Surveillance and monitoring are highly critical in many application scenarios like wildlife conservation, restricted areas such as nuclear spillover, and border security. Moreover, in these scenarios, intrusions do not happen frequently thus, conventional surveillance is overkill and expensive that also requires extensive human involvement which can be arduous, expensive, and inefficient. To address these issues we propose an end-to-end smart acoustic surveillance solution for intrusion detection using a simple low-cost system called Balls for Walls (B4 W). The objective is to create a network of sensors that could also be remotely launched. The nodes responsible for surveillance employ audio sensors which are packaged within hard balls thus allowing the launch of these sensors from a distance of over 500 m. We use microphones for detecting human activity inferred through sensing the sound of footsteps against background noise. We evaluate the systems across five different terrain types. We propose a novel, low complexity detection algorithm called SEED which leverages signal energy and shape to distinguish humans from ambient noise. B4 W offers a maximum detection rate of 98.3% on dry leaves and a low false alarm rate of 0.9%. The system is energy efficient to last a maximum of 170 days and it is orientation agnostic. The proposed system has been extensively tested across varying terrains and ambient signal scenarios to demonstrate its efficacy. ... Read more

Internet of Things is bringing multiple domains and multiple av-enues to connect anything and everything. It mainly uses RF con-nectivity. However, recently visible light communication (VLC) isalso being explored. VLC has the properties that are unique withrespect to the privacy and security that it provides. Though thetransmission is of broadcast in nature the receiver needs to be inthe vicinity of the transmitter, thus providing secure communica-tions. Further, when low power receivers need to be constructed,it is important to harness energy from transmission itself. In thisarticle we propose a novel design for a receiver to be used in VLCfor embedded systems. The setup works, using a small solar panel(2mm x 2mm) as a medium to simultaneously harvest incident lightenergy and receive data bit streams. The LED source was modulatedusing On-Off Keying. The receiver works for close range commu-nications. The results in this paper show experimental evaluationof the system. We could detect the signals from the source usingharvested energy from the same transmission. ... Read more

The Tactile Internet presently constitutes a vision of an Internet over which, in addition to current communications modalities, a sense of touch can be transported. In that case, people would no longer need to be physically near the systems they operate, but could control them remotely. The main problem that needs to be solved to realize the Tactile Internet is summarized by the “1 ms challenge.” If the response time of a system is below 1 ms, the end-user will not be able to tell the difference between controlling a system locally or from another location. This paper offers a summary of the requirements for haptic communications, followed by an overview of challenges in realizing the Tactile Internet. In addition, possible solutions to these challenges are proposed and discussed. For example, the development of the fifth generation mobile communication networks will provide a good foundation upon which a Tactile Internet could be built. This paper also describes the design of a modular testbed needed for testing of a wide variety of haptic system applications. ... Read more