and delivers long-term services to citizens and society. This article also emphasizes that a strong groundwork of the GPS framework will lead to the successful adaptation of innovative technologies and ideas for future smart city programs.