The rapid development in low-cost sensor and wireless communication technology has made it possible for a large number of devices to coexist and exchange information autonomously. It has been predicted that a substantial number of devices will be able to exchange and provide information about an environment with the goal of improving our lives, under the well-known paradigm of the Internet of Things (IoT). One of the main applications of these kinds of devices is the monitoring of scenarios. In order to improve the current wine elaboration process, this paper presents a real-time monitoring system to supervise the status of wine casks. We have focused on a special kind of white wine, called Fino, principally produced in Andalusia (Southern Spain). The process by which this kind of wind is monitored is completely different from that of red wine, as the casks are not completely full and, due to the fact that they are not renewed very often, are more prone to breakage. A smart cork prototype monitors the structural health, the ullage, and the level of light inside the cask and the room temperature. The advantage of this smart cork is that it allows winemakers to monitor, in real time, the status of each wine cask so that, if an issue is detected (e.g., a crack appears in the cask), they can act immediately to resolve it. Moreover, abnormal parameters or incorrect environmental conditions can be detected in time before the wine loses its desired qualities. The system has been tested in “Bodegas San Acacio,” a winery based in Montemayor, a town in the north of Andalusia. Results show that the use of such a system can provide a solution that tracks the evolution and assesses the suitability of the delicate wine elaboration process in real time, which is especially important for the kind of wine considered in this paper.

Wireless Sensor Networks constitute pervasive and distributed computing systems and are potentially one of the most important technologies of this century. They have been specifically identified as a good candidate to become an integral part of the protection of critical infrastructures. In this paper we focus on railway infrastructure protection and we present the details of a sensor platform designed to be integrated into a slab track system in order to carry out both installation and maintenance monitoring activities. In the installation phase, the platform helps operators to install the slab tracks in the right position. In the maintenance phase, the platform collects information about the structural health and behavior of the infrastructure when a train travels along it and relays the readings to a base station. The base station uses trains as data mules to upload the information to the internet. The use of a train as a data mule is especially suitable for collecting information from remote or inaccessible places which do not have a direct connection to the internet and require less network infrastructure. The overall aim of the system is to deploy a permanent economically viable monitoring system to improve the safety of railway infrastructures.

Recently, slab track systems have arisen as a safer and more sustainable option for high speed railway infrastructures, compared to traditional ballasted tracks. Integrating Wireless Sensor Networks within these infrastructures can provide structural health related data that can be used to evaluate their degradation and to not only detect failures but also to predict them. The design of such systems has to deal with a scenario of large areas with inaccessible zones, where neither Internet coverage nor electricity supply is guaranteed. In this paper we propose a monitoring system for slab track systems that measures vibrations and displacements in the track. Collected data is transmitted to passing trains, which are used as data mules to upload the information to a remote control center. On arrival at the station, the data is stored in a database, which is queried by an application in order to detect and predict failures. In this paper, different communication architectures are designed and tested to select the most suitable system meeting such requirements as efficiency, low cost and data accuracy. In addition, to ensure communication between the sensing devices and the train, the communication system must take into account parameters such as train speed, antenna coverage, band and frequency.