The impact of COVID-19 has been felt across all sectors, from transportation, education, and public works to the daily operations of businesses like selling, retailing, and so forth. The business sector is among those badly affected, especially micro, small, and medium enterprises. The understanding of ground prevailing conditions is key in driving informed policies that would have meaningful impact on society with regard to overcoming the effects of the virus. Hence, this work is an attempt to report the real ground statistics and necessity of technological support with the goal of submitting a report of recommended policies to the concerned authorities. In this direction, this work presents the outcome of a survey conducted to assess the impact of COVID-19 on operations of micro, small, and medium enterprises and also to find out the interventions put in place around business environments so as to enforce adherence to COVID-19 health safety measures. The survey was part of a study to develop automated IoT-powered technological solutions that would help to enforce proper mask wearing in indoor environments and also observance of social distance requirements within business premises. A customized questionnaire was designed to capture data on various aspects central to the focus of the study. The study was carried out in the month of May 2021, in the Huye district of Rwanda. According to the survey findings, the major challenges faced by businesses due to COVID-19 include failure by clients to settle bills, reduced ability to expand investment, difficulty in accessing inputs domestically, lower domestic sales to consumers, and lower domestic sales to businesses. The results also reveal some positive points that most businesses were found to have: hand washing points, hand sanitizer dispensers, and mechanisms to enforce social distance between customer and customer and also customer and front desk worker. In a nutshell, this work is unique in terms of (1) the customized questionnaire about Rwanda’s needs, (2) field visit-based data collection for accurate data, and (3) including an assessment of the importance of technological intervention for better handling of public safety, especially in the MSME business sector.

A novel computing paradigm, called the Internet of things emerged a few years ago. IoT is materialized by connecting both real and digital worlds together. The deployment of IoT in vehicular networks has introduced a new vehicular communication technology-themed vehicular internet of things (V-IoT). With the introduction of miniaturized sensors and actuators, V-IoT has demonstrated the ability to improve the level of urban transport systems through the development and deployment of low-cost but powerful technologies which seamlessly upgrade the level of smart transportation in urban environments. In this research article, we have presented the features of V-IoT that encompass both the benefits and potential challenges of the technology. Low-cost IoT prototypes have been built and tested for numerous functions in vehicular environments. The monitored parameters include air, road conditions such as traffics flow sizes, air quality, weather parameters, and signal status in terms of Received signal strength indicator, and Signal noise ratio for both road and intra-vehicular environments. Devices are implemented at every IoT architectural layer and tested on a web-based IoT front-end application using different protocols like LoRaWAN. Two LoRa sensors have been deployed in the public bus to monitor some of the mentioned parameters on a real-time basis and historical data could be retrieved through the developed web-based dashboard. Simplistic algorithms are implemented for both real-time and historical data demonstration.

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Vehicular Ad Hoc Network (VANET) is a subclass of Mobile Ad Hoc Network that mainly consists of moving and/or stationary vehicles, connected through wireless protocols such as IEEE 802.11p and wireless access in vehicular environments (WAVE). With the evolution of the Internet of Things (IoT), ordinary VANET has turned to the Internet of Vehicles (IoV), with additional social aspects, a novel extension themed SIoV has become common in urban areas. However vehicular wireless communication paradigms exhibit short radio communication. This problem has always been approached by supplementing moving vehicles with stationary Road Side Infrastructures, commonly known as roadside units (RSUs). The penetration of such RSUs on the global market is very low; furthermore, their procurement, deployment, and maintenance costs are prohibitively very high. All mentioned challenges have discouraged the widespread deployment of roadside infrastructure especially within large urban scenarios. With this research, we leverage on-street parked vehicles to allow them to exist as temporal gateways in the case study area. A novel modeling technique is introduced to enable a specific Percentage of parked vehicles to take up the role of roadside gateways for a certain percentage of their parking time. A mobile application is implemented that manages parking duration of the vehicle, based on the arrival, and departure time frames. Two more existing strategies were discussed (road-intersection RSUs deployment approach and Inter-vehicle scheme) to validate our proposed method through comparative studies. To evaluate the network performance evaluation, we compare two performance metrics, that is, Packets success delivery rate, and overall packets throughput under numerous vehicle densities. Using parked vehicles as temporal roadside gateways has demonstrated better results in comparison to intersection based RSUs deployment approach, and free vehicle to vehicle communication approach.

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Placements of Road Side Units (RSUs) are an important issue of vehicular networks in urban areas. The merged cost of procurement, installation, and maintenance of intelligent RSUs is high, and therefore, cost-effective deployment strategies are necessary. In this article, we propose a scheme that optimally deploys intelligent roadside units using a travel matrix scheme based on the classical delta strategy where urban vehicles are involved in RSUs communication in the course of their travel times. Four (4) vehicular communication modes are studied, namely, (a) travel matrix based on delta RSUs deployment communication, (b) road intersection-based RSUs deployment communication, (c) road segmentation, and (d) free vehicle-to-vehicle communication. A baseline algorithm is suggested to determine the optimal locations of RSUs in terms of their geographical positions. A travel matrix technique is proposed to trace vehicles’ routeways and travel times in some points of interest (POI). Our intention is to seek an approach that reduces the required number of RSUs and ensures greater network performance effectiveness in terms of packets delivery ratio, throughput, message delay, and jitter; from our study, travel matrix delta-based placement of RSUs becomes the best in our case study scenario. The simulation results indicate that the travel matrix deployment is a suitable deployment scheme in the case study area since it can reduce the number of RSUs while enhancing the vehicular communication abilities under different vehicle density scenarios.