An important aspect of enabling Smart Grid and other similar technologies is the development of communication networks that efficiently gather information from remote locations and reliably deliver the data to a world of connected devices. In this context, the concept of Internet of Things (IoT) has emerged and led to the development of several lightweight communications protocols optimized for various environments. This study will focus on the Message Queue Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocol as used in a remote sensor network setting with the goal of characterizing delay patterns to improve reliability of large scale sensor networks in a publish/subscribe communication environment. Revealing the connection between data size, data collection intervals, network traffic, and delay, an approach for modeling an MQTT network design based on experimentation and inspection of behavior at the packet level is presented, and statistical distributions are explored to develop a method for real-time analysis.
Urban data is being collected in increasing quantities as smart cities around the globe seek to understand and improve their operations and plan their growth. This trend is set to continue as UNICEF predicts that 75% of people will live in cities by the end of the 21st century. One of the aims of Smart City initiatives is to improve inclusivity by communicating more about the city to citizens and organizational stakeholders. The large amounts of data and computational cost of the calculations required to do this mean that cloud-based analytics and visualization is an attractive option as it can deliver results to virtually any client device. In this article, we describe the design and implementation of the Urban Insight Cloud Engine (UICE) a pilot cloud-based 3D visualization system for Smart Cities that has been created using open software and data sets. This delivers a continuous live view of data collected by Urban Observatory sensors in the city of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK. We precede this with a discussion of our experience designing the facilities that exist, are being built, or are being planned to be built, to support our visualization research and production at Newcastle University.