The Future Internet (FI) context can best be summarised as “everything always connected everywhere”. The Future Internet initiative deals with the design, evaluation and deployment of technologies in order to adapt the network to current and future needs arising from the Internet’s omnipresence.

Optimising supply and access in urban areas

Within this context, the goal of the OUTSMART project was to harness the Future Internet by developing five innovation eco-systems. These eco-systems, covering smart transportation, waste management, water and sewage, street lighting and smart metering, will facilitate the creation of a wide range of pilot services and technologies that contribute to optimising supply and access to services and resources in urban areas.

The eco-system for waste management, for example, monitors fill level (and contents) of public waste baskets. Its aim is to optimise routes of refuse collection vehicles, increase the general sense of duty for public cleanliness and to raise citizens’ awareness by indicating overloaded waste baskets and “muck corners”. The aim of the water and sewage eco-system is to monitor water quality and sewers, including an early-warning system.

Intelligent street lighting and smart metering allows dynamic adaptations of the lighting depending on the presence of human beings and the level of darkness. These systems also include almost real-time monitoring and reporting of the energy consumption. The smart transportation eco-systems will compile all data on the current traffic situation in a city – including both public transport such as buses or trains and private vehicles – to help users choose the best paths to rapidly arrive at a destination and avoid being blocked in traffic jams.

The overall aim of these innovation eco-systems is to contribute to a more sustainable utility provision and, through increased efficiency, lower the strain on resources and on the environment. In order to develop such advanced services and technologies, an industry-driven approach works best, involving the whole value chain, from city authorities, utilities operators and ICT companies, to academia. OUTSMART services and technologies are based on an open and standardised infrastructure as envisioned by the FI Private Public Partnership (FI PPP) and provided by a service framework designed to facilitate provisioning, development and access.

Security expertise from Luxembourg

OUTSMART brought together a consortium of successful and innovative companies, research and academic institutions, end-user centric service providers and business experts from eight European countries: Denmark, France, Germany, Luxembourg, Italy, Serbia, Spain and the United Kingdom. An international team at the University of Luxembourg, headed by Prof. Dr Thomas Engel, contributed with its expertise in security and privacy handling in distributed environments to the OUTSMART innovation eco-systems.  

The contribution of the Luxembourg team involved investigating domain management, as well as the dependability and trust requirements of the OUTSMART architecture, with a particular focus on identifying suitable Quality of Service (QoS) and security mechanisms. It developed a framework for analysing a large collection of network traffic by combining data mining techniques and cloud-based solutions (i.e. Hadoop/Map-Reduce). The tool developed enables the real-time traffic of a real operator in Luxembourg to be analysed in order to figure out botnet communications.