23 Nov 2015 |
Research article |
Infrastructure and the Built Environment , Life at ÉTS
Star ÉTS: A Sustainable Cloud-Based Smart ÉTS Residence





You might want to live in a smart home using smart technologies, but you might want also to live in an environment-aware home. Smart city is an emerging concept introduced to achieve more efficient and sustainable cities to enhance the quality of life based on innovative ICT.
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Star ÉTS: Sustainable Smart ÉTS Residence
The Sustainable Smart ÉTS Residence project can be viewed, albeit on a much smaller scale, as a smart city, like Austin (QC), to which Star ÉTS will be linked through a gigabit connection.
It is a living lab supporting innovative research carried out in connection with the Canada Research Chair program on the Sustainable Smart Eco-Cloud at the ÉTS.
Serving a population of about 200 students (i.e. 100 rooms), Star ÉTS is a real model for a smart city, where smart cloud services will be deployed, validated and improved.

Figure 1 ÉTS Smart Residence
This substantial platform will support smart grids and smart city applications in the first green digital university campus in Canada; more specifically, to orchestrate student residence resources, and ultimately the campus, with the help of Telco cloud-based services, smart meters, and actuators.
Project main objectives
The main goal of Star ÉTS is to orchestrate the university residence resources, and ultimately the campus. A new class of smart grids and applications will be developed taking in account sustainability issues including energy consumption optimization, increased renewable energy usage and GHG emission reduction.
Project platform
Star ÉTS infrastructure as shown in the Figure 2 is connected to the Green Sustainable Telco Cloud infrastructure at the ÉTS, the first cloud in the world to host Telco-grade services, funded by the NSERC, Ericsson and Inocybe. Star ÉTS will be connected also to the GreenStar Network (GSN) – the first nationwide network powered entirely by green energy and a testbed environment from which practices and guidelines are derived that ICT providers can follow when building low carbon networks.
The platform is an integration of smart network and services, in particular new software defined networking (SDN) paradigms and cloud-based services, like virtual Internet Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), smart meters, and Web services the platform.
An example of traditional smart home versus cloud base smart home is shown in Figure 3.
This ICT architecture, based on a holistic concept and technologies for monitoring, analytics, and management of various ultra-broadband services of a smart city model, is situated and intelligently controlled within a broader environment, the eco-cloud.
Star ÉTS and the Environment
Orchestrating smart home resources using green Cloud Computing technology and services has a great impact on environmentally social awareness. In addition, bringing intelligence from a single home into the cloud (Figure 2), helps optimize the overall energy consumption and reduces GHG emissions.

Saida Khazri
Saida khazri has completed a Master degree in Telecommunications networks at ÉTS. She is working as a research assistant in the laboratory SYNCHROMÉDIA. Her research interests include applications and services deployment in the cloud.
Program : Telecommunications Networks
Research laboratories : SYNCHROMEDIA – Multimedia Communication in Telepresence

Kim Khoa Nguyen
Kim Khoa Nguyen is a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at ÉTS and the Synchromedia laboratory Vice-Director. His research interests include cloud computing, network virtualization and data center architecture.
Program : Electrical Engineering
Research laboratories : SYNCHROMEDIA – Multimedia Communication in Telepresence

Caroline Arnouk
Caroline Arnouk graduated in Civil Engineering at École Polytechnique de Montréal. She has a master degre in Infrastructure Management at École de technologie supérieure (ÉTS)
Program : Urban Infrastructures Management

Mohamed Cheriet
Mohamed Cheriet is a professor in the Department of Systems Engineering at ÉTS and Director of Synchromedia. His research focuses on eco-cloud computing, knowledge acquisition and artificial intelligence systems and learning algorithms.
Program : Automated Manufacturing Engineering
Research chair : Canada Research Chair in Smart Sustainable Eco-Cloud
Research laboratories : SYNCHROMEDIA – Multimedia Communication in Telepresence
Research laboratories :