Integration of Wireless Technologies in Smart University Campus Environment: Framework Architecture

Abstract

In this paper, the authors are particularly interested in enhancing the education process by integrating new tools to the teaching environments. This enhancement is part of an emerging concept, called smart campus. Smart University Campus will come up with a new ubiquitous computing and communication field and change people's lives radically by providing systems and devices supported with smart technologies that have the capabilities of rapid respond to changes and circumstances without human interference, and it will be able to learn from these circumstances. This paper presents framework architecture for integrating various types of wireless networks into a smart university campus to enhance communication among students, instructors, and administration. Moreover, the authors study two possible applications to utilize the proposed networking framework: smart identification and social collaboration applications. An essential part to achieve the main principles of smart university campus is the deployment and usage of smart card technologies for identification and payment. Nowadays, there are several types of smart identification cards that support wireless technologies such as RFIDs and NFC. In both types, a card reader can read the card information from a distance. Moreover, in NFC cards, the card is integrated with the user's cellular phone. Social networking services (such as Facebook) facilitate online communication and provide a suitable environment for collaboration among students. As a part of future work, the proposed framework is deployed in the authors' university campus to find out the end-end performance and system usability.