Natural disasters cause enormous damage and losses every year, both economic and in terms of human lives. It is essential to develop systems to predict disasters and to generate and disseminate timely warnings. Recently, technologies such as the Internet of Things solutions have been integrated into alert systems to provide an effective method to gather environmental data and produce alerts. This work reviews the literature regarding Internet of Things solutions in the field of Early Warning for different natural disasters: floods, earthquakes, tsunamis, and landslides. The aim of the paper is to describe the adopted IoT architectures, define the constraints and the requirements of an Early Warning system, and systematically determine which are the most used solutions in the four use cases examined. This review also highlights the main gaps in literature and provides suggestions to satisfy the requirements for each use case based on the articles and solutions reviewed, particularly stressing the advantages of integrating a Fog/Edge layer in the developed IoT architectures.
Smart objects and home automation tools are becoming increasingly popular, and the number of smart devices that each dedicated application has to manage is increasing accordingly. The emergence of technologies such as serverless computing and dedicated machine-to-machine communication protocols represents a valuable opportunity to facilitate management of smart objects and replicability of new solutions. The aim of this paper is to propose a framework for home automation applications that can be applied to control and monitor any appliance or object in a smart home environment. The proposed framework makes use of a dedicated messages-exchange protocol based on MQTT and cloud-deployed serverless functions. Furthermore, a vocal command interface is implemented to let users control the smart object with vocal interactions, greatly increasing the accessibility and intuitiveness of the proposed solution. A smart object, namely a smart kitchen fan extractor system, was developed, prototyped, and tested to illustrate the viability of the proposed solution. The smart object is equipped with a narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) module to send and receive commands to and from the cloud. In order to evaluate the performance of the proposed solution, the suitability of NB-IoT for the transmission of MQTT messages was evaluated. The results show how NB-IoT has an acceptable latency performance despite some minimal packet loss.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.