While traditional wired communication technologies have played a crucial role in industrial monitoring and control networks over the past few decades, they are increasingly proving to be inadequate to meet the highly dynamic and stringent demands of today's industrial applications, primarily due to the very rigid nature of wired infrastructures. Wireless technology, however, through its increased pervasiveness, has the potential to revolutionize the industry, not only by mitigating the problems faced by wired solutions, but also by introducing a completely new class of applications. While present day wireless technologies made some preliminary inroads in the monitoring domain, they still have severe limitations especially when real-time, reliable distributed control operations are concerned. This article provides the reader with an overview of existing wireless technologies commonly used in the monitoring and control industry. It highlights the pros and cons of each technology and assesses the degree to which each technology is able to meet the stringent demands of industrial monitoring and control networks. Additionally, it summarizes mechanisms proposed by academia, especially serving critical applications by addressing the real-time and reliability requirements of industrial process automation. The article also describes certain key research problems from the physical layer communication for sensor networks and the wireless networking perspective that have yet to be addressed to allow the successful use of wireless technologies in industrial monitoring and control networks.

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Shopping using mobile applications (apps) is becoming a trend. Studies have highlighted the importance of interface in the case of shopping websites. However, to the best of our knowledge, there is hardly any study that has investigated the impact of interface quality of mobile apps on purchase intention. The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of interface quality of mobile shopping apps on customer intention to purchase. Four dimensions of interface quality of mobile shopping apps (viz. general information quality, product information related quality, layout quality, and visual appeal quality) were explored. Survey method was used to test the framework developed in this study. Results suggest that shopping apps' interface quality has indirect effect on purchase intention. Shopping app-interface quality has a positive impact on perceived enjoyment, which has little but positive impact on purchase intention using shopping apps. Shopping app-interface quality has no effect on perceived trust, but perceived enjoyment exerts a positive effect on perceived trust, which positively influences customer intention to purchase using shopping apps. Further, the study discusses theoretical and managerial implications and concludes with limitations and avenues for future research.

In this paper we propose a new dual radio IoT network architecture for wildlife monitoring system (WMS). WMS leverages bluetooth low energy (BLE) in low power wide area networks (LPWANs) by dynamically changing the operating radio based on the proximity among herd of wild animals. This approach will facilitate ultra-low power IoT devices to be deployed for sustainable wildlife monitoring application. In addition we present an analytical model to investigate the performance of the proposed IoT network in terms of energy consumption under a wildlife monitoring use-case. The simulation results show that the dual radio network leads to a higher energy efficiency when compared to the network utilizing only LPWAN. Moreover, our network readily doubles the network life time for various data traffic rates.

Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) enable the timely broadcast dissemination of event-driven messages to interested vehicles. However, when dealing with broadcast communication, suppression techniques must be designed to prevent the so-called broadcast storm problem. Numerous suppression schemes aim to reduce broadcast redundancy by assigning vehicles to different delay values, i.e., time slots, that are inversely proportional to their distance to the sender. In this way, only the farthest vehicles would rebroadcast, thereby allowing for quick data dissemination. Despite many efforts, current delay-based schemes still suffer from high levels of contention and collision when the number of vehicles rebroadcasting nearly simultaneously is high in dense networks. Even choosing appropriate values for the total number of time slots does not prevent situations where simply no vehicle is assigned to the earliest time slot, what may result in high end-to-end delay. In this paper, we tackle such scalability issues with a scheme that controls with precision the density of vehicles within each time slot. To reach this goal, we exploit the presence of beacons, periodic messages meant to provide cooperative awareness in safety applications. Simulations results show that our protocol outperforms existing delay-based schemes and is able to disseminate data messages in a scalable, timely, and robust manner.