The advent of Internet of Things has propelled the agricultural domain through the integration of sensory devices, capable of monitoring and wirelessly propagating information to producers; thus, they employ Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). These WSNs allow real time monitoring, enabling intelligent decision-making to maximize yields and minimize cost. Designing and deploying a WSN is a challenging and multivariate task, dependent on the considered environment. For example, a need for network synchronization arises in such networks to correlate acquired measurements. This work focuses on the design and installation of a WSN that is capable of facilitating the sensing aspects of smart and precision agriculture applications. A system is designed and implemented to address specific design requirements that are brought about by the considered environment. A simple synchronization scheme is described to provide time-correlated measurements using the sink node’s clock as reference. The proposed system was installed on an olive grove to assess its effectiveness in providing a low-cost system, capable of acquiring synchronized measurements. The obtained results indicate the system’s overall effectiveness, revealing a small but expected difference in the acquired measurements’ time correlation, caused mostly by serial transmission delays, while yielding a plethora of relevant environmental conditions.

With the rapid increase of vehicles in use worldwide, the need for efficient traffic monitoring systems has arisen. This work proposes a low-cost vehicular traffic monitoring system using IoT devices and fog computing. The system is based on a three-tiered architecture which is composed of (i) the mobile tracking system that records the positions of the vehicles using GPS technologies; (ii) the information gathering system which gathers all the data collected by the mobile tracking system; and (iii) the fog devices that process the data collected and extract the information needed. The system is tested in the town of Corfu during a period of increased tourism when the traffic is considered to be relatively dense. The mobile tracking system devices are placed on taxis and with the help of professional taxi drivers the accuracy of the data collected is evaluated. The system is able to record the movement of the vehicles accurately using its own independent data. The results can be remotely accessed by utilizing fog and cloud computing infrastructure established to process the data and upload it on a server. The system is used to give a better understanding of the speed variance in the center of the town during different dates and hours. In conclusion the system presented in this study can be utilized to monitor the traffic and provide vital information about its behavior in relation to time.

Technological evolution and in particular the development of the Internet of Things (IoT) has paved the way for material prosperity and a better standard of living. A critical factor in the effectiveness of emerging IoT applications, which heavily rely on sensor information flow, is the development of a functional and efficient Wireless Sensor Network. Additionally, the levels of automation are conducive to usability and time efficiency by reducing the need for human intervention, as well as increasing the rate at which experiments can be carried out. In current work, an already installed infrastructure on the Ionian University campus is considered and enhanced, with the goal of elevating accessibility and user-friendliness, by designing a web platform. The presented platform enables the remote development, execution and monitoring of simple but necessary network-based algorithms using a custom language, without requiring code to be uploaded to remote nodes. As a proof of concept, three information dissemination algorithms are implemented and provided as example templates for users, promoting simultaneously ease of use.

The upcoming era of the Internet of Things comes with a plethora of applications in various areas, as well as challenges that can be better addressed in small and controlled environments. This motivates the development of a low-cost wire-less network testbed that consists of Arduino devices and XBee modules that handle the communication among them. Moreover, each device is equipped with humidity, ultraviolet radiation, and structural ambient vibrations sensors. The particular testbed is installed in the premises of the Ionian University (Corfu, Greece). The location of nodes plays a crucial role in the network’s topology and is highly considered at the development stage. This paper describes the Ionian University’s Campus Wireless Network Testbed Infrastructure and discusses the impact of humidity and ultraviolet radiation on the network’s topology by performing several experiments.