A Survey of Enabling Technologies for Smart Communities

Abstract

In 2016, the Japanese Government publicized an initiative and a call to action for the implementation of a “Super Smart Society” announced as Society 5.0. The stated goal of Society 5.0 is to meet the various needs of the members of society through the provisioning of goods and services to those who require them, when they are required and in the amount required, thus enabling the citizens to live an active and comfortable life. In spite of its genuine appeal, details of a feasible path to Society 5.0 are conspicuously missing. The first main goal of this survey is to suggest such an implementation path. Specifically, we define a Smart Community as a human-centric entity where technology is used to equip the citizenry with information and services that they can use to inform their decisions. The arbiter of this ecosystem of services is a Marketplace of Services that will reward services aligned with the wants and needs of the citizens, while discouraging the proliferation of those that are not. In the limit, the Smart Community we defined will morph into Society 5.0. At that point, the Marketplace of Services will become a platform for the co-creation of services by a close cooperation between the citizens and their government. The second objective and contribution of this survey paper is to review known technologies that, in our opinion, will play a significant role in the transition to Society 5.0. These technologies will be surveyed in chronological order, as newer technologies often extend old technologies while avoiding their limitations.

Vehicular Crowdsourcing for Congestion Support in Smart Cities

“…We trust VACCS will enhance our knowledge and understanding of vehicular crowdsourcing, bridging the gap between municipal-level needs and problems related to the distributed ownership of computational resources. In fact, we anticipate that our results could be applied to other transformative Smart City or Smart Community applications [14].…”

“…In a nutshell, an IoT is a network of everyday objects endowed with computation and communication capabilities. The IoT devices can be sensor nodes, actuators, coffee makers, vacuum cleaners, refrigerators, edge devices such as RFID tags, smartphones, smart watches, tablets, smart meters and other similar devices [14].…”

Sustainable Smart City to Society 5.0: State-of-the-Art and Research Challenges

“…A plan for infrastructure systems is being developed through Society 5.0 in an effective manner. A system tries to figure out how to solve problems by implementing known enabling technologies [25]. This will play a significant role in moving towards Society 5.0.…”

SEE-TREND: SEcurE Traffic-Related EveNt Detection in Smart Communities

“…These two fundamental characteristics of Smart Cities can be summarized by saying the Smart Cities will "put their citizens first" or, equivalently, that they will be citizencentric communities [9]. The citizen-centric characteristic of Smart Cities is aligned with the open e-government services proposed in the past two decades by the European Union [10] and permeates the work of [11,12].…”