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Water distribution systems are one of the critical infrastructures and major assets of the water utility in a nation. The infrastructure of the distribution systems consists of resources, treatment plants, reservoirs, distribution lines, and consumers. A sustainable water distribution network management has to take care of accessibility, quality, quantity, and reliability of water. As water is becoming a depleting resource for the coming decades, the regulation and accounting of the water in terms of the above four parameters is a critical task. There have been many efforts towards the establishment of a monitoring and controlling framework, capable of automating various stages of the water distribution processes. The current trending technologies such as Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), Internet of Things (IoT), and Artificial Intelligence (AI) have the potential to track this spatially varying network to collect, process, and analyze the water distribution network attributes and events. In this work, we investigate the role and scope of the IoT technologies in different stages of the water distribution systems. Our survey covers the state-of-the-art monitoring and control systems for the water distribution networks, and the status of IoT architectures for water distribution networks. We explore the existing water distribution systems, providing the necessary background information on the current status. This work also presents an IoT Architecture for Intelligent Water Networks - IoTA4IWNet, for real-time monitoring and control of water distribution networks. We believe that to build a robust water distribution network, these components need to be designed and implemented effectively.

There are situations when you need to accelerate the software development lifecycle. When the state of Kerala in India was devastated by severe flooding in 2018, we faced such a situation while we were building applications for managing rescue and relief operations during floods. We present a variant of DevOps called Rapid-DevOps to meet the need for accelerated release cycles while maintaining the required quality and stability. We describe the cost-benefit analysis to justify its use and the factors in our development process that enabled its successful adoption.

In this paper we present our experiences in designing, developing and deploying the essential components of effective disaster relief technology using the crowdsourced approach, based on our disaster relief platform named Amrita Kripa. We present both the technical and humanitarian aspects of Amrita Kripa. Amrita Kripa has been used in providing disaster relief during both 2018 and 2019 Kerala floods. We also share some of the feedback from various users during the disaster and how the feedback helped Amrita Kripa to evolve into a flexible, user-friendly and effective disaster relief platform. We also present a comprehensive comparison with other relief applications based on the crowdsourced approach.

Crowdsourced technology has been proven as effective communication mechanism in various disaster relief efforts worldwide. It often results in generating actionable and timely information regarding disaster situation, shelters, requirement for and availability of essential supplies such as food, clothing etc. But crowdsourcing has its downsides such as providing potentially inaccurate, incomplete and unverifiable information. We have developed and deployed a crowdsourced disaster relief mobile and web platform during 2018 and 2019 Kerala floods and provided relief to victims in the areas of rescue, medical help, supplies and services. During the deployment we experienced firsthand, both the positive and the negative aspects of crowdsourced approach. In this paper we detail our experiences and analysis and highlight some potential measures to mitigate the challenges in deploying crowdsourced technology.

Pervasive new advancements and internet connectivity have brought modern visions for medical diagnosis. Sensors on the patients' body can track parameters such as body temperature, pulse rate, and other medical signals in real time. Any abnormal deviations in the parameters can alert doctors to provide immediate attention. Marine fisherman travel into deep sea for their livelihood. They may stay up to a week, 100km away from land. During these times they are cut off from the land and do not have any support in case of emergencies. They often face issues such as sea sickness, mild fever and diarrhoea. We propose to develop a primary diagnosis device for marine fisherman and help them connect with doctors on the shore. We propose to build this device for the OceanNet marine communication infrastructure. The device will help doctors to diagnose the fisherman remotely and provide first level medical aid. Parameters such as heart rate, body temperature and respiration rate are captured by the device and sent to doctors using OceanNet network. Doctors can analyse the data and prescribe medicines to the fisherman. We also developed a mobile application which can suggest medicines if the device is unable to connect to a doctor immediately. In this paper, we discuss the architecture of the proposed diagnostic device. We have built a prototype of the proposed device and we discuss the results in this paper.

The World Health Organization (WHO) describes COVID-19 as a pandemic that is causing a worldwide health disaster. Wearing a face mask in public places is the most effective method to curb the spread of the virus. The Internet of Things is emerging as one of the most significant innovations and playing a vital role during the pandemic. Affordable remote health monitoring devices help doctors to track quarantined patients. Our government is trying its best to control the spread of the virus. Citizens who do not follow the protocols serve as the reason for these widespread infections. Our work proposes a system to identify protocol violators in real-time. Our system consists of a face mask detection module, a social distance monitoring module, and a non-contact temperature monitoring module. We intend to deploy our proposed approach in public places such as airports, schools, and hospitals. These modules depend on video feeds from general security cameras and IoT sensor nodes deployed around public areas. Health care and security officials can subscribe to real-time data feeds to track public behaviour.

In this paper, we propose a cost-effective framework for developing and testing autonomous toy RC cars. In addition, we present our on-going work on developing an autonomous toy RC car that is being built using the proposed framework.

Fishermen travel far up to 50 nautical miles into the ocean for fishing. They are often stressed and worried about their families as they cannot contact them for many days. Also, it is very difficult to pass any information regarding cyclone or other natural calamities to the fishermen. As there is no scope for mobile communication offshore beyond 8–9 nautical miles due to high operational expenses(OPeX). Traditional communication systems like Marine VHF radios and satellite phones are costly and restricted to only the boats in the ocean. This paper proposes a cost-effective, full duplex communication system for the marine fishermen to communicate among the boats in the ocean as well as with their families on the shore. This paper also presents the performance evaluation results of the system setup in a lab environment. The results obtained from the tests are satisfactory and the system can be implemented on the boats.

Coping with natural disasters is one of the central challenges of this century. Many disasters are accompanied by the collapse of buildings and other structures. Since, most of the rescue operations are manually executed, this, in turn, endangers the lives of the responders who are unaware of the situation inside the building. Exact localization of the trapped victims under the debris of collapsed buildings will help streamline the rescue operations. Use of UAVs to set up an aerial IoT to help in this effort is an area of ongoing research. The objective of this paper is to evaluate the various communication technologies that are best suited for such an application of IoT. Experiments were designed and performed under various scenarios to study the propagation effects through the debris, furniture, glass panels, etc. The communication technology alternatives were evaluated based on their coverage range, and throughput through various mediums such as concrete, metal, wood, glass, and air. This paper presents the results obtained and the inferences drawn from them.

Fishermen travel beyond 100km in trawlers for fishing and sometimes the trips last for a month. The cellular network coverage is limited to 15km from the shore. Fishermen are isolated from the shore, beyond 15km. Several hundreds of fishermen lost their lives during the recent cyclones in 2017 to 2019. This demands an efficient cost-effective and affordable communication system for marine applications. OceanNet can provide Internet Services in the ocean up to 100km. There is a lack of low cost and compact Wi-Fi access points for the current OceanNet System. This work proposes the design and development of a low-cost Wi-Fi access point for the OceanNet System and benchmarks the performance in comparison with the standard off the shelf WiFi Access Point.

OceanNet is a project to provide affordable offshore Internet service for marine fishermen during their fishing activities. The communication system onboard the fishing vessel consists of long-range (LR) Wi-Fi based Adaptive Backhaul Equipment (ABE) on the mast and Wi-Fi access point inside the deck. ABE can adapt its role to either client station or mobile base station to provide backhaul and fronthaul connectivity respectively. The directional antenna of the ABE tracks the base station. Fishermen can connect their mobile phones to Internet via the Wi-Fi access point to use social media apps such as WhatsApp, Skype, etc., for offshore communication. The automatic antenna reorientation platform reorients the directional antenna of the ABE towards the base station. The current deployed system has a potential reliability issue due to the moving parts in the reorientation mechanism and the possibility of misalignment of the directional antenna. This paper proposes an alternative solution for the current antenna reorientation system by using six ABEs to provide 360 o coverage. The role of each ABE needs to be switched dynamically to either client or base station or idle. We implemented the automated wireless mode switching of one ABE through python program using a Raspberry Pi board. The detailed implementation process is discussed in the paper.

Internet of Things (IoT) is an integrated technology in which billions of devices are capacitated with digital intelligence to interconnect and communicate through the Internet, for the fulfillment of various needs obviating human intervention. Communication technologies play a vital role in the design of IoT networks, in both indoor and outdoor applications. This work presents an in-depth study on the application of the sub-GHz frequencies (915 MHz and 868 MHz) over the widely used 2.4 GHz channel, for the design of low-cost IoT networks for indoor mission-critical applications. These frequency bands were experimentally evaluated, under varying indoor environments. In addition, a mathematical model for the computation of path loss exponent, in an indoor scenario affected by random interference by movements of humans as the environmental condition, is also proposed in this paper.

Marine environment can be very extreme and unpredictable. fishing vessels need a robust communication infrastructure to connect to the shore based services during scenarios such as impending cyclones and other emergencies (such as accidents with ships) to expedite rescue operations. Even operation-wise, Internet at sea would enable the availability of several applications and services (E-commerce, Live data of Potential Fishing Zones advisory, etc.) which would lead to a more improved and efficient fishing business for fishermen. The potential of the proposed OceanNet architecture for marine Internet connectivity is demonstrated through this V2I communication infrastructure that ensures connectivity and coverage to satisfy the vehicular application requirements. This work is a study of link quality parameters based on real data collected from the installed OceanNet devices on eight fishing nodes. The ultimate aim of such a study is to be able to provide information for fishermen as to the locations where they would get reliable Internet connectivity for emergency communication using VoIP services.

Social media has been a critical factor in providing improved disaster relief across the world in the past 15 years. However, our analysis of Chennai flood relief efforts revealed many downsides to the relief efforts based on social media such as inaccurate, inconsistent, incomplete, and stale information, user anonymity, information misuse, lack of geographical information etc. To address these issues, we propose the following technical, security, and operational considerations for building a robust disaster relief application. We classify the technical considerations into performance and resilience. Security considerations cover data integrity, trust, and privacy. Operational considerations include multilingual support, GIS support, data organization, live status updates, and disaster boundary demarcation. We illustrate these considerations in the context of Amrita-Kripa, a disaster relief application based on crowdsourcing. Amrita-Kripa was deployed during 2018 and 2019 Kerala floods and provided relief to thousands of victims.

Crowdsourced approach using mobile phones towards rescue and relief operations in post-disaster situations is becoming popular. The mobile phones play a critical role in estimation, evacuation and relief operations as they can be used for sensing and transmitting information such as location, elevation, acceleration, images and other user generated messages, but the mobile IoT edge devices are often resource constrained by battery and network. In this paper we present AROM, an Adaptive Resource Optimization Model for optimizing mobile sensing and communication systems, by considering network and battery constraints. AROM works by adaptively computing a resource criticality score and controlling sensing mechanisms and throttling and prioritizing network communications based on the score. We also present the details of performance tests done to validate our model and the analysis of results. We have implemented this architecture in our Amrita-Kripa disaster relief application which was deployed during 2018 and 2019 Kerala floods for rescues and relief activities.

Tracking the location of fishing boats in real-time had been a major concern to families and administrators. The solutions available in the market are either too costly or do not provide real-time tracking. The IoS and Android mobile phones put a lot of restrictions on background location tracking, which makes them unreliable for continuous real-time tracking. A low cost, embedded, real-time location tracking system, built using Raspberry Pi, and GPS sensor onboard, communicating with the server on the shore using long-range WiFi backhaul. This boat tracker system runs on Linux OS, embedded NodeJS server and OceanNet network. This was implemented in 10 boats and has been working for over a year successfully. In this paper, the hardware and software design aspects of the lightweight, network-fault-tolerant, real-time OceanNet boat tracking system along with an analysis of its performance are presented.

A compact Antipodal Vivaldi Antenna(CAVa) with the dimension $\mathbf{60\ x\ 65\ x\ 1.6\ mm3}$ is proposed in this paper. The structural modifications emanated from the original fan shaped fin structure have increased the electrical length of the antenna and has ensued in reduction in the lower operating frequency from 4.8 GHz to 3.7 GHz which is close to the desired lower operating band for an UWB covering antenna. The proposed antenna follows a simple structure but delivers good plot impedance characteristic. The antenna is designed on FR-4 substrate with dielectric constant 4.4 and height 1.6 mm. The antenna design and simulation has been carried out using ANSYS HFSS 17.0 software which uses Finite Element Method(FEM) for its working. The designed antenna offers higher gain and flat gain over the 3.1 to 10.6 GHz UWB operating spectrum with peak gain of 6.4dB which is high for any compact structure. The structure is simulated for its return loss, −10 dB impedance bandwidth, radiating power patterns and compared with earlier results in an iterative manner. The designed antenna is an eligible candidate for various wide band operating applications including medical imaging, Ground Penetrating Radar applications etc.

In this paper, an Ultra-Wideband(UWB) Antenna of Dual Ridged Horn Antenna family is broadly investigated. The vivaldi shaped horn feeding ridges are designed and introduced into the antenna to extend the lower cut-off frequency and also the frequency range of operation. Since, several researchers have studied and demonstrated the effect of varying rate parameters of the exponential ridges, a suggested rate parameter of 0.050 is fixed for the design and the paper mainly focuses on analysing the effect of pure and partial dielectric filling in the ridge space. The designed antenna follows a standard thickness of about 0.035mm to overcome the skin depth. In this contribution, we are presenting two major modifications with respect to the classical TEM Dual Ridged Horn Antennas to increase its performance. Primarily, the effect of dielectric filling in the aperture gap between the ridges of the antenna with lossy and lossfree materials is studied and secondly, a nominal way of filling the gap is suggested to attain peak gain over the band. The designed antenna attains a peak gain of 17 dB at the higher frequency band of UWB spectrum. The design is carried out using CST Microwave Studio Suite software. The designed antenna’s reflection and farfield results are presented in the frequency domain.

In recent years, CNN algorithms are being increasingly applied for various computer vision based applications such as disaster management systems using crowd-sourced images. Flood is one such frequent natural disaster that threatens human life and property. Research is in progress to find the extent of damage in flood hit areas by calculating the depth of the water using flood images containing humans captured by smartphone cameras. Algorithms, which can detect a human face and its attributes such as age, gender and ethnicity with these crowd-sourced images, can provide valuable information during such situations. A multitude of CNN algorithms is available for these tasks. Each one of them is different in their architecture which in turn influences the accuracy of the results. In this survey, we compare the state of the art CNN algorithms which perform each of these tasks, namely, face detection, age and gender classification, and ethnicity classification. We compare these algorithms with respect to their performance and accuracy so that an appropriate algorithm can be selected for the above application.

In this paper, a novel Pyramidal Horn Antenna for Ultra Wideband(UWB) applications is proposed. The designed horn antenna is fed with a co-axial cable and is backed by the back cavity containing absorber. The proposed structure consists of three main parts: waveguide section, pyramidal flared section and the feeding section. In this, the flaring section is exponentially tapered for a particular rate parameter of 0.050. This type of UWB horn antenna with curved flaring gives a proper and smooth guidance to the incoming travelling waves. This indeed helps in better impedance matching when the wave wholly leaves the antenna. This paper also aims to reduce the spurious back reflections due to the sharp corners of the horn's aperture segment. As a follow up, the sharp corners are replaced by curvy profiles that minimizes the point edge diffraction problem. The effect of having a curvy profile at the end corners of the horn's aperture on the reflection coefficient, gain, directivity, voltage standing wave ratio, etc. is investigated and studied. The designed antenna operates in the allocated ultrawideband spectrum of 3.1 GHz to 10.6 GHz. The design is carried out using CST Microwave Studio Suite 17.0 software which follows FDTD method for computation. The simulated results show the gain, VSWR (less than 2) performances maintained without much deviation over the entire spectrum and makes the antenna suitable for UWB applications.

Fishermen are completely isolated from the sea shore while they are fishing in the ocean. They travel more than 120 km into the ocean for fishing. Mobile phone coverage exists only till 15 km from the shore. In such scenario, passing information like bad weather alerts to them is nearly impossible. Due to which hundreds of fisherman could lose their lives in the ocean. ‘OceanNet’ is an affordable solution developed to solve this problem in communication. The system comprises ad-hoc infrastructure networks that uses long-range Wi-Fi solution and enables offshore connectivity for fishing boats. The long range CPE deployed in the boats used directional antennas. As the boat moves, the orientation of this directional antenna changes leading to loss of connectivity. In this paper, we propose a solution to solve this problem by developing an automated antenna reorientation system that maintains the alignment between the CPE and the base station and ensures good connectivity. We also discuss on the outcome of this developed solution that solve the problem with the antenna alignment.

Real-time weather alerts will be very helpful to marine fishermen to avert the dangers from storms. Problems happen when the alerts are issued when the fishermen are already in sea. OceanNet, an affordable communication infrastructure for marine fishermen developed by our research center, will be used for this purpose. Weather stations installed on fishing vessels will perform fine-grained monitoring of the sea weather and alert the fishermen in real-time. The weather station will consist of low-cost sensors to monitor temperature, light, salinity, wind, humidity, etc. Towards this, we plan to develop a low-cost sensor for measuring the temperature of sea surface for better understanding of weather changes. Several techniques are existing to measure the sea surface temperature but most of them are expensive with less accuracy. This paper presents a survey of the available techniques and their comparison. A cost-effective technique based on thermopiles is selected for our prototype based on this survey.

In the recent years, natural disasters have become frequent due to many causes such as global warming. Flooding is one of the most common natural disasters. In this work, we introduce a flood monitoring system based on Computer Vision. The system determines the depth of the water from images captured using smartphones. The average human height is used as reference to estimate the water level. The human face is classified based on gender and age group so that the average human height of the corresponding category can be used in estimation of water depth. The data set for the system is preprocessed to mitigate the effect of poor lighting conditions, occlusions and alignment. The ground-truth validation is done using images with known water depth to determine the accuracy of the system developed.

Our research center has developed and deployed a low-cost communication infrastructure, OceanNet, for marine fishermen using long range Wi-Fi for backhaul. In the current deployments, the transceiver on the fishing vessel is not enclosed and is therefore exposed to the atmospheric salinity. Even though the equipment is built to last under these harsh conditions, it is a worthwhile exercise to assess the impact of keeping it inside an enclosure. This work analyses the effect of placing the transceiver inside one cm thick PVC enclosure in terms of the additional path loss. The variation in path loss is measured using an experimental setup and is also studied using a path loss model. The results show that an additional 2 dB path loss is incurred due to the enclosure. Therefore, it is decided not to use an enclosure in our deployments for now.

Marine fishermen need weather updates in realtime. Currently, there is no affordable communication mechanism for them from the sea. OceanNet is a solution developed by our research center to serve this purpose. It is proposed to monitor oceanic microclimate using OceanNet by installing weather stations and sensors on boats and to issue realtime weather alerts to fishermen. A low-cost solar irradiance sensor is one of the sensors to be built in-house to monitor the weather changes. Accurate measurement of solar irradiance will aid research in the area of climate change adaptation. This paper describes the survey of solar irradiance sensors and measurement techniques conducted for this purpose. The review covers three types of commercial instruments and five different research prototypes for solar irradiance measurement. A suitable technique is formulated for our prototype based on this survey.

Due to its significance in areas such as traffic surveillance, autonomous navigation, transportation management and law enforcement, vehicle classification has become a popular field of study. We plan to use vehicle classification for estimation of flood depth using images with partially submerged vehicles. The aim of this paper is to provide researchers with an overview of different machine learning algorithms used for vehicle classification using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) architecture. Different CNN algorithms have been used for classification of vehicles efficiently. This work reviews and compares the various classification algorithms for detecting the type as well as the model of a vehicle.

Our research center has successfully developed and deployed OceanNet, a novel high-speed communication infrastructure for marine fishermen which has a range of 60-70 km from the shore. We plan to use this network for coastal oceanography and weather monitoring by installing an IoT of low-cost weather stations equipped with multiple sensors on fishing vessels. Towards this, we are developing a suite of low-cost and yet feature rich sensors. Ultrasonic anemometer is one such sensor. A survey of the commercially available anemometers revealed that they are too expensive for our use and also not fully featured to meet our requirements. Various research prototypes were also surveyed to get a realistic assessment of the price point and the feature set that we can target for our prototype. This work presents a detailed account of the survey of the available anemometers with a comparison of their key parameters.

Subscriber Identity Module (SIM) is an integrated circuit card on the mobile phone used for identifying and authenticating subscribers on mobile networks and for establishing a connection with the mobile network. Over the years, we have witnessed considerable change in the size of SIM card. SIM card size has reduced from 1FF (Form Factor) to 4FF (nano SIM), which is currently being used in smart phones. Apart from the size of the SIM getting smaller, the amount of storage a SIM could provide, the number of operator profiles a SIM could support and the file systems included in a SIM card have all improved over time. Virtual SIM or eSIM is a new technology to replace the traditional SIM and with remote provisioning it allows user to change the SIM profile remotely over the air. An eSIM that allows interoperability of operator profiles can handle Machine-to-Machine communication in a better way. This paper presents a study of the evolution of SIM with various usage scenarios of eSIM. In addition, it proposes a design for next generation SIM along with the implementation of a security algorithm between a SIM card and Service Provider.

IoT application protocols have a vital role to play while designing and building an IoT system. As the application changes, the functionalities that the protocols have to deliver will also change. We plan to build a marine IoT system by installing environmental monitoring stations on fishing vessels. The fishing vessels form a multi-level P2MP infrastructure network, OceanNet, rooted at an onshore base station which is connected to the Internet. OceanNet has been successfully deployed over the Arabian Sea from the sea shore near our campus. The marine IoT system is composed of a sink node based sensor network, gateway device, and an onshore monitoring station. Sensor nodes can respond to the environmental changes in the form of voltage or current. In this work, we present a detailed comparison of Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP), Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) and Message Queuing Telemetry Transport Protocol (MQTT) for a marine IoT application scenario.

Sensors working in low frequency range are often subject to flicker noise and produce a noisy output signal. Therefore, it is necessary to retrieve the expected low frequency signal eliminating the unwanted noise. Lock-in amplifiers have been used as an effective signal recovery technique in the past. Custom made lock-in amplifiers have become an integral part of sensor applications. This article takes a detailed look at the existing models of lock-in amplifiers that have been developed for sensor applications. We plan to build and deploy a marine IoT of environment monitoring stations on fishing vessels using ultra low-cost sensors. Towards this, we intend to develop extremely cost-effective lock-in amplifiers with targeted functionality for sensor applications. Based on our survey in this article, we draw some inferences on the components to be used and the approach to be adopted to accomplish our goal.

In order to ensure reliable and effective offshore communication of fishing vessels, it is required to set up a wireless network at sea. Ocean network is a network of fishing vessels at sea to provide network connectivity to fishermen at sea. Due to the dynamic nature of the sea environment, the traditional packet forwarding strategies cannot guarantee good network performance every time. Connectivity of the link is a critical factor that affects the performance of the network that consists of mesh links and ad-hoc links for offshore communication. This paper discusses the analysis of mesh links with different network load conditions.

The cellular network range over the oceans is limited to about 15 km from the shore in most places. The service providers do not have any incentive to extend the coverage further. However, marine fishermen who routinely spend 5 to 7 days at the ocean on a single fishing trip are severely impacted by this. They go as far away as 120 km from the shore on some occasions and are completely cut off from the land during their fishing trips. Also, they are generally poor and need an economical solution to stay connected. We have developed and successfully prototyped an affordable solution based on a multi-level auto-reconfigurable backhaul infrastructure network. It uses long range (LR) Wi-Fi and extends the connectivity to 60 km and beyond over the oceans using heterogeneous networks and relay nodes. Multiple field trials involving up to four boats over the Arabian Sea have yielded consistent and repeatable results even under rough sea states. Additional experiments conducted over the backwaters by scaling up the network further have also yielded positive results. This work provides a detailed description of the architected solution and the results obtained.

Marine fishermen in developing countries like India do not have an economically viable mode of communication during their long fishing trip which covers a distance more than 40 to 50km range. Project OceanNet fills this gap by including a novel heterogeneous network and provides a cost-effective solution of over the sea communication. The purpose of this work is to analyse the link quality of Long Range (LR) Wi-Fi backhaul link used in OceanNet, which is significant in improving the overall network throughput. This work compares and analyzes the link quality parameters of the hardware test bed with the results obtained from sea trial. This analysis is useful to develop a simulation platform for carrying out successful tests in improving the overall network performance.

Urban flooding is a common occurrence these days due to many reasons. Providing timely and adequate help to the victims is challenging. Enlisting the citizens to help themselves using their smartphones to provide real-time status updates and ensure timely delivery of needed help is a winning proposition. This paper describes a novel crowd-sourcing approach to urban flood management addressing the inherent challenges using smartphone applications and services that can be deployed by a variety of entities – government agencies, NGOs, social networks, etc. It enables sharing of real time information on the status of flooding, rescue and relief requests and responses, etc. It also collects data from various smartphone sensors in the background which is analyzed and synthesized to track the location and movement of people and to assess the integrity of structures such as bridges. It can also be a valuable resource for future city planning.

Wireless networking technologies are the best options to connect a large number of devices. The emerging IEEE 802.11ah, aka Wi-Fi HaLow, is a promising communication standard that supports a massive number of heterogeneous devices in the Internet of Things (IoT). It utilizes sub-1 GHz license-exempt bands to provide an extended range to the Wi-Fi networks. This standard seeks to address various limitations of legacy 802.11 Wi-Fi by incorporating enhancements in both the PHY and MAC layers. This work assesses the evolution and the market readiness of this new, low power Wi-Fi standard. It focuses on the technical challenges faced by this standard. This standard is still in its infancy and there is a large spectrum of opportunities for the research community to evaluate its successful deployment. In this paper, we survey the state of the art of 802.11ah and identify how device manufacturers are responding to this new standard and the promising research directions in this area.

Smart Grid consists of a network of computer infrastructure that takes care of power to monitor, manage and control power usage. Inclusion of various electronic, electrical and intelligent modules in the grid poses several cyber security challenges and needs different countermeasures to be applied. Micro Grid, a part of Smart Grid is also facing the same issues. This is due to the computational resource scarcity, communication constraints, and sensitive information in the data. In developing countries such as India, Micro Grid is an innovative opportunity to conserve power and reduce power consumption on a large scale. This paper gives an idea of the Micro Grid designed by our research center and shows how it helps in power conservation and lowering power consumption. Further it describes the potential security challenges faced by Micro Grid and corresponding solutions for the issues.