The Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is an attractive solution for implementing low-cost, low power consumption, short-range wireless transmission technology and high flexibility wireless products, which working on standard coin-cell batteries for years. The original design of BLE is restricted to star topology networking, which limits network coverage and scalability. In contrast, other competing technologies like Wi-Fi and ZigBee overcome those constraints by supporting different topologies such as the tree and mesh network topologies. This paper presents a part of the researchers’ efforts in designing solutions to enable BLE mesh networks and implements a tree network topology which is not supported in the standard BLE specifications. In addition, it discusses the advantages and drawbacks of the existing BLE network solutions. During analyzing the existing solutions, we highlight currently open issues such as flooding-based and routing-based solutions to allow end-to-end data transmission in a BLE mesh network and connecting BLE devices to the internet to support the Internet of Things (IoT). The approach proposed in this paper combines the default BLE star topology with the flooding based mesh topology to create a new hybrid network topology. The proposed approach can extend the network coverage without using any routing protocol.

Wireless sensor networks connect a set of highly flexible wireless devices with small weight and size. They are used to monitor and control the environment by organizing the acquired data at a central device. Constructing fully connected networks using low power consumption sensors, devices, and protocols is one of the main challenges facing wireless sensor networks, especially in places where it is difficult to establish wireless networks in a normal way, such as military areas, archaeological sites, agricultural districts, construction sites, and so on. This paper proposes an approach for constructing and extending Bi-Directional mesh networks using low power consumption technologies inside various indoors and outdoors architectures called “an adaptable Spider-Mesh topology”. The use of ESP-NOW protocol as a communication technology added an advantage of longer communication distance versus a slight increase of consumed power. It provides 15 times longer distance compared to BLE protocol while consuming only twice as much power. Therefore, according to our theoretical and experimental comparisons, the proposed approach could provide higher network coverage while maintaining an acceptable level of power consumption.

Currently, agile methodologies are widely used as a light-weight development process model based on short development cycles, which can satisfy frequent change requests from customers and stakeholders, and reach an efficient product delivery.On the other hand, most suppliers in the automotive industry are currently facing a challenge to comply to automotive SPICE (ASPICE) standard, which is a domainspecific model of ISO/IEC 15504. Moreover, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) have increasingly requested ASPICE compliance from their suppliers to accurately assess their process quality capability. This paper analyzes to what extent the ASPICE process areas were covered by agile and aims to propose a model based on integrating agile methodologies, as well as customize some agile practices so that it can fit in the Automotive SPICE process model and support automotive suppliers to achieve the required ASPICE rating. MAN.03, which is the process area for project management, was selected from the process reference model (PRM). Then, each base practice (BP) was mapped to the suitable agile methodology. Moreover, MAN.03 consists of 10 BPs, and each BP rating was measured to be N, P, L, or F. For Level 1, we applied Kanban on BP.4 and Scrum on the remaining BPs. For Level 2, we applied Scrum on all generic practices. We presented our results after deploying Kanban, and a restructured version of Scrum, which makes it in compliance with the automotive industry. The approach taken in this study could be applied in other process areas in the PRM afterwards.

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