The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is one of the most demanding IoT applications. The insertion of industries in the context of smart cities and other smart environments, allied with new communication technologies such as 5G, brings a new horizon of possibilities and new requirements. These requirements include low latency, the support of a massive quantity of devices and data, and the need to support horizontal communications between devices at the edge level. To make this feasible, it is necessary to establish an IIoT-to-cloud continuum distributing federated brokers across the infrastructure and providing scalability and interoperability. To attend this type of application, we present the Helix Multi-layered IoT platform and its operating modes. We report and discuss its real-world deployment in the Aveiro Tech City Living Lab in Aveiro, Portugal with functional and performance tests. We tested device-to-device communication across edge and core layers and also interconnected the infrastructure with one in São Paulo, Brazil, replicating the use of a global industry. The successful deployment validates the use of a Helix Multi-layered IoT platform as a suitable backend platform for IIoT applications capable of establishing the IIoT-to-cloud continuum. It also helps for the deployment of other applications in such a domain.

This paper presents the Helix SandBox, an open platform for quick prototyping of smart environment applications. Its architecture was designed to be a lightweight solution that aimed to simplify the instance integration and setup of the main Generic Enablers provided in the FIWARE architecture. As a Powered by FIWARE platform, the SandBox operates with the NGSI standard for interoperability between systems. The platform offers a container-based multicloud architecture capable of running in public, private and bare metal clouds or even in the leading hypervisors available. This paper also proposes a multi-layered architecture capable of integrates the cloud, fog, edge and IoT layers through the federation concept. Lastly, we present two Smart Cities applications conducted in the form of Proof of Concept (PoC) that use the Helix SandBox platform as back-end.

Efficiently orchestrating resources in a Radio Access Network poses a challenging task, which has been made even more difficult by the addition of vertical slices of operation with very unrelated requirements in 5G and Beyond 5G. The proposal of an open and interoperable standard by the Open Radio Access alliance has paved the path to foment research and development of innovative solutions. As a result, the solution herein presented employs a Machine Learning algorithm of Reinforcement Learning to deal with the multiple slices requirements in a unified approach based on a resource management policy. The simulation results showed a consistent response of the Machine Learning model to wisely administrate the available resources to maximize the potential of the User Equipment requirements attainment.

O crescente volume de pesquisas e o desenvolvimento de novas plataformas de backend para Internet das Coisas (IoT, do inglês Internet of Things) reforçam a proposição de novas arquiteturas que ofereçam...

This paper describes a TEM horn for applications in Ultra Wide Band (UWB) Ground Penetration Radar (GPR), named DARHA (Disaster Assistance and Rescue Horn Antenna) for short. Two antennas were designed and built, with good performance in terms of bandwidth and directivity. Special care was taken with the baluns since the overall antenna performance, in terms of return loss, was strongly influenced by them. Two designed antennas detected the presence of a water filled plastic container behind a concrete wall, by using their time responses read by a vector network analyzer, as for a real world scenario application..