Abstract
Our contribution aims at showing how we can benefit from FIWARE as a platform for device management and data handling in a smart city study case. The application is in the context of an EU FP7 project SINFONIA (http://www.sinfonia-smartcities.eu/). In particular, we focus on wireless networks of environmental sensors to assess/validate the effect of integrated refurbishment techniques at district scale. As Center for Sensing Solutions (http://www.eurac.edu/) we go through all the steps along the data life-cycle namely acquisition, organization, processing, analysis, sharing, acting. We provide an interoperable, standard and open-source Environmental Data Platform that is available to the research community of South-Tyrol as well as for local companies. One of our main challenges is the collection of information from different environments, especially where poor connectivity is there. Furthermore, we address the organization of heterogeneous data with a harmonized approach as well as the related security issue. With this in mind, we are constantly looking to keep control over the whole data flow/ownership and to avoid vendor lock-in. Within the SINFONIA’s scenario, we engage at different levels: from the devices to the application passing through service and support layers. In this specific pilot, we exploit the LoRaWAN as a communication protocol and the network capabilities of the LoRa server. Our final goal within the project is the deployment of a high-resilience multi-node star topology network architecture in an urban context. The integration of the FIWARE LoRaWAN IoT Agent with the Environmental Data Platform of the Center for Sensing Solutions allows us to get the most out of our wireless sensor networks. By this means, we can move from simply connect objects to interact with them. Moreover, having a standard exchange model (NGSI context information protocol) we can easily embed data from different sources or communication protocols within a unique frame. FIWARE fits well with our perspective of turning the Environmental Data Platform into a more flexible Digital Platform, where many different data sources can be combined with ease. The integration of stand-alone frameworks within a federated infrastructure will, by the one hand, enhance data collection and processing capabilities. By the other hand, this will allow us to move towards a simplified overlayer for the management and sharing of information.