SmartSantander: IoT Experimentation over a Smart City Testbed

TL;DR

SmartSantander addresses the need for realistic, large-scale IoT testing by deploying a city-scale, open experimentation facility in Santander that integrates multiple existing platforms (SENSEI, WISEBED, USN) into a three-tier architecture comprising an IoT node tier, gateway tier, and server tier. The system separates testbed observation/management from the experimentation plane, enabling concurrent service provisioning and experimentation with robust resource discovery, monitoring, and dynamic reconfiguration via an event-driven architecture. The deployment features thousands of heterogeneous sensors, mobile nodes on public transport, NFC/QR tagging for augmented reality, and participatory sensing through citizen smartphones, all connected through dual radio networks and resilient backhaul options. The paper provides detailed mechanisms for dynamic testbed management, resource registration, and MOTAP-based remote reprogramming, and demonstrates how service-level and device-level experiments can be conducted at scale with real end users. This work yields practical impact by delivering a realistic platform for evaluating IoT architectures, services, and human-in-the-loop smart-city applications, with future plans for federation with GENI and FIRE ecosystems.

Abstract

This paper describes the deployment and experimentation architecture of the Internet of Things experimentation facility being deployed at Santander city. The facility is implemented within the SmartSantander project, one of the projects of the Future Internet Research and Experimentation initiative of the European Commission and represents a unique in the world city-scale experimental research facility. Additionally, this facility supports typical applications and services of a smart city. Tangible results are expected to influence the definition and specification of Future Internet architecture design from viewpoints of Internet of Things and Internet of Services. The facility comprises a large number of Internet of Things devices deployed in several urban scenarios which will be federated into a single testbed. In this paper the deployment being carried out at the main location, namely Santander city, is described. Besides presenting the current deployment, in this article the main insights in terms of the architectural design of a large-scale IoT testbed are presented as well. Furthermore, solutions adopted for implementation of the different components addressing the required testbed functionalities are also sketched out. The IoT experimentation facility described in this paper is conceived to provide a suitable platform for large scale experimentation and evaluation of IoT concepts under real-life conditions.

Figures (13)

• Figure 1: Logical separation of 3-tier node architecture into a testbed observation and management and an experimentation plane
• Figure 2: Reference model architecture of the SmartSantander facility
• Figure 3: Santander city centre deployment excerpt view
• Figure 4: (a) Wireless sensor nodes attached to lamppost; (b) Wireless sensor nodes buried under the asphalt
• Figure 5: (a) Detail of sensor nodes installed on public bus; (b) QR/NFC tag attached to bus stop