SMART ARCHAEOLOGICAL TOURISM: CONTENTION, CONVENIENCE AND ACCESSIBILITY IN THE CONTEXT OF CLOUD-CENTRIC IoT

Abstract

The spread of digital technologies offers a great potential for the creativity and innovation in all aspects of tourism industry. The integration between advanced technologies of ICT and tourism industry plays vital role in enhancing the tourism services and experiences, particularly, in the context of archaeological tourism. Following this, this study proposes a protocol that offers tourists site/destination and experiences according to their preferences. More specifically, tourists can express various preferences regarding the type of tourism site, their contention level in order to avoid crowded ones, the accessibility and convenience of different sec- tions of a site, and the distance and congestion of the paths lead to such site …etc. Our Contention, Conven- ience and Accessibility based Smart Tourism-destination Approach (CASTA) is presented in this paper to offer online services for tourists assuming that they are always connected and they do not have advanced IT skills. A tourist has only to send a preference message that specifies all the personal constraints via a smart hand held device. A control unit that resides on the cloud analyzes the message and suggests a tour to cer- tain sites and their sections based on the tourist preferences. Information about tourism sites and their sec- tions, in terms of contention, convenience, and accessibility, is collected by wireless sensor networks and sent to the control unit via a gateway node. Results of simulated experiments of CASTA have shown that it outperforms the shortest path approach which suggests a tour based solely on the distance toward those tourism destinations. Moreover CASTA outperformance shortest path approach that takes the quality of network connections available over the selected paths.