The Internet of Things (IoT) already connects billions of devices and keeps growing exponentially. These devices are designed to be integrated with industrial machines, home appliances and infrastructures. One such use-case is to build a smart grid management system that relies on demand-response techniques to control the appliances automatically so that the power can be distributed optimally. The mission-critical smart grid communications require secure, reliable, two-way communicable, and latency bounded connections between the management system and the electrical appliances. To realize these, cellular technology is arguably the most feasible solution. 3GPP has already released the Narrowband-Internet of Things (NB-IoT) standards as the low-power dense-area coverage IoT cellular solution. In this paper, we present an NB-IoT system to monitor and control the connected electrical appliances in a smart grid network. The platform is also capable of configuring the network dynamically. We assess the latency performance for our solution using the commercially available Orange network in Belgium. It is observed that NB-IoT enabled devices can be controlled and monitored with a maximum latency less than 8 seconds in the deep-indoor environment and within 2 seconds for the outdoor environment.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is being deployed to provide smart solutions for buildings, logistics, hospitals, and many more. It is growing with billions of connected devices. However, with such tremendous growth, maintenance and support are the hidden burdens. The devices deployed for IoT generally have a light microcontroller, low-power, low memory, and lightweight software. The software, which includes firmware and applications, can be managed remotely via a wireless connection. This improves flexibility, installation time, accessibility, effectiveness, and cost. The firmware can be updated constantly to remove known bugs and improve the functionality of the device. This work presents an approach to update firmware over-the-air (OTA) for constrained IoT devices. We used Narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) as the wireless communication standard to communicate between the managing server and devices. NB-IoT is one of the most promising low power wide area (LPWA) network protocols that supports more than 50k devices within a cell using a licensed spectrum. This work is a proof of concept demonstrating the usage of NB-IoT to update firmware for constrained devices. We also calculated the overall power consumption and latency for different sizes of the firmware.

This paper presents the architecture and the basic principles behind the design and implementation of the SCATTER system, a wireless end-to-end communication system that participated in the DARPA Second Spectrum Collaboration Challenge (SC2). The focus is mainly on presenting the architecture and the supported interactions between the different components of the system in order to deliver a true dynamic collaborative spectrum allocation and usage, while coexisting with numerous unknown heterogeneous wireless technologies.

Today's electronic devices have multiple communication technologies available at any time. Currently, the application layer or the user needs to manually switch between them, depending on the networks in range. No holistic and adaptive approach exists that can manage all technologies and devices at once. To this extent, we previously proposed the inter-technology management framework ORCHESTRA. The framework is the first of its kind in providing fine-grained packet-level control across different network technologies in a network-wide manner. In this paper, we present a real-life implementation of this framework and show that it can cope well with mobility requirements of users by offering seamless inter-technology handovers.