Green Communication in Internet of Things: A Hybrid Bio-Inspired Intelligent Approach

Bio-Inspired Internet of Things: Current Status, Benefits, Challenges, and Future Directions

There is no doubt that the involvement of the Internet of Things (IoT) in our daily lives has changed the way we live and interact as a global community, as IoT enables intercommunication of digital objects around us, creating a pervasive environment. As of now, this IoT is found in almost every domain that is vital for human survival, such as agriculture, medical care, transportation, the military, and so on. Day by day, various IoT solutions are introduced to the market by manufacturers towards making our life easier and more comfortable. On the other hand, even though IoT now holds a key place in our lives, the IoT ecosystem has various limitations in efficiency, scalability, and adaptability. As such, biomimicry, which involves imitating the systems found in nature within human-made systems, appeared to be a potential remedy to overcome such challenges pertaining to IoT, which can also be referred to as bio-inspired IoT. In the simplest terms, bio-inspired IoT combines nature-inspired principles and IoT to create more efficient and adaptive IoT solutions, that can overcome most of the inherent challenges pertaining to traditional IoT. It is based on the idea that nature has already solved many challenging problems and that, by studying and mimicking biological systems, we might develop better IoT systems. As of now, this concept of bio-inspired IoT is applied to various fields such as medical care, transportation, cyber-security, agriculture, and so on. However, it is noted that only a few studies have been carried out on this new concept, explaining how these bio-inspired concepts are integrated with IoT. Thus, to fill in the gap, in this study, we provide a brief review of bio-inspired IoT, highlighting how it came into play, its ecosystem, its latest status, benefits, challenges, and future directions.

Planning and Optimization of Software-Defined and Virtualized IoT Gateway Deployment for Smart Campuses

The Internet of Things (IoT) is based on objects or “things” that have the ability to communicate and transfer data. Due to the large number of connected objects and devices, there has been a rapid growth in the amount of data that are transferred over the Internet. To support this increase, the heterogeneity of devices and their geographical distributions, there is a need for IoT gateways that can cope with this demand. The SOFTWAY4IoT project, which was funded by the National Education and Research Network (RNP), has developed a software-defined and virtualized IoT gateway that supports multiple wireless communication technologies and fog/cloud environment integration. In this work, we propose a planning method that uses optimization models for the deployment of IoT gateways in smart campuses. The presented models aimed to quantify the minimum number of IoT gateways that is necessary to cover the desired area and their positions and to distribute IoT devices to the respective gateways. For this purpose, the communication technology range and the data link consumption were defined as the parameters for the optimization models. Three models are presented, which use LoRa, Wi-Fi, and BLE communication technologies. The gateway deployment problem was solved in two steps: first, the gateways were quantified using a linear programming model; second, the gateway positions and the distribution of IoT devices were calculated using the classical K-means clustering algorithm and the metaheuristic particle swarm optimization. Case studies and experiments were conducted at the Samambaia Campus of the Federal University of Goiás as an example. Finally, an analysis of the three models was performed, using metrics such as the silhouette coefficient. Non-parametric hypothesis tests were also applied to the performed experiments to verify that the proposed models did not produce results using the same population.