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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.

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.

The development of Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) used in various industrial applications and remote monitoring has been motivated from the military applications such as battlefield surveillance. The wireless sensor networks contains a group of sensors which monitor or sense several physical parameters like temperature, pressure, moisture content, etc., and pass the data through the network wirelessly to other sensors or to a remote location without being lost or being eavesdropped. WSNs for landslide monitoring are deployed by our research center in some areas of the Western Ghats and another location in the north eastern India which are prone to landslide due to heavy rainfall. The landslide research work includes various sensors for sensing and monitoring the parameters which may lead to landslide, which is one of the natural calamities that can cause several life losses. The sensor values at the landslide prone area are monitored in the data management center, which is situated several kilometers away from the sensors. The paper focus on the architecture of the landslide project, the security threats faced in real world applications, and how they can be resolved.

This paper provides an approach to incorporate security when deploying Internet of Things (IoT) for Smart Buildings. In the area of wireless networks, there has occurred a dramatic increase in technological inventions in the past few decades, as also the security threats associated with it. Security threats are imminent because of the openness of the wireless communication. In TCP/IP protocol stack, threats can be seen at every layer which includes eavesdropping at physical layer, Denial of Service (DOS) at MAC layer, packet dropping, packet re-routing at Network layer, etc. The effect of these threats can vary from comparably minor issues like affecting the privacy of a user to major issues like killing of the user, especially in the medical field. Considering this, it is highly necessary to analyze the impacts of security threats on Smart Buildings. In this paper, we address the security threats that are likely to occur in the IoT network of Smart Buildings, prioritize the threats based on risk and then focus on the solutions to counteract two of the major threats.

Internet of Things (IoT) is an emerging technology paradigm that can be incorporated in various applications such as Smart Grid, Smart Home, and Communication Networks etc. Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are playing a key role in various applications such as landslide detection, waste management, water quality monitoring in rivers and lakes etc. One of the most data critical applications of WSN is Smart grids. The major problem in the existing power grid is the lack of reliability as one cannot predict power failure. The primary cause of power failure is the energy scarcity and the lack of awareness among the users of the energy availability and their usage limits. This result in increase in the energy consumption costs and projects the impression that electricity is unaffordable in the user's mind. Smart Grid offers promising solutions in transforming the existing power grids into a reliable and cost efficient grid by using WSN. This paper focuses on incorporating IoT into Smart Grid and then various security challenges faced therein. It also introduces a solar energy harvester for Smart City Framework, a community of buildings, each equipped with a solar energy harvesting system, which can share their energy according to the decision taken by the control station. There by, it proposes a cost-effective Smart Grid model using distributed renewable energy generators that helps meet the local power demands.

There are seven billion people across the world. Out of this 4.5 billion people do not have internet connectivity. In India, the total number of villages is 638,619. Most of the villages in India do not have good connectivity· Technology is improving, but rural broadband access is still a problem. This paper presents a comparison of long range Wi-Fi and super Wi-Fi to provide low cost and efficient connectivity in rural areas. Long range Wi-Fi is an alternative to many other standards. It has better coverage and can travel longer distance. Super Wi-Fi is a recent version of traditional Wi-Fi which uses a lower frequency band within the range of 300-700MHz. Super Wi-Fi utilizes TV white spaces with cognitive radio to provide internet. TV whitespace standards are IEEE 802.11af and IEEE 802.22. This paper presents a comparative study of the advantages, disadvantages, system architecture, limitations, challenges and applications of both these technologies to enable rural connectivity.

The study of aircraft communication is both interesting and challenging as not many papers have been published in this area. Communication is the most important thing that an aircraft needs while in flight as well as on the ground or else it would be like a flightless bird. Lack of proper communication is considered as the major factor resulting in aircraft crashes, thus it is important to research into this area to ensure the safety of passengers and pilots on board. This paper surveys the existing communication technologies that serve the aircraft and the future adaptations that may be required in the field of communication for handling large amount of data coming to and from the aircraft. In addition, an alternate low cost technology using Long Range Wi-Fi is proposed to meet the demand for traffic handling.

OceanNet is a Long Range Wi-Fi based system that has been designed to provide internet services for fishermen who venture into the sea for several days together as far as 60 kms and beyond. Internet availability would enable options such as onshore communication (text and calls) using VOIP, localization and tracking of boats & access to all smartphone applications which could range from information related to weather conditions, Potential Fishing Zones etc. which would enrich their business as well as ensure more security to their lives. Several field trials have already been conducted where the Long Range Wi-Fi link range of up to 50 km has been validated. One of the bottlenecks of the OceanNet network is the impact of wave effects on the reliability of the wireless link between the base station and the transceiver equipment on the boat. This work focuses on the experiments conducted by building a prototype that would replicate the pitch and roll movements observed during the field trials, so that in-depth study can be done to quantify the impact of pitch and roll on the received signal strength due to the misalignment between the base station and the antenna on the boat.

Typically, marine fishermen take 5–7 days for a single fishing trip. They travel 40–120 km away from the shore. There is no viable communication technology available currently to keep them connected to the shore while they are gone. We have successfully developed and prototyped a marine communication network based on a multi-level point to multipoint backhaul architecture using Long Range (LR) Wi-Fi technology. We conducted sea trials both at 5.8 GHz and 2.4 GHz and got better results at 2.4 GHz. We achieved a range of 60+ km using an intermediate hop during our field trials at Arabian Sea. The channel quality over the marine waters is likely to experience fading due to multiple factors such as undulations of the boat due to variation in sea state, reflection from the sea surface, variation in environmental conditions such as temperature, relative humidity, etc. Understanding the effect of various parameters will help in building an accurate propagation model and estimating the characteristics of the network such as range, data rate, etc. It will also help in the control of transmission parameters such as power, antenna height, type and gain, frequency, etc. This work presents the analysis of the results obtained from the study of the effect of environmental parameters on the propagation characteristics of a LR Wi-Fi link set up over the backwaters of Arabian Sea. The experiments were conducted at both 2.4 GHz and 5.8 GHz.

Path loss is caused by the propagation characteristics and the obstacles between transmitter and receiver due to which signal strength is reduced in wireless communication. Analysis based on path loss models provides good initial estimate of the signal characteristics. Propagation models are used to determine the path attenuation based on parameters such as carrier frequency, transmitter-receiver distance, basestation antenna height, receiver antenna height and terrain profile (e.g. rural, suburban and urban). Propagation models are used for path loss estimation which is important for planning the deployment of base-stations and area of coverage. In this paper, different Propagation models such as Okumura's Model, Hata Model, Longley rice Model, Free Space Propagation Model, COST 231 Extension to Hata Model, COST 231 Walfisch Ikegami Model, Stanford University Interim (SUI) Model and Hata-Okumura Model are surveyed. A comparative analysis of these models is provided which can serve as a valuable guide for selecting the appropriate model for a specific application scenario.

An algorithm which estimates the extent of flood from random, crowd sourced images is proposed. It uses color based segmentation with brown color to segment out the flood water. The average brown color intensity, largest brown area, as well as water depth found out by comparison with human bodies detected, together contribute to the final estimation of the extent of flood. The algorithm, since it deals with normal images rather than satellite images or video sequences, can be used widely to explore flood affected areas so that adequate help can be supplied. This method can also be used in flood detection systems run in order to carry out rescue operations enabling us to lend our support for flood victims. Moreover, the fact that the existing work in this area deals with videos and satellite images mainly adds to the novelty of this work.

Current technology assistance to Indian Fishermen for coastal communication consists mainly of handheld radios, which only enables broadcast communication over a short range. In order to overcome these limitations, a cost effective marine communication infrastructure based on long range Wi-Fi backhaul, called OceanNet, has been developed at our research centre, where fishermen would be able to have Internet access until 60 km. This work aims to carry out traffic analysis and modelling of this marine communication network for Fishermen, OceanNet. This exercise will help us model and understand the behavior of the network, once it is scaled up when the OceanNet deployment is done on several boats and the number of end user devices (smart phones and tablets) increases. It will also help us to identify bottlenecks in the network and identify ways to overcome these bottlenecks. This work is based on real world traffic data collected from the field trials conducted over the Arabian Sea and an experimental network set up over the backwaters.