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Future Internet
Special Issues
Communications and Computing for Sustainable Development Goals
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Communications and Computing for Sustainable Development Goals

A special issue of Future Internet (ISSN 1999-5903).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 December 2017) | Viewed by 81153

Special Issue Editors

Dr. Luca Chiaraviglio

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Guest Editor
Department of Electronic Engineering, University of Rome Tor Vergata, Via del Politecnico 1, 00133 Rome, Italy
Interests: 5G networks; sustainable computing; energy-efficient networking
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Dr. William Liu

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
School of Computing, Electrical and Applied Technologies, Unitec Institute of Technology, Auckland 1025, New Zealand
Interests: network survivability; sustainable computing and communications; trust computing
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Prof. Dr. Jaap Van de Beek

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Luleå University of Technology, Sweden
Interests: 5G mobile broadband networks; 5G radio access in tough industrial environments and in dynamic spectrum-access regimes
Dr. Filip Idzikowski

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Poznan University of Technology, Poznan, Poland
Interests: power consumption of multi-layer core networks; traffic modeling, protection, and routing

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

The Information and Communication Technology (ICT) sector is currently focused on exploring different technological challenges, such us increasing the speed, maximizing the available capacity, and, in general, improving the performance of ICT systems. However, little attention has been paid so far to the role of ICT towards sustainable development. For example, the forthcoming 5G technology is mainly devoted to urban areas, while the development of such technology in rural zones is not yet considered. Additionally, more than two billions people still lack an Internet connection, and relatively low number of initiatives are being put into place to invert this trend.

This Special Issue dedicates itself to explore the role and impact of the transformational power of ICT for making our world more sustainable: saving energy and material resources by creating more value from less physical input, increasing quality of life for ever more people without compromising future generations ability to meet their needs. In this context, the United Nations General Assembly has proposed the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a list of actions over the next fifteen years in areas of critical importance for the humanity and the planet. The goal of this Special Issue is to pursue these goals in all areas of networking and computing. Papers related to ICT for Sustainability in a broad sense such as Sustainability by ICT, Sustainability in ICT and their overarching aspects, and especially papers developing Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), are welcome.

Dr. Luca Chiaraviglio
Dr. William Liu
Prof. Dr. Jaap Van de Beek
Dr. Filip Idzikowski
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Future Internet is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • Topics of Interests:
  • 5G networks for rural zones
  • Sustainable backbone networks/cellular network or data centers
  • New paradigms to improve the network sustainability: softwarization and fog computing
  • Networks elements and storage units powered by renewable sources
  • Sustainable architectures for increasing the connectivity in rural zones
  • Sustainable drone-services and network-services
  • e-Health applications for rural zones
  • Emergency services in rural zones
  • Case-studies results from the application of networks and services for improving the sustainability
  • Measurement of sustainability including metrics and benchmarks in networks and computing resources

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Published Papers (7 papers)

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Research

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2403 KiB  
Article
Approximate Networking for Universal Internet Access
by Junaid Qadir, Arjuna Sathiaseelan, Umar Bin Farooq, Muhammad Usama, Muhammad Ali Imran and Muhammad Shafique
Future Internet 2017, 9(4), 94; https://doi.org/10.3390/fi9040094 - 11 Dec 2017
Cited by 2 | Viewed by 8248
Abstract
Despite the best efforts of networking researchers and practitioners, an ideal Internet experience is inaccessible to an overwhelming majority of people the world over, mainly due to the lack of cost-efficient ways of provisioning high-performance, global Internet. In this paper, we argue that [...] Read more.
Despite the best efforts of networking researchers and practitioners, an ideal Internet experience is inaccessible to an overwhelming majority of people the world over, mainly due to the lack of cost-efficient ways of provisioning high-performance, global Internet. In this paper, we argue that instead of an exclusive focus on a utopian goal of universally accessible “ideal networking” (in which we have a high throughput and quality of service as well as low latency and congestion), we should consider providing “approximate networking” through the adoption of context-appropriate trade-offs. In this regard, we propose to leverage the advances in the emerging trend of “approximate computing” that rely on relaxing the bounds of precise/exact computing to provide new opportunities for improving the area, power, and performance efficiency of systems by orders of magnitude by embracing output errors in resilient applications. Furthermore, we propose to extend the dimensions of approximate computing towards various knobs available at network layers. Approximate networking can be used to provision “Global Access to the Internet for All” (GAIA) in a pragmatically tiered fashion, in which different users around the world are provided a different context-appropriate (but still contextually functional) Internet experience. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Communications and Computing for Sustainable Development Goals)
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1975 KiB  
Article
How 5G Wireless (and Concomitant Technologies) Will Revolutionize Healthcare?
by Siddique Latif, Junaid Qadir, Shahzad Farooq and Muhammad Ali Imran
Future Internet 2017, 9(4), 93; https://doi.org/10.3390/fi9040093 - 11 Dec 2017
Cited by 139 | Viewed by 23137
Abstract
The need to have equitable access to quality healthcare is enshrined in the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which defines the developmental agenda of the UN for the next 15 years. In particular, the third SDG focuses on the need to [...] Read more.
The need to have equitable access to quality healthcare is enshrined in the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which defines the developmental agenda of the UN for the next 15 years. In particular, the third SDG focuses on the need to “ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages”. In this paper, we build the case that 5G wireless technology, along with concomitant emerging technologies (such as IoT, big data, artificial intelligence and machine learning), will transform global healthcare systems in the near future. Our optimism around 5G-enabled healthcare stems from a confluence of significant technical pushes that are already at play: apart from the availability of high-throughput low-latency wireless connectivity, other significant factors include the democratization of computing through cloud computing; the democratization of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and cognitive computing (e.g., IBM Watson); and the commoditization of data through crowdsourcing and digital exhaust. These technologies together can finally crack a dysfunctional healthcare system that has largely been impervious to technological innovations. We highlight the persistent deficiencies of the current healthcare system and then demonstrate how the 5G-enabled healthcare revolution can fix these deficiencies. We also highlight open technical research challenges, and potential pitfalls, that may hinder the development of such a 5G-enabled health revolution. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Communications and Computing for Sustainable Development Goals)
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350 KiB  
Article
Energy Efficient Power Allocation for the Uplink of Distributed Massive MIMO Systems
by Xinhua Wang, Yan Yang and Jinlu Sheng
Future Internet 2017, 9(2), 21; https://doi.org/10.3390/fi9020021 - 9 Jun 2017
Cited by 7 | Viewed by 6476
Abstract
In this paper, an energy efficient power allocation scheme is proposed for a distributed massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system with a circular antenna array. Single-antenna users simultaneously transmit signal to the base station (BS) with a large number of distributed antennas. The tight [...] Read more.
In this paper, an energy efficient power allocation scheme is proposed for a distributed massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system with a circular antenna array. Single-antenna users simultaneously transmit signal to the base station (BS) with a large number of distributed antennas. The tight approximation of the energy efficiency (EE) is derived in closed form expressions. Through jointly optimizing the power allocation and the antenna number of BS, an NP-hard problem is formulated to maximize the EE. The equal power allocation is proved to be optimal given the total transmit power and the number of antennas. Finally, the optimal antenna number is determined by one dimension search. It is noteworthy that the NP-hard problem is solved by one dimension search. Simulation results validate the accuracy and the low-complexity of our proposed scheme. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Communications and Computing for Sustainable Development Goals)
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441 KiB  
Article
Spectrum and Energy Efficiency of Uplink Massive MIMO System with D2D Underlay
by Xinhua Wang
Future Internet 2017, 9(2), 12; https://doi.org/10.3390/fi9020012 - 13 Apr 2017
Cited by 2 | Viewed by 7232
Abstract
In this paper, both the spectrum efficiency (SE) and the energy efficiency (EE) are investigated for an uplink massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system coexisting with an underlay device-to-device (D2D) system. The outage probability and the achievable rates of the cellular user equipments (CUEs) [...] Read more.
In this paper, both the spectrum efficiency (SE) and the energy efficiency (EE) are investigated for an uplink massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system coexisting with an underlay device-to-device (D2D) system. The outage probability and the achievable rates of the cellular user equipments (CUEs) and the D2D link are derived in closed-form, respectively. Constrained by the SE of the D2D link and the CUEs, the EE of the massive MIMO system is maximized by jointly optimizing the transmit power of CUEs and the number of BS antennas. An algorithm with low complexity is proposed to solve the optimization problem. Performance results are provided to validate our derived closed-from results and verify the efficiency of our proposed scheme. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Communications and Computing for Sustainable Development Goals)
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3255 KiB  
Article
Designing a Softwarized Network Deployed on a Fleet of Drones for Rural Zone Monitoring
by Corrado Rametta and Giovanni Schembra
Future Internet 2017, 9(1), 8; https://doi.org/10.3390/fi9010008 - 20 Mar 2017
Cited by 57 | Viewed by 9515
Abstract
In the last decade, the differences in the information communication technology (ICT) infrastructures between urban and rural areas have registered a tremendous increase. ICT infrastructures could strongly help rural communities where many operations are time consuming, labor-intensive and expensive due to limited access [...] Read more.
In the last decade, the differences in the information communication technology (ICT) infrastructures between urban and rural areas have registered a tremendous increase. ICT infrastructures could strongly help rural communities where many operations are time consuming, labor-intensive and expensive due to limited access and large distances to cover. One of the most attractive solutions, which is widely recognized as promising for filling this gap, is the use of drone fleets. In this context, this paper proposes a video monitoring platform as a service (VMPaaS) for wide rural areas not covered by Internet access. The platform is realized with a Software-Defined Network (SDN)/Network Functions Virtualization (NFV)-based flying ad-hoc network (FANET), whose target is providing a flexible and dynamic connectivity backbone, and a set of drones equipped with high-resolution cameras, each transmitting a video stream of a portion of the considered area. After describing the architecture of the proposed platform, service chains to realize the video delivery service are described, and an analytical model is defined to evaluate the computational load of the platform nodes in such a way so as to allow the network orchestrator to decide the backbone drones where running the virtual functions, and the relative resources to be allocated. Numerical analysis is carried out in a case study. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Communications and Computing for Sustainable Development Goals)
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3177 KiB  
Article
Designing and Implementing Weather Generators as Web Services
by Rassarin Chinnachodteeranun, Nguyen Duy Hung, Kiyoshi Honda, Amor V. M. Ines and Eunjin Han
Future Internet 2016, 8(4), 55; https://doi.org/10.3390/fi8040055 - 15 Dec 2016
Cited by 2 | Viewed by 9011
Abstract
Climate and weather realizations are essential inputs for simulating crop growth and yields to analyze the risks associated with future conditions. To simplify the procedure of generating weather realizations and make them available over the Internet, we implemented novel mechanisms for providing weather [...] Read more.
Climate and weather realizations are essential inputs for simulating crop growth and yields to analyze the risks associated with future conditions. To simplify the procedure of generating weather realizations and make them available over the Internet, we implemented novel mechanisms for providing weather generators as web services, as well as a mechanism for sharing identical weather realizations given a climatological information. A web service for preparing long-term climate data was implemented based on an international standard, Sensor Observation Service (SOS). The weather generator services, which are the core components of the framework, analyze climatological data, and can take seasonal climate forecasts as inputs for generating weather realizations. The generated weather realizations are encoded in a standard format, which are ready for use to crop modeling. All outputs are generated in SOS standard, which broadens the extent of data sharing and interoperability with other sectoral applications, e.g., water resources management. These services facilitate the development of other applications requiring input weather realizations, as these can be obtained easily by just calling the service. The workload of analysts related to data preparation and handling of legacy weather generator programs can be reduced. The architectural design and implementation presented here can be used as a prototype for constructing further services on top of an interoperable sensor network system. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Communications and Computing for Sustainable Development Goals)
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Review

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4197 KiB  
Review
A Comprehensive Survey on Real-Time Applications of WSN
by Ahmad Ali, Yu Ming, Sagnik Chakraborty and Saima Iram
Future Internet 2017, 9(4), 77; https://doi.org/10.3390/fi9040077 - 7 Nov 2017
Cited by 144 | Viewed by 15858
Abstract
Nowadays, the investigation of the Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) has materialized its functional area ubiquitously such as environmental engineering, industrial and business applications, military, feedstock and habitat, agriculture sector, seismic detection, intelligent buildings, smart grids, and predictive maintenance, etc. Although some challenges still [...] Read more.
Nowadays, the investigation of the Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) has materialized its functional area ubiquitously such as environmental engineering, industrial and business applications, military, feedstock and habitat, agriculture sector, seismic detection, intelligent buildings, smart grids, and predictive maintenance, etc. Although some challenges still exist in the wireless sensor network, in spite of the shortcoming, it has been gaining significant attention among researchers and technologists due to its versatility and robustness. WSN is subject to a high potential technology that has been successfully implemented and tested in real-time scenarios, as well as deployed practically in various applications. In this paper, we have carried out an extensive survey in real-time applications of wireless sensor network deployment in a practical scenario such as the real-time intelligent monitoring of temperature, criminal activity in borders and surveillance on traffic monitoring, vehicular behavior on roads, water level and pressure, and remote monitoring of patients. The application of the Wireless Sensor Network in the assorted field of research areas has been widely deliberated. WSN is found to be the most effective solution in remote areas which are not yet explored due to its perilous nature and unreachable places. Here, in this study, we have cited the recent and updated research on the ubiquitous usage of WSN in diverse fields in an extensive and comprehensive approach. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Communications and Computing for Sustainable Development Goals)
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