Constructing Virtual Backbones over Low-Cost Wireless Networks for Smart Tourism Services

The construction of Connected Dominating Sets (CDS) in order to provide virtual backbones over low-cost wireless networks and facilitate the operation of intelligent services in smart tourism environments is a challenging task. In these kinds of environments, heterogenous networks are usually encountered, consisting of a wide variety of devices, ranging from data centers to Internet of Things devices and sensors. As such, each individual system's performance needs to be taken into account during the construction of the virtual backbone network, in order to maximize its efficiency based on the requirements of a considered service. To accomplish this, each node in the network is characterized by an appropriateness parameter, which indicates how appropriate a node is for a requested virtual backbone network. An algorithm for the construction of a CDS is extended to take this parameter into account. A low-cost wireless network installed in a university campus is used as an experimental testbed to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. The obtained results show that the proposed approach is capable of constructing appropriate virtual backbone networks for smart tourism services which add reduced network overhead.

I. Introduction

The tourism sector has evolved to a large industry and is an important driver of government policies, societal changes and financial development [1] –[4]. Due to its large scale, its financial importance and its effects on tourism destinations, both public bodies and private sector take advantage of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), in order to facilitate their functioning for tourism management. The adoption of ICTs provides tourism destinations and the tourists visiting them with intelligent services on approaches that are often described by the term smart tourism. The smart tourism concept can be seen as a specialization of the smart cities concept, aiming to take advantage of the existing ICTs and related infrastructures, in order to provide services of value to tourists before, during and after their visit on a tourism destination [5].