Hindawi Publishing Corporation

International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks

Volume 2015, Article ID 785061, 15 pages
http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2015/785061

Research Article
Large-Scale Mobile Sensing Enabled Internet-of-Things
Testbed for Smart City Services
Jorge Lanza, Luis Snchez, Luis Muoz, Jos Antonio Galache, Pablo Sotres,
Juan R. Santana, and Vernica Gutirrez
Network Planning and Mobile Communications Laboratory, University of Cantabria, 39005 Santander, Spain
Correspondence should be addressed to Luis Munoz; [email protected]
Received 30 March 2015; Revised 6 July 2015; Accepted 8 July 2015
Academic Editor: Paolo Bellavista
Copyright 2015 Jorge Lanza et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License,
which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Smart cities are one of the key application domains for the Internet-of-Things paradigm. Extending the Web into the physical
realm of a city, by means of the widespread deployment of spatially distributed Internet-addressable devices with sensing and/or
actuation capabilities, allows improving efficiency of city services. Vehicles moving around the city become excellent probes when
the objective is to gather information across the city in a cost effective manner. Public transportation fleets, taxis, or vehicles such
as waste collection trucks cover most of the urban areas with a limited number of vehicles. This paper presents the deployment of a
large scale Internet-of-Things testbed that has been carried out in the city of Santander. It extends previous descriptions by providing
a specification of one of the unique features of the testbed, namely, the devices that have been installed on 140 buses, taxis, and vans
that every day drive around the city. Besides the physical characteristics of the devices installed and the lessons learnt during the
deployment, the paper introduces the three mobile sensing network strategies used for distributing the data gathered. Finally, the
paper sketches some of smart city services which might be provided using the information coming from the mobile IoT devices.

1. Introduction
Improving efficiency of city services and facilitating a more
sustainable development of cities are the main drivers of
the smart city concept. The growth and change in cities are
accelerating and make it even harder to provide a sustainable
urban living environment [1]. The use of an Information and
Communication Technologies- (ICT-) based infrastructure
alongside the traditional utilities and services infrastructures
will be the next big step in the development of cities [2, 3].
Information systems will help to optimise infrastructure,
inform citizens, and build a communication network that
spans the city and allows tailoring the utility and services
delivery to the actual needs rather than to overprovision
for peak demands; in turn, the confluence of ICT and city
services will fuel economic growth and prosperity and will
form new city ecosystems. This revolution is still only at the
beginning as suitable infrastructures are being deployed and
significant investments into the city infrastructures are being
made.

Based on this precept, the SmartSantander project [4]

targeted the creation of a European experimental test facility
for the research and experimentation of architectures, key
enabling technologies, services, and applications for the
Internet of Things (IoT) in the context of a smart city. This
facility aims to leverage key IoT-enabling technologies and to
provide the research community with a unique-in-the-world
platform for large-scale IoT experimentation and evaluation
under real-world operational conditions. The objectives of
SmartSantanders deployed IoT infrastructure are two-fold
as well as concurrent. As a testbed, it enables experimental
assessment of cutting-edge scientific research. However, this
testbed goes beyond the experimental validation of novel IoT
technologies. It also aims at supporting the assessment of the
socioeconomical acceptance of new IoT solutions and the
quantification of service usability and performance with end
users in the loop.
To attract the widest interest and demonstrate the usefulness of the SmartSantander platform, the deployment of
the IoT experimentation infrastructure has been undertaken

2
to realise the most interesting and impact-generation experimentation scenarios. In this sense, part of the SmartSantanders testbed is based on the deployment of 140 IoT devices
on vehicles that are continuously driving around the city.
Such a deployment has, to the best of our knowledge, not
any analogous one in any of the testbeds existing nowadays
in the world. In addition to enabling experimentation on
vehicular networking technologies, IoT devices embarked on
vehicles get, as mobile sensors, a variety of information with
increased capillarity in time and space that allows gathering
data from all over the city in a much more efficient manner.
This capacity for getting information from almost the whole
city area is critical in supporting the provision of smart city
services.
Two main contributions are presented in this paper.
Firstly, as the deployment of distributed multipurpose multistakeholder mobile IoT infrastructure is complexity-fraught
and not risk-averse (often a compromise over platform capabilities, overall usefulness, and cost), we regard the experience
gained and lessons learnt from our physical deployment
process as a valuable contribution. In this respect, the paper
provides detailed insight on the actual physical deployment
of 140 IoT devices embarked on buses, taxis, and other city
services vehicles and how they interoperate with the rest of
devices present at the SmartSantander IoT infrastructure.
It is, however, important to highlight, for the sake of
completeness, and to fully understand the technical relevance
of this first contribution, which are the main functionalities
and related challenges that underlie the deployment and
setup of the experimental infrastructure. In this sense, the
experimentation possibilities enabled by existing testbeds,
which are primarily focused on wireless sensor network
(WSN) research, do not fully fulfill the testbed methodologies needed to perform experimentally driven research
when moving from islands of WSNs to a global networked
infrastructureas envisioned by the Internet of Things. This
vision opens up new challenges that demand new capabilities
and features from suitable testbeds [5, 6]. Key features that
have been observed for the deployment of the SmartSantander platform in general and the mobile IoT devices in
particular to support the experimentation when moving from
WSNs to IoT are (1) scale, (2) heterogeneity, (3) mobility, (4)
experimentation realism, (5) data-centricity, (6) concurrency,
and (7) autonomy.
Second contribution presented in the paper is the description and discussion of the three strategies that are used to
address the mobile crowd sensing challenge. Respectively,
they are based on periodic reporting through mobile broadband network, opportunistic Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I)
networking on top of IEEE 802.15.4 links, and Delay Tolerant
Network (DTN) approach using IEEE 802.11. Moreover,
analytical assessment of the V2I-based strategy using real
data traces as obtained from the mobile IoT devices is also
presented.
Finally, the description of two smart city services that
make use of the data gathered by the embarked IoT devices is
another minor contribution presented in the paper. Presenting these services is meant to showcase the potentiality of the
deployed infrastructure besides the experimentation support,

International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks

which focused on the analyses done. However, it is out of
the scope of this paper to assess the deployment in terms of
how the information gathered thanks to this deployment has
optimized the city management.
The paper is organized as follows. In Section 2 related
work and research activities are summarized highlighting
the advances achieved by the contributions presented in
the paper. Section 3 provides insights on the deployed IoT
infrastructure. It first sketches the SmartSantander platform
before focusing on the details and lessons learnt from the
installation of IoT devices on vehicles. Results from the
analytical assessment of the strategies employed for mobile
crowd sensing data dissemination are presented in Section 4
along with the description of the three data dissemination
strategies. In Section 5 two smart city applications exploiting
the information gathered by the mobile IoT devices deployed
are described. Finally, Section 6 concludes the paper.

2. Related Work
This section overviews current trend in terms of application
scenarios and main research path in vehicular networks
(VANETs) and how the smart city applications described
in this paper represent an advance on the applicability of
VANETs. Then it outlines related real-world deployments and
initiatives in which vehicles are used as sensing platforms
comparing them with the sensing infrastructure described
in this paper. Finally, a review of various mobile sensing
proposals in the literature is presented comparing the architecture and data dissemination strategies used with the ones
implemented in the SmartSantander mobile sensing testbed.
Many different services have been proposed in the
literature using VANETs like CarTel [7], TrafficView [8],
or MobEyes [9]. These services are mainly focused on
safety applications like collision warning, up-to-date traffic
information, or active navigation [10]. Thus, much of the
existing literature has focused on challenges around efficient
data dissemination [11] as it is of particular interest for
safety services. Anyway, the common denominator for the
majority of applications is that they are navigation or road
safety related and, thus, concentrate on the vehicles and
circulation domains rather than serving to domains outside
the traffic circumstances. However, vehicular networks have
the potential to become important sensor platforms, for
example, for proactive urban monitoring and for sharing and
disseminating data of general interest. Each vehicle can sense
one or more events (e.g., detecting toxic chemicals), process
sensed data, and report this information to a common sensor
platform.
In this sense, the general philosophy of smart cities [2, 12]
is a paradigm shift combining IoT and M2M infrastructures with a citizen-centric model, all together leveraging
massive data collected by sensors, connected devices, social
applications, and so forth. Most of the existing smart city
initiatives with relevant sensor deployments like Santander
[13], Barcelona [14], Oulu [15], or Cambridge [16] rely on
static environments, with application-specific monitoring
tasks. However, in the very last years, there are a number of deployments and applications in which vehicles are

International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks

being used to monitor different parameters of the city. The
Copenhagen Wheel [17], a project of the SENSEable City
Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT),
places environmental sensors on the rear wheel of a bicycle
which connects via Bluetooth to the cyclist smartphone
and from there potentially shared. However, to the best of
our knowledge, this was a short-term project with limited
penetration and results. LIVE Singapore [18] is another
project from MIT in collaboration with Singapore authorities
which is developing an open platform for the collection,
the combination, and fusion as well as the distribution
of real-time data that originate from a large number of
different sources. Some of the information is taken from
taxis investigating how in the future the system can be
streamlined in order to better match taxi supply and demand.
Cab Spotting [19] traces San Franciscos taxi cabs as they
travel throughout the Bay Area. The patterns traced by each
cab create a living map of city life that hints at economic,
social, and cultural trends that are otherwise invisible. The
deployment of vehicle-mounted sensing devices described in
this paper and the applications exploiting the information
gathered by them are much in line with these projects.
They aim at using information captured through a vehicular
network on general-purpose applications within the smart
city scenario. Analogous experimental testbeds focused on
mobility have also been deployed [5]. While a minority can
compare in the number of mobile devices [20], they do not
combine at similar scale fixed and mobile devices and they
are not deployed in real-world conditions. Large scale of
the deployed infrastructure and its integration on a Future
Internet enabled platform are the key distinguishing novelties
of the testbed presented in this paper.
Even though cities on developed countries can rely
on the coverage of their territory with 3G or LTE high
capacity wireless access networks, the expected growth of
mobile data traffic might overwhelm these infrastructures
if another capillary network paradigm is not put forward
[21]. Lee and Gerla [22] overviewed various wireless access
methods in vehicular environments. However, the exact
potential of large-scale urban mobile capillary networks is
still to be exactly quantified. For example, the ubiquity of
WiFi access in urban areas makes this solution particularly
interesting. Some studies have focused on its potential (e.g.,
[23]), concluding that a relevant percentage of the data
can be offloaded from the cellular infrastructure in high
density areas. Moreover, another interesting feature that
has been also explored is the ability of mobile sensing
nodes to store the data, instead of periodically reporting it
to sinks [24]. For example, MetroSense [25] proposes an
architecture for mobile sensing: servers in the wired Internet
are in charge of storing/processing sensed data; Internetconnected stationary gateways (GWs) act as sensor access
points between servers and mobile sensors (MS); MS move
in the field opportunistically delegating tasks to each other,
and muling [26] data to GW. The main data dissemination
strategy implemented for the SmartSantander mobile sensing
deployment is based on periodic reporting using cellular
access network. However, opportunistic offloading of sensed

3
data through short- and medium-range wireless access technologies such as IEEE 802.15.4 and IEEE 802.11 has also been
used. Analysis performed to real data traces obtained from
the embarked devices has demonstrated the suitability, under
certain conditions, of the implemented mechanisms.

3. Large-Scale IoT Smart City Testbed

Setting an experimental facility into a city context has special
significance for three main reasons: (1) the pervasiveness
of IoT-based technologies that form part of the smart city
infrastructure fabric and the realism of experimentation
achieved through their use; (2) the infrastructural scale
and heterogeneity (devices, protocols, and services) and the
population of users that are key enablers for a broad range
of experimentation; (3) the diversity of problems and application domains in dense technosocial ecosystems such as
smart cities that provide invaluable sources of challenging
functional and nonfunctional requirements.
Before presenting the insights of the mobile sensing
part of the SmartSantander infrastructure, this section, first,
briefly describes the SmartSantander platform high-level
architecture and the fixed part of the IoT infrastructure in
order to put the whole IoT deployment in context.
3.1. SmartSantander IoT Platform Reference Model. The
SmartSantander platform follows a three-tiered architecture
consisting of an IoT device tier, an IoT GW tier, and server tier.
The IoT node tier provides the necessary experimentation substrate consisting of IoT devices. These devices are
typically resource-constrained (in terms of power, memory,
and energy availability) and export sensing or actuating
capabilities. This tier accounts for the majority of the devices
utilised in the testbed. Due to their outdoor deployment,
these devices are subject to harsh environmental conditions
(physical damage, weather influences, and power supply).
For dependability, dual power supplies (electric distribution
network combined with batteries) and dual communication
interfaces are installed. For reliability, multiple communication paths to a gateway are enabled for sensor reading
collection and for maintenance (e.g., over-the-air firmware
and application updates) and a set of management procedures
are implemented to ensure rapid detection of malfunctioning
nodes.
The IoT gateway node tier links the IoT devices at the
edges of the network to a core network infrastructure. The
GW tier devices are typically more powerful than IoT nodes
but at the same can still be based on embedded device
architectures and are thus more resource-constrained than
devices of the server tier.
The server tier provides more powerful server devices
which are directly connected to the core network infrastructure. The servers can be used to host IoT data repositories and
application servers that can be configured to realise a variety
of different IoT services and applications or to investigate
approaches for real-world data mining and knowledge engineering. The server tier might benefit from virtualisation in a
cloud infrastructure, ensuring high reliability and availability
of all components and services.

4
The proposed architecture is agnostic to the communication technologies between the different elements at the different tiers. In this sense, realizations of the architecture can
be carried out using different communication technologies
between servers, GW nodes, and IoT nodes.
In order to realize this architecture, we propose a reference model for IoT experimentation testbeds that encompasses both testbed observation/management and IoT experimentation planes. We contend that such facilities require,
as illustrated in Figure 1, the provision of testbed features
by four main subsystems: (1) Authentication, Authorisation,
and Accounting (AAA), (2) Testbed Management, (3) Experimental Support, and (4) Application Support. The AAA
subsystem controls the access to the testbed by authenticating
users, authorising the invocation of particular testbed services based on user privileges, and monitoring the level of
platform-use by users. The Testbed Management subsystem
encapsulates the functionalities concerning the automatic
management of the facility. The Experimentation Support
Subsystem (ESS) provides operations to assist the user during
the entire experimentation life-cycle [27]. The Application
Support Subsystem (ASS) offers, via its Application Support
Interface (ASI), a wide range of data management functions
that can operate on information retrieved from the devices at
the IoT node tier.
In our reference model, each subsystem comprises several
functional blocks that implement the functionality expected
from the subsystem. Subsystems may span across the three
tiers requiring different components or logic to be deployed
at each tier. Subsystems export a number of interfaces. Interfaces in our reference model architecture are notional entities
that expose the functionality of the different subsystems
through a collection of Application Programming Interfaces
(APIs). In concrete instantiations of the reference model,
these interfaces may be realised through technologies such as
Web Services, RESTful APIs, messaging protocols, or event
handling to name but a few.
3.2. Fixed IoT Infrastructure. As reported in previous work
[6], existing IoT experimentation facilities have several limitations that make them fail to provide adequate support
for the emerging requirements of experimental IoT research.
The SmartSantander facility [13] offers a variety of properties
and features to overcome many of these shortcomings and
integrates them into a holistic experimentation environment.
The IoT experimentation facility deployed in Santander
was settled on a cyclic approach. The objective of the first
cycle of deployment was to create a meshed Wireless Sensor
Network (WSN) on fixed locations that would serve as a testing environment for the experimental validation of advanced
WSN-related mechanisms. The deployment, also influenced
by the city of Santander smart city service requirements
and strategy, intentionally provided a concentration of IoT
devices in the city centre (a 1 Km2 area) in order to achieve
the maximum possible impact to the citizens. Nonetheless,
other city areas are also covered.
Figure 2 shows an excerpt view of the Santander city
centre deployment. The different markers represent the
deployed nodes (i.e., carbon monoxide (CO), light intensity,

International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks

noise, temperature, and car presence detection sensors).
Following the architecture described in the previous section,
the deployment includes clusters of wireless sensors that use
one gateway device acting as cluster head.
The first cycle of IoT deployment yielded 740 points of
presence in the city. Each point of presence is equipped
with several sensors making a total of more than 50 noise
sensors, 600 temperature sensors, 500 light intensity sensors,
and 30 CO sensors. Additionally, 23 GWs have been installed
to ensure connectivity between the IoT node tier and the
server tier. In the second cycle, three fixed node clusters
were added to the infrastructure totalling approximately 50
more IoT nodes supporting a smart irrigation use case with
around 170 additional sensors such as relative humidity,
soil moisture, soil temperature, solar radiation, atmospheric
pressure, rainfall, or water flow.
Although WSNs are typically considered autonomous in
terms of power needs, this assumption does not reconcile
with the envisaged high-frequency multiuser usage model
of the testbed. Energy autonomy is achieved through the
use of long-lasting batteries and, most importantly, energy
efficient mechanisms. However, experimentation imposes a
stiffer power consumption penalty on IoT nodes that cannot
be realistically met by batteries alone.
A hybrid solution to IoT node power requirements was
adopted to minimise the infrastructures energy consumption
signature on the power grid but ensure the survivability of
its experimentation nodes. To fulfill the need for proximity
to a power source, sensor devices were attached to public
lampposts at a minimum of 3.5 meters high. The sensor
devices are also endowed with rechargeable batteries and a
charging circuit. This solution guarantees power supply even
under energy-hungry experimentation scenarios.
Sensor nodes installed on lampposts are based on the
ATmega1281 microcontroller. Depending on the device, the
corresponding sensing probes are connected to a sensor
board placed on top of the main board. This enabled the
deployment of IoT nodes with diverse sensing capabilities,
each with a configuration designed to support particular
experiment or smart city service classes. The sensing capabilities of our IoT devices include air quality (temperature and
CO sensors), noise (noise sensor), temperature (temperature
sensor), luminosity (light and temperature sensors), irrigation monitoring sensor (temperature, relative humidity, soil
moisture, and soil temperature sensors), and environmental
station (temperature, relative humidity, solar radiation, atmospheric pressure, anemometer, and rainfall sensors).
3.3. Testbed Intertier Connectivity. Intertier connectivity in
the SmartSantander testbed (the Santander WSN) is arranged
through different communication technologies. This section
describes the network topology of the facility. As illustrated
in Figure 3, the most noteworthy characteristic of these
devices in terms of communication capacities is that they are
provisioned to provide two separate wireless communication
channels: one for the experimentation plane and one for the
management/service plane. The solution adopted at the IoT
nodes level was the inclusion of two XBee-Pro radio modules
(operating at 2.4 GHz frequency) on each lamppost sensor

International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks

Experimental
user client

ESI

Service
provider client

ASI

Scheduling

Session mgt.

Resource reservation

Deployment

Scheduler

Monitoring

Configuration
Synthesis

Experiment spec.

File upload

Sanity check

VTD config. Resource lookup

Result analysis

Control

Resource
pub/sub/notify

Visualisation Data mining

tools
tools

Resource
DB

Experiment
DB

Testbed
MIB

O&M
DB

Participatory
sensing

IoT resource

Data
O&M
lookup

Data
pub/sub/notify

Resource lookup

PSens server

Resource mgt.

PSens
DB
Monitoring and fault mgt.

Resource discovery

Resource monitoring

Resource registration

(Re)configuration
Resource configuration

Systems reconfiguration

Application support

User
accounts
DB

Authentication Authorisation Accounting

ACI

Testbed
admin client

Testbed
management

Experiment support

AAA

Testbed server tier

MSI
AAA

Data
Subscription/
notify

IoT resource
Resource
mgt.

Configuration
VTD config.

Session mgt.

Monitoring and fault mgt.

Deployment

Resource monitoring

Monitoring
Control

Resource discovery
Resource registration

(Re)configuration
Resource configuration

Systems reconfiguration

Testbed
management

Application
support

Gateway tier

Data
Subscription/
notify

IoT resource
Resource
mgt.

Participatory
sensing
PSens client

Session mgt.

Monitoring and fault Mgt.

Deployment

Resource monitoring

Monitoring
Control

Resource discovery
Resource registration

(Re)configuration
Resource configuration

Testbed
management

Application
support

IoT node tier

Figure 1: Reference model architecture of the SmartSantander facility.

Figure 2: Santander city centre fixed IoT infrastructure deployment

excerpt view.

device. One of the modules implements native IEEE 802.15.4

protocol, whilst the other runs IEEE 802.15.4 protocol modified with the proprietary routing protocol, called Digimesh
[28].
The two interfaces allow the participation of the IoT
node in two physically independent wireless networks. All
the devices in a cluster form part of the same mesh network
enabling multihop data transfer to the gateway and server tier
via the Digimesh-enabled radio interface. On the contrary,
the testbed does not impose any restriction on the use of the

second radio interface. In essence, all the devices deployed

are part of the same physical network as long as it is possible
to find a set of IEEE 802.15.4 links connecting, on a multihop
manner, any pair of the deployed nodes.
Fixed IoT nodes are organised into clusters that form a
mesh network of nodes providing both single-hop connectivity (via the native 802.15.4 interface) and multihop data
transfer to the GW and server tier (via the Digimesh-enabled
radio interface). All the devices in a cluster form part of the
same mesh network and may serve the experimentation plane
or service plane or both. IoT nodes that are physically close
but belong to different cluster groups are not part of the same
mesh network and therefore cannot relay each others sensor
observations towards the servers. All sensor observations,
testbed management, and experiment management traffic
have to be forwarded through the cluster head, that is, the GW
node. Multiple egress points for multihome cluster groups
have not been considered.
GWs are the cluster heads for the fixed IoT nodes.
All sensor observations, testbed management, and experiment management traffic have to be forwarded through the
cluster head, that is, the GW node. Multiple egress points
for multihome cluster groups have not been considered.

International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks

Platform servers

Internet
University
intranet
GPRS

Cluster 1

City council
intranet
Cluster 3

IoT node
Gateway
IEEE 802.15.4

Cluster 2

IEEE 802.15.4 with Digimesh

GPRS link

Figure 3: Testbed physical network diagram.

Depending on where the GW is deployed, several possibilities

for connecting them to the Internet, and thus to the Platform
Servers, arise. Whenever it has been possible, GWs have been
deployed at one of the City Council or University premises.
This kind of location allows direct access to a wired Intranet.
If it is not possible to find such location, GPRS connection is
used to connect the GW to the core network.
Platform Servers are directly connected to the core
network using the network of the University of Cantabria.
Connectivity for the IoT nodes deployed on vehicles
differs from the case of static ones. These devices are not
part of any cluster but they mainly use a GPRS connection
to directly report the observations captured by their sensors
and to support testbed and experimentation management
procedures. However, as it will be described in the following
section, wireless local area connectivity capabilities of some
of the IoT devices mounted on vehicles allow these nodes to
also communicate with IoT fixed nodes network as long as
the vehicle on which they are mounted comes close to them.
3.4. Mobile Sensing Deployment. Once the high-level architecture of the platform and the fixed part of the infrastructure
have been briefly introduced, in this section the details of
the mobile sensing part of the SmartSantander experimental
facility will be presented.
3.4.1. Mobile IoT Devices Description. Although the deployment of fixed IoT devices is very representative as it massively

covers Santander city centre, it was necessary to extend

the environmental monitoring service to other areas of the
city. Hence, instead of continuing with fixed deployments
all over the city, 140 new IoT devices were deployed on
municipal public buses (84 of them), taxis (30 of them), and
other municipal services vehicles (26 of them). This way, a
much wider area was covered in a much more efficient way.
Using the enlarged number of measurement locations and
intelligent processing of the measurements, it was possible to
obtain sufficiently accurate measurements that are currently
used as the initial indicator of the status of the environment
pollution.
Figure 4 shows the schema of the devices installed on
the vehicles. In order to support the additional requirements
imposed by the mobility of the nodes and to maximize the
experimentation possibilities over devices on such unrivalled
location, the nodes are far more complex than their fixed
counterparts.
A modular approach has been followed to address the
three main functional requirements imposed to the mobile
sensing devices: (1) Experimentation-Service provision duality
refers to the duality that the deployed devices have with
regard to their use as part of an environmental monitoring
smart city service, as well as their use as an experimentation laboratory; (2) Coexistence with the existing fixed
SmartSantander infrastructure refers to the fact that access
from and to the devices should be possible through the
already existing platform not only at the server tier but

International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks

(Optional) CAN-Bus connector

Vehicle interior mounted

Vehicle exterior mounted

GPS/GPRS

Main processing unit

Local
persistence
storage

Environmental data
collection module
IEEE 802.15.4
or
IEEE 802.11
(Optional) local
communication
module

Figure 4: Mobile IoT device schema.

also on a peer-to-peer manner at the IoT device tier; and

(3) Environmental monitoring sensing capacity refers to the
environmental monitoring smart city service that expects to
receive air pollution information from the mobile sensing
devices.
The Main Processing Unit is based on an embedded PC
running Linux operating system based on a 32-bit ARM7 processor. Since vehicles are moving all over the city, the communication towards the server tier cannot be handled through a
short-range wireless technology as it is the case with the fixed
devices. Thus, embarked nodes are equipped with a General
Packet Radio Service (GPRS) interface. However, IoT nodes
installed on buses have a Local Communication Module. This
module has two different configurations. The first one is based
on an ATmega1281 microcontroller, equipped with a native
IEEE 802.15.4 interface that allows them to communicate
not only with other devices deployed on other buses, with
the same module configuration, but also with the devices
installed on lampposts. This configuration (represented with
a dashed border in Figure 4 due to its optionality) is only
possible at the public buses since it is the only kind of
vehicle where an appropriate rooftop placeholder, shown
in Figure 5(a), with Line of Sight (LOS) towards fixed IoT
devices could be found. Devices installed on taxis and other
municipal services are mainly situated under the vehicle
bonnet so, in our deployment, peer-to-peer communication
with other IoT devices is not possible for those devices due
to radio signal degradation caused by metallic parts of the
vehicle. Most of the 84 IoT devices deployed on buses are
built with this configuration. The second configuration for
the Local Communication Module integrates an IEEE 802.11
interface that can only act in Basic Service Set (BSS) mode
(a.k.a. infrastructure mode) so that it can connect to available
WiFi access points. Only 6 buses are equipped with an IoT
device with this configuration.
It is important to highlight that the testbed allows
complete reprograming of the microcontroller at the Local
Communication Module, thus enabling a larger versatility of
the devices for supporting advanced experimentation on top
of them.

7
The Environmental Data Collection Module contains a
bunch of sensors for detecting air pollutants such as nitrogen
dioxide (NO2 ), carbon monoxide (CO), and ozone (O3 ) as
well as detection of particles in suspension, temperature,
and air humidity. Installed on the rooftop, the sensors are
protected within an ABS box that is shown in Figure 5(b). In
this box, the air inlet traverse a labyrinth designed to allow air
flow while preventing water spills in the electronics.
Most significantly, mobile IoT devices are also equipped
with GPS so that all their observations come geolocalized and
they also report speed and course of the vehicle. Additionally,
the nodes deployed on the Santander public buses provide
information from the vehicles CAN-Bus (represented with
dashed line in Figure 4 due to its optionality). The information taken from the vehicles is used to feed the traffic
assessment service.
It is also important to mention that observation generation (i.e., gathering of information from the device sensors)
frequency is higher than the reporting (i.e., sending this
information to the repository at the server tier) one. In this
sense, the IoT nodes have a sampling rate that is deliberately
configured to generate a large number of observations. As
the devices count with a Local Persistence Storage memory,
the Environmental Data Collection Module is continuously
producing new observations.
3.4.2. Deployment Insights and Lessons Learnt. Apart from
presenting the mobile IoT nodes architecture and features, it
is essential to highlight some issues that have been addressed
during the deployment or have arisen as lessons learnt.
Never forget that the deployed infrastructure aim is to
support IoT experimentation, the more information that can
be captured, and the widest experimentation possibilities
that are opened. Having a budget restriction, the possibility
of enlarging the available information by increasing the
number of IoT devices has a limit. The approach taken was to
overrate the sensing frequency. This way, a larger amount of
information could be made available. However, there is also
a restriction that applies to this approach; the reporting of all
the observations gathered poses a challenge to the networking
solution to be implemented. In this sense, the solution
adopted reported one observation every five minutes, on a
real-time manner, while one observation every 80 seconds
is captured. Those observations that are not immediately
reported are kept locally and reported through Delay Tolerant
Networking (DTN) or opportunistic networking strategies
which will be described in Section 4.
The main application for the information produced by
mobile IoT nodes, namely, environmental monitoring, does
not need observations at such high pace; however, other
applications, such as traffic assessment, benefit from this
oversampling. Moreover, as it has been already mentioned,
the whole SmartSantander deployment is meant to support
experimentation on IoT technologies. Massive production of
sensor observations is critical to maximize the research and
experimentation opportunities on top of the deployed facility.
Concerning the powering of the mobile nodes, it is
realized by connecting them to the vehicle electrical batteries.
This way, we guarantee a large, practically endless, energy

International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks

(a)

(b)

Figure 5: (a) Detail of sensor nodes installed on public bus; (b) Environmental Data Collection Module.

(a)

(b)

Figure 6: (a) Mobile IoT devices real-time location view; (b) mobile IoT devices aggregated location view.

supply to the nodes. This is an aspect of particular importance

for experimental testbeds that has been effectively addressed
for the different deployments of the SmartSantander testbed.
As mobile devices are not only supporting the monitoring of
environmental parameters but also enabling experimentation
on top of them, extreme duty cycles optimizing power
consumption must be discarded. As it has been stated in
Section 1, one of the challenges that must be overcome
by the experimental testbeds is the avoidance, as much as
possible, of restrictions to the experimentation. In this sense,
such extreme duty cycles would limit the experimentation
possibilities. The solution adopted for powering the mobile
nodes through the vehicle batteries allows these nodes to be
always on if necessary. However, in order to avoid improbable
vehicle battery drain, devices are set to hibernate if the engine
of the vehicle is kept off for one hour. As soon as the engine is
turn on, the IoT device gets back into fully operative mode.
The decision of installing IoT devices on top of vehicles
has demonstrated to be extremely useful and an important
lesson learnt itself. The main advantage of installing these
devices in vehicles regards the extended range that can
be covered in a very cost-effective manner. As it can be
seen in Figure 6, the distribution of the devices along the
city provides a good coverage of almost the whole city.
Additionally, frequent encounters among mobile IoT devices
as well as between the mobile and fixed IoT devices enable
testing of peer-to-peer networking strategies. In Figure 6(a),
the instantaneous position of the mobile IoT devices fleet
can be observed. In contrast, in Figure 6(b), an aggregated
view of the last 30,000 observations taken by the mobile IoT

devices is presented in bubbles gathering all the observations

generated in 1000 square meters around. Colour code goes
from orange (more than 100) to blue (between 15 and 100)
and pink (less than 15). It is also important to mention that
mobility is not restricted to the city and some vehicles go far
beyond Santander boundaries.
The connection of the newly deployed devices to the
already existing testbed poses also some challenges. It goes
without saying that wireless access technologies were the
only possibility, not only for the mobile devices but also for
the fixed ones due to the geographic scale of the deployment. Using a Wide Area Network (WAN) technology was
the straightforward decision to guarantee access availability. However, the main drawback of these networks is the
associated cost. The GPRS connection used for the IoT
devices deployed was associated with the fleet management
service used by the public transportation company, which
helped minimizing these costs, but adding communication
interfaces using short-range ISM-band technologies to some
of the devices has proven to be a wise decision. Besides
enabling opportunistic networking solutions, described in
Section 4, that add network redundancy thus making the
overall system more resilient, it opens new experimentation
opportunities since, to the best of our knowledge, there is
no experimental testbed in which IEEE 802.15.4 technology
can be used for communication among nodes moving at
relatively high speeds. Moreover, it is part of the future plans
for extending the testbed to include novel IoT-related wireless
access technologies, such as SigFox [29] or LoRa [30], which
could be tested under real-world conditions.

International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks

Last but not least, the installation process had to overcome some hurdles in terms of logistics and casing. Concerning the first aspect, it is important to note that the IoT
nodes were installed on vehicles that were on duty. Thus, it
was of utmost importance to minimize the installation time.
Modular design of the devices helped in this requirement
as the different physical modules could be installed in
parallel. Pertaining to the casing, this was a major issue
for the Environmental Data Collection Module as it had to
compulsorily be installed outdoors. The solution adopted for
the air inlet to pass an ABS labyrinth has demonstrated to be
adequate as no damage due to water or humidity has been
recorded even in a rainy city as Santander is.
3.5. Key Success Indicators of the Support for Experimentation. After having presented the details of the installation
and described the lessons learnt associated with the actual
installation process, in this section we will analyse it in terms
of the features identified as most relevant characteristics
for supporting IoT experimentation, namely, scale, heterogeneity, mobility, experimentation realism, data-centricity,
concurrency, and autonomy, and take them as key success
indicators assessing whether the deployed infrastructure has
achieved its main goal or not. Since the description has
focused on the mobile part of the SmartSantander testbed,
the analyses will also concentrate on it.
It is clear that, in terms of scale, the number of mobile
IoT devices deployed puts SmartSantander testbed in the top
part of the table of any existing experimentation testbeds
[5]. However, scale has additional connotations, namely,
geographic extension and amount of information generated,
which are of special interest for IoT experimentation and are
also significantly covered in the testbed.
In terms of heterogeneity, the testbed has focused on
information heterogeneity rather than on devices heterogeneity itself. This goes in line with the focus on IoT rather
than on WSN. While for WSN experimentation having
access to heterogeneous devices is a relevant feature for
demonstrating portability of solutions, IoT experimentation
requirements are much more service oriented [31] and thus
are interested in the services that the infrastructure provides
which are in general information-centric.
Enabling experimentation involving mobility is the obvious leap forward enabled by the deployment described in this
paper. The main limitation is that only undergone mobility
is supported meaning that an experimenter will not be
able to control the trajectory of mobile devices. On the
other hand, the fact that some of the mobile devices can
communicate with the fixed ones must be highlighted as a
major enablement of the testbed.
One of the main rationales for experimentally driven
research is to be able to challenge the solutions being developed against real-world situations that cannot be modelled
in simulation environments. Controlled testbeds (typically
indoor) are actually a step forward but they are still restricted
in realism terms. The testbed we have described is exposed
to real-world conditions which implicitly affect experiments
running on top of it. Solutions evaluated under such circumstances will benefit from these contour conditions, thus

9
guaranteeing that the resulting solution is suited to a real-life
urban setting.
Data-centricity is another key differentiator between
WSN experimentation and IoT one. While, for the first
one, focus is put on the devices and how they operate
(communicate, internetwork, etc.), IoT builds on top of
devices but provides a higher level of abstraction in which
the focus is put on the services that objects provide (generally
data gathering and reporting). The SmartSantander platform
and the mechanisms deployed for intertier communication
were implemented with this feature as a fundamental design
consideration and the deployed mobile infrastructure has
been successfully integrated in it.
Experimentation as a service model has been adopted by
the SmartSantander platform so that concurrent experimentation can be handled. This way the underlying infrastructure
is decoupled from the experimenters requests guaranteeing
scalability both in terms of enlarging the deployed infrastructure, where as a matter of fact mobile IoT devices have been
seamlessly incorporated into the testbed on a plug and play
manner, and in terms of increasing the number of concurrent
experiments.
With the scale and variety of testbed management
events to track, one cannot assume that human intervention
alone is sufficient to provide timely response to events and
remediation to faults. Testbed management automation has
been incorporated keeping the human in the loop only for
decision-making and policy-specification. Moreover, there
are other aspects, more related to the deployment and
networking, that have been put forward in order to maximize
testbed autonomy. Firstly, the energy demands from the
infrastructure, which are augmented due to experimentation
support necessity, have been tackled during the installation
process guaranteeing large enough energy sources for all the
mobile IoT devices. Secondly, multiple intertier communication networking solutions have been adopted in order to
avoid single point of failure problems and maximize testbed
resiliency.

4. Mobile Sensing Data Distribution Strategies

Data distribution is one of the key aspects to be solved in
order to fully exploit the potential of a sensing infrastructure
based on vehicle-mounted IoT devices. In this sense, as
already introduced, the three-tiered architecture defined
specifies that access to the information gathered at the IoT
tier must be reported towards the components at the server
tier since these latter ones are the responsible for making
it available to the applications and services consuming this
information.
In the following subsections the three different observations reporting strategies employed for the Santander
deployment will be described.
4.1. WAN-Based Observations Reporting
4.1.1. Strategy Description. To be really effective, smart city
services have to enable citizens and organisations to make
well-informed decisions in a timely fashion. As the value of

10
information can fall rapidly, smart city services need to be
capable of capturing relevant information in real-time and
distributing it in a format that citizens and organisations can
act on immediately.
WAN-based observations reporting strategy make use
of the GPRS interface with which all the IoT devices
installed on the vehicles of the SmartSantanders facility are
equipped. These IoT devices are programmed to periodically
send an observation to the so-called GW for mobile nodes
(GW4MN). This element, directly connected to the server
tier, forwards these observations to the appropriate repository.
The periodicity with which observations are reported
is a tunable parameter depending on time, distance, or a
combination of both. Thus, an observation can be reported
every certain number of seconds, when the vehicle has
travelled a specific number of meters or when the first of these
two conditions occur. Currently, this reporting frequency is
fixed to five minutes.
4.1.2. Strategy Discussion. This reporting strategy is used as
the baseline for the SmartSantander deployment. It guarantees sufficiently fresh information since GPRS coverage
of the city is almost 100% assured. Moreover, it supports
real-time event-based asynchronous reporting. Additionally,
it is the only one that can be implemented by all the IoT
devices installed on the SmartSantanders vehicles as it does
not depend on the optional Local Communication Module.
The main drawback for this strategy is that frequent
connection through the cellular network is costly in terms of
energy and should be restricted in terms of quantity of data
due to economic costs.
While the power consumption is not a major issue due
to the fact that nodes installed are connected to the vehicle
battery in order to guarantee permanent and almost endless
access to energy, the economic cost associated with this
reporting strategy should not be neglected. The solution
adopted to minimize the impact and keep these costs to
a minimum while maintaining the experimental facility
grade of service was to negotiate the commercial contract
for the mobile nodes deployment in conjunction with the
Santander municipality mobile phone lines service. This
way it was possible to get competitive fees as economies
of scale apply. However, it is clear that although it was
possible to minimize the communication costs, reaching
a trade-off between observations reporting freshness and
cost, it is important to develop other observations reporting
strategies that reduce the costs while increasing the amount
of information retrieved.
4.2. V2I-Based Opportunistic Observations Reporting
4.2.1. Strategy Description. As the vehicles circulate around
the city, they might come close to some of the fixed IoT
devices. As it has been introduced in Section 3, IoT devices
installed on the Santanders public transportation buses were
equipped with a Local Communication Module which in the
majority of cases included an IEEE 802.15.4. This module
was installed on the roofs of the buses in order to enable

International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks

Table 1: Mean number and standard deviation of fixed-mobile
devices encounters per day.

Weekday
Weekend

Mean number of encounters

4550
3530.4

Std. deviation
117.43
153.32

direct communication between the embarked IoT devices

and the fixed ones as long as they come close enough.
Taking advantage of this condition another observations
reporting strategy has been implemented exploiting Vehicleto-Infrastructure (V2I) opportunistic networking.
Observations gathered by mobile IoT devices that are
not immediately reported through the WAN-based reporting
strategy are kept at the Local Persistence Storage repository
inside the IoT device. IoT devices on the buses opportunistically try to report observations on this repository by
broadcasting them as soon as they come close to any of the
fixed IoT devices. Once one of these broadcasted reports
reaches one of the fixed IoT devices, this device acknowledges
its reception. Upon the reception of this acknowledgement
the device that originated the observation should consider
it reported and remove it from the Local Persistence Storage
repository.
4.2.2. Strategy Experimental Assessment. Figure 7(a) shows
an excerpt of the fixed IoT devices locations. Devices are
represented in the figure with blue dots. These devices are
the ones that, among all the deployed ones, are located at
streets coinciding with buses lines. As it can be seen, they are
basically deployed along both sides of Santanders main city
centre avenues. Correspondingly, Figure 7(b) shows the locations where IoT devices embarked on the buses came across
one of the fixed nodes, thus being able to opportunistically
report one or more locally stored observations. The meetings
presented were detected just on a single day (September 1,
2014).
The results on the figure can be extrapolated to any
weekday. Table 1 presents the results of the analysis done to
this parameter during the first fifteen days of September 2014
analysing the number of reporting opportunities from all
the mobile devices. Public transportation timetable is slightly
modified on weekends affecting the distribution and overall
number of fixed-mobile devices encounters. The meeting
points shown in Figure 7(b) are colour-coded on a per mobile
IoT device manner; this is, every device is assigned a colour
on the blue to green range.
The aggregated number of encounters presented in
Table 1 does not reflect the fact that they are not uniformly
distributed among all the devices embarked on the different
buses. While there are buses which are assigned to lines
that regularly pass through the streets on which the fixed
IoT devices are installed, others do it less frequently or
just do not circulate on the fixed deployment area. Figure 8
shows the probability density function for the number of
observations reporting opportunities per day among all the
mobile IoT devices during the analysed period (first fifteen
days of September 2014). As it can be seen, it follows a

International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks

11

(a)

3,795 W

3,8 W

3,805 W

3,81 W

3,815 W

3,82 W

3,825 W

3,83 W

3,795 W

3,8 W

3,805 W

3,81 W

3,815 W

3,82 W

43,463 N
43,462 N
43,461 N
43,46 N
43,459 N
43,458 N

3,825 W

3,83 W

43,463 N
43,462 N
43,461 N
43,46 N
43,459 N
43,458 N

(b)

Figure 7: (a) Fixed IoT devices location at city centre; (b) mobile IoT devices opportunistic reporting positions.

0.12

Probability density

0.1
0.08
0.06
0.04
0.02
0

20 40 60 80 100 120 140 160 180 200 220 240 260

Number of observations reporting opportunities

12

10
8
6
4
2
0
3:00:00
4:00:00
5:00:00
6:00:00
7:00:00
8:00:00
9:00:00
10:00:00
11:00:00
12:00:00
13:00:00
14:00:00
15:00:00
16:00:00
17:00:00
18:00:00
19:00:00
20:00:00
21:00:00
22:00:00
23:00:00

Number of observations
reporting opportunities

Figure 8: Observations reporting opportunities per mobile IoT

device probability density function.

Time of the day

Id = 3010
Id = 3044

Id = 3048
Id = 3078

Figure 9: Time distribution of mobile IoT devices reporting

opportunities.

normal distribution with the mean around 82 encounters and

a standard deviation of 43.
Figure 9 shows the observation reporting opportunities
time distribution of four different devices during one of the
days analysed (September 1). Thirty-minute interval analysis
is performed. It presents the amount of encounters between
the mobile device and any of the fixed ones on that particular
interval.
4.2.3. Strategy Discussion. The main drawback of this solution is that it does not provide any guarantee on the timely
manner in which observations are reported.

As it has been experimentally demonstrated, encounters

occur on a time-scattered way. This is, for the same mobile
device they concentrate on a, typically reduced, number
of consecutive intervals (so-called opportunity periods) followed by several intervals in which no reporting opportunity is detected (so-called silent periods). These periods,
respectively, correspond to the timeframes in which the buses
circulate around the city centre (where SmartSantanders
fixed infrastructure is deployed) and those that their lines
make them drive outside the downtown area. The analysis
done has been conducted over the reporting opportunities
that the devices installed on vehicles have. However, it is
important to note that it might be possible to report several
observations per opportunity.
The result of this kind of behaviour is that while observations gathered during the opportunity periods might have
the chance to be timely reported using V2I-based strategy,
those gathered during silent periods will have to wait till
the next opportunity period to be reported. Moreover, stored
observations gathered during silent periods will be reported
first during the next opportunity period thus delaying those
observations gathered during that opportunity period. Typically opportunity periods are large enough to report the
observations gathered during the previous silent period and
catch up with the ones gathered in that opportunity period.
In contrast, this approach allows for large amount of
information to be made available at no additional communication costs.
From the analysis of these results, we can conclude that
even when this reporting strategy might not be used as the
baseline reporting solution, it provides an efficient manner
to enrich the sensing capacity of such a vehicular-based
infrastructure without having to rely on mobile networks.
Moreover, it is also important to highlight that since
buses follow a predictive trajectory, the time when data
could be reported could be forecast. So reporting date can
be predictive and periodic. Thus, although the solution
assessment has not analysed the actual delay statistics (i.e.,
mean delay for observations reported using this method), the
results let us envisaging, without losing generality, that for
noncritic, delay-tolerant applications it could actually be used
as the default approach.
4.3. Batched Observations Reporting
4.3.1. Strategy Description. The last of the observations
reporting strategies implemented is also based on the ability

12

International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks

Table 2: Application requirements key performance indicators.

WAN-based
V2I-based
Batched

Capacity
Restricted
Unbounded
Unbounded

Delay
Negligible
Restricted
High

Cost
High
Zero
Zero

of the mobile devices to locally store the observations which

they produce but which have not been reported. In this case,
the fixed infrastructure will not be composed by the fixed IoT
devices rolled out in the city but mobile IoT devices will try
to connect to IEEE 802.11b hotspots in order to upload all the
observations in their local storage.
Low data rate of IEEE 802.15.4 interfaces made it only
possible to report observations one by one. However, batched
mode can be used thanks to the relative high data rate of IEEE
802.11b. It is important to note that every observation is just
some bytes long so even in the worst case the batch will be
just some kilobytes.
The current implementation of this strategy is limited to
the WiFi hotspot at the bus depot. This way, when buses end
their shift every night and come back to the depot they can
download the observations stored throughout the day.
4.3.2. Strategy Discussion. Similar to the case of the V2Ibased reporting strategy, the main advantage associated
with this mode of sending the gathered observations to the
SmartSantander platform is the possibility of reporting a big
amount of data in a costless manner. Bearing in mind that
power consumption is not a problem thanks to the way the
nodes were installed connected to the large batteries of the
vehicles, frequency of the observations gathering (note the
contrast between gathering and reporting) could be increased
as much as necessary.
Likewise, the drawback for this reporting strategy is
clearly the impossibility of guaranteeing timely transfer of
data to the SmartSantander platform server tier. In this sense,
applications with strict requirements in terms of delay could
not be supported using this way of reporting observations
gathered by mobile devices.
Extending this implementation to other hotspots around
the city would be possible by enabling dynamic hotspot
discovery and connection. This would enhance the timerelated behaviour of this solution but would not completely
solve the problem nor would it enable the support of eventbased applications. Thus, it would be necessary to assess if the
performance improvement compensates the costs of rolling
out and managing these hotspots.
4.4. Data Distribution Strategies Discussion. One of the
lessons learnt through the operation of SmartSantander IoT
infrastructure is the crucial need, which might become a fatal
bottleneck, for efficient data distribution solutions that take
the information from the devices out in the wild towards
the IoT platforms. Data gathering and disseminating are fundamental mechanisms of smart services and infrastructures
which stresses the need for efficient, city-wide, and manifold
communication networks.

Power consumption
N/A
N/A
N/A

Real-time support
Yes
No
No

Security
High
High
High

Besides the individual discussions at the end of each

of the above sections which had focused on presenting the
main advantages and drawbacks for the proposed reporting
strategies, it is also interesting to analyse them with regard to
the application requirements. Table 2 presents the evaluation
of some of the main key performance indicators in terms
of requirements imposed by applications making use of the
information gathered by the mobile devices deployed.
The capacity of cellular networks, even those that are now
being planned, will be really challenged by the increasing
demands of IoT-like infrastructures. Besides the raw capacity
discussion, what is clear is that it is advisable to exploit other
networking strategies in order to accommodate the reporting
of sensor observations in the most efficient manner.
The assessment made to the opportunistic strategy has
confirmed that while applications with real-time demands
could not be handled due to the potential delays in which
this approach incurs, these delays might be bearable for
applications with relaxed time constraints. They compensate
this with an unbounded capacity at no additional cost and
keeping confidentiality and integrity of information.
In this sense, combining traditional Wide Area Network (WAN) networks such as broadband mobile networks
with less-conventional networking solutions such as hotspot
connectivity or multihop communications is an appealing
answer to broadcasting geolocalized information efficiently.
Analysis performed to real data traces obtained from the
embarked devices has demonstrated the benefits that, under
certain conditions, the implemented mechanisms could bring
to the data distribution challenge in this kind of networks.

5. Smart City Applications

Deploying the devices and gathering the information they
continuously generate are just the first step towards the final
aim of the testbed described in previous sections. It goes
without saying that the key aspect of an IoT infrastructure is
its capacity to enrich the understanding of the city behaviour.
This advanced knowledge makes it possible to optimize
the city management procedures as well as to enable more
informed, and thus smarter, decisions by the citizens. A brief
description of two potential applications for the information
gathered through the mobile sensing infrastructure rolled out
in Santander will be presented in this section.
5.1. Environmental Monitoring. As it has been introduced
in Section 3, the sensors with which mobile IoT devices
are equipped are mainly aimed at measuring air quality
parameters like carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, ozone,
or dust particles in suspension. Additionally, they also count

International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks

13

(a)

(b)

(c)

(d)

Figure 10: Real-time environmental monitoring Santander area heatmaps. (a) Temperature ( C); (b) relative humidity (%); (c) dust particles
(mg/m3 ); and (d) carbon monoxide (mg/m2 ).

with general weather sensors like temperature and relative

humidity.
Besides more professional and skilled use of the information gathered by weather and environment technicians
in complex studies that can be used in forecasting or
public safety, citizens can be directly informed by means
of applications including general city conditions dashboards
in which panels like the ones shown in Figure 10 can be
presented. Easily understandable graphical representations,
like heatmaps, of almost real-time data would be warmly
welcome by citizens interested in knowing about their city.
Despite the actual values of the parameters observed
and shown in each of the maps in Figure 10, the aim of
these maps is to show to the reader the capacity of covering
the city area with a certainly limited number of devices.
Observations carried out by the mobile devices could, in a
cost-effective way, feed mathematical estimation algorithms
which are used nowadays with a twofold objective, firstly,
to assess current algorithms that with a little number of
fixed sensors extrapolate the conditions in other areas and,
secondly, to fine-tune the values resulting from mathematical
interpolation with values gathered from physical observation
of the corresponding parameter.

5.2. Traffic Conditions Assessment. Nowadays, most of the

traffic conditions assessment applications are based on
information gathered from inductive loops buried in the
city streets. While this infrastructure provides consistent
information, it has two main drawbacks. Firstly, real-time
information gathering is not provided. Secondly, deployment
and management costs are not negligible as they include
road works every now and then to keep the infrastructure
operational.

Figure 11: Smarter Travel [34] screenshot.

It is already possible to find in the literature [32, 33] experiences in which Floating Car Data paradigm is employed to
perform traffic estimation. With a good number of vehicles
moving around the city it would be possible to enrich
currently available traffic condition assessment applications
with the information on speed and course gathered by the
mobile IoT devices as they circulate across the city. Figure 11
shows colour-coded (green for fluid, yellow for moderate,
and red for dense) assessment of the Santander streets traffic
conditions. This map is part of a smartphone app which is
currently using the information from the inductive loops but
is being extended to receive also the information from the
mobile IoT devices.

6. Conclusions
Vehicular networking will be inevitably part of the IoT
scenario and smart cities are one of the most evident examples
of the IoT applicability potential. This paper focuses on
the description of a large-scale IoT testbed deployed at
the city of Santander with special emphasis on the devices

14
that have been installed on 140 vehicles that circulate all
over the city daily. It presents the detailed description of
the embarked devices and analyses the experimentation
alternatives that they enable. In this sense, particular stress
is put on the mobile IoT devices features enabling, through
short-range low-power radio technologies, the interaction
not only among them but also with the fixed infrastructure
deployed at Santander streets. We expect that this description
will promote a better knowledge of the testbed features
and experimentation scenarios that it enables and assist IoT
experimenters to prepare such experiments.
Three different mobile sensing data distribution strategies
have been implemented in the testbed and they have been
described in this paper, while the main data dissemination strategy implemented for the SmartSantander mobile
sensing deployment is based on periodic reporting using
cellular access network. However, opportunistic offloading
of sensed data through short- and medium-range wireless
access technologies such as IEEE 802.15.4 and IEEE 802.11
has also been used. Future work in this area will focus
on complementing the analysis with a detailed study of
the delay conditions for V2I-based strategy. Moreover, the
practical implementation of opportunistic batched reporting
at hotspots different from bus depot will also complement
currently implemented solutions.
Finally, a brief description of two smart city applications
for the information gathered through the mobile sensing
infrastructure has been presented as easily understandable
examples of the added value that can be obtained thanks to
real-world roll-outs of IoT (fixed and mobile) technology.

Conflict of Interests
The authors declare that there is no conflict of interests
regarding the publication of this paper.

Acknowledgments
This work has been partially funded by Research Project
SmartSantander, under FP7-ICT-2009-5 of the 7th Framework Programme of the European Community. The authors
would like to acknowledge the collaboration with the rest
of partners within the consortium leading to the results
presented in this paper. The authors would also like to express
their gratitude to the Spanish government for the funding in
the following project: Connectivity as a Service: Access for
the Internet of the Future, COSAIF (TEC2012-38574-C0201).

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