The advent of various wireless technologies has paved the way for the realization of new infrastructures and applications for smart cities. Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are one of the most important among these technologies. WSNs are widely used in various applications in our daily lives. Due to their cost effectiveness and rapid deployment, WSNs can be used for securing smart cities by providing remote monitoring and sensing for many critical scenarios including hostile environments, battlefields, or areas subject to natural disasters such as earthquakes, volcano eruptions, and floods or to large-scale accidents such as nuclear plants explosions or chemical plumes. The purpose of this paper is to propose a new framework where WSNs are adopted for remote sensing and monitoring in smart city applications. We propose using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles to act as a data mule to offload the sensor nodes and transfer the monitoring data securely to the remote control center for further analysis and decision making. Furthermore, the paper provides insight about implementation challenges in the realization of the proposed framework. In addition, the paper provides an experimental evaluation of the proposed design in outdoor environments, in the presence of different types of obstacles, common to typical outdoor fields. The experimental evaluation revealed several inconsistencies between the performance metrics advertised in the hardware-specific data-sheets. In particular, we found mismatches between the advertised coverage distance and signal strength with our experimental measurements. Therefore, it is crucial that network designers and developers conduct field tests and device performance assessment before designing and implementing the WSN for application in a real field setting.

Nowadays, smartphone applications (apps) are literally used in all life aspects, improving the quality of different services in addition to saving time and effort. However, the majority of currently used apps in different universities around the world are limited in their features and not very popular among students who may suffer to get useful information using traditional guiding methods. However, the importance of these apps is constantly increasing, especially in times of crises like the COVID‐19 pandemic during which people were forced to work from home and the human interaction was reduced to its minimal degree. In this paper, we present a Student Interactive Assistant Android Application with Chatbot (SIAAA‐C), which is basically a personal electronic guide that is used by students to get various and effective academic services. The app has a number of useful features including a campus map, multiple types of notifications, and most important, an efficient built in chatbot that responds to both Arabic and English written queries and covers a wide range of academic topics ranging from basic to complex. Even more, SIAAA‐C was designed to have Arabic and English interfaces to be used in the University of Jordan (UoJ), which has one of the biggest campuses in the Arabic area with more than 40,000 local and foreign students. Moreover, SIAAA‐C was practically tested in a real‐life environment by a group of UoJ students who were selected from different faculties during the pandemic peak period and the feedbacks were very promising, based on the outcomes of an evaluation survey that was answered by 102 students after a 1‐month test period.