Search

In the contemporary era, smart buildings, characterized by their integration of advanced technologies to enhance energy efficiency and user experience, are becoming increasingly prevalent. While these advancements offer notable benefits in terms of operational efficiency and sustainability, they concurrently introduce a myriad of privacy concerns. This review article delves into the multifaceted realm of privacy issues associated with energy-efficient smart buildings. We commence by elucidating the potential risks emanating from data collection, storage, and analysis, highlighting the vulnerability of the personal and behavioral information of inhabitants. The article then transitions into discussing the rights of occupants, emphasizing the necessity for informed consent and the ability to opt-out of invasive data collection practices. Lastly, we provide an overview of existing regulations governing the intersection of smart buildings and privacy. We evaluate their effectiveness and present gaps that necessitate further legislative action. By offering a holistic perspective on the topic, this review underscores the pressing need to strike a balance between harnessing the benefits of technology in smart buildings and safeguarding the privacy of their occupants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since LiFi and WiFi do not interfere with one another, a LiFi/WiFi hybrid network may provide superior performance to existing wireless options. With a large number of users and constant changes, a network can easily become overloaded, leading to slowdowns and fluctuations in data transfer speeds. Handover (HO) increases significantly with an increase in users, which can negatively impact system performance and quality of service (QoS) due to connection loss and/or delay. Innovative three-phase handover management and AP transition (TPHM-APT) is proposed with the goals of maintaining a steady link with reduced HOs for all connected users, meeting high per-user data rates, and having low outage performance. The proposed scheme primarily focuses on reducing the total number of HOs, which improves reliability and keeps user densities low on individual LiFi APs, which conserves bandwidth and energy. Conventional methods of HO management and user assignment, such as those based on signal strength strategy (SSS), involve reallocating users to a different AP the moment they encounter a HO. Our technique consists of three stages that focus on the optical gain, the incidence angle of the receiver FOV, and user mobility speed for decision-making. Specifically, a data rate threshold (DRT), which is equivalent to the data rate gained from the optical gain, is used to determine whether users must be served by a LiFi or a WiFi AP. In addition, an incidence angle threshold (IAT) is identified to manage the handover process and user AP transition with the consideration of the user mobility threshold (UMT). The proposed method considers load balancing (LB) among all connected users as well. This approach is evaluated using Monte Carlo simulations with MATLAB. Mathematical expressions are derived to analyze the performance of the proposed method. Different aspects, for example, Outage Probability, HO Overhead, User density, System Average Throughput (SAT), and Average Data Rate Requirement (ADRR), are studied. Analysis shows performance gains in overall system performance in terms of system data rates, fairness, and HO rates. Simulation results show that against the standard HO scheme and traditional HO skipping and APA methods, the proposed scheme can effectively decrease HO rates, save LiFi resources, and increase user throughput. It also shows good correspondence to the analysis and reveals the associated trade-offs that occur when moving between the span of narrow to wide FOVs and vice versa (HO rates and APS). The proposed scheme achieves almost identical results for low-density and high-density systems as well, with different ADRR and HO overhead values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research aims to provide a comprehensive background on social distancing as well as effective technologies that can be used to facilitate the social distancing practice. Scenarios of enabling wireless and emerging technologies are presented, which are especially effective in monitoring and keeping distance amongst people. In addition, detailed taxonomy is proposed summarizing the essential elements such as implementation type, scenarios, and technology being used. This research reviews and analyzes existing social distancing studies that focus on employing different kinds of technologies to fight the Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic. This study main goal is to identify and discuss the issues, challenges, weaknesses and limitations found in the existing models and/or systems to provide a clear understanding of the area. Articles were systematically collected and filtered based on certain criteria and within ten years span. The findings of this study will support future researchers and developers to solve specific issues and challenges, fill research gaps, and improve social distancing systems to fight pandemics similar to COVID-19. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]