Complex IoT Systems as Enablers for Smart Homes in a Smart City Vision

Abstract

The world is entering a new era, where Internet-of-Things (IoT), smart homes, and smart cities will play an important role in meeting the so-called big challenges. In the near future, it is foreseen that the majority of the world’s population will live their lives in smart homes and in smart cities. To deal with these challenges, to support a sustainable urban development, and to improve the quality of life for citizens, a multi-disciplinary approach is needed. It seems evident, however, that a new, advanced Information and Communications Technology ICT infrastructure is a key feature to realize the “smart” vision. This paper proposes a specific solution in the form of a hierarchical layered ICT based infrastructure that handles ICT issues related to the “big challenges” and seamlessly integrates IoT, smart homes, and smart city structures into one coherent unit. To exemplify benefits of this infrastructure, a complex IoT system has been deployed, simulated and elaborated. This simulation deals with wastewater energy harvesting from smart buildings located in a smart city context. From the simulations, it has been found that the proposed infrastructure is able to harvest between 50% and 75% of the wastewater energy in a smart residential building. By letting the smart city infrastructure coordinate and control the harvest time and duration, it is possible to achieve considerable energy savings in the smart homes, and it is possible to reduce the peak-load for district heating plants.

Internet of Things Applications as Energy Internet in Smart Grids and Smart Environments

“…The smart city concept needs to cope with various important challenges as mentioned before. Lynggaard and Skouby suggested a layer structure model for the smart city concept in [40], where this model is called a smart city infrastructure (SCI) and is established based on four major layers. The first layer defined is based on IoT to fulfill several processes, such as context management, computational procedures, and ICT infrastructures.…”

“…The third layer is characterized as the Cloud of Things (CoT), which integrates smart home and smart city services placed in the final layer of the SCI. The last layer comprises further service structures, resource management infrastructure, and integration with communication systems [40]. This system is described as the cyber-physical system (CPS) enabling IoT (IoT-CPS) in [41], in which authors have taken into account several application scenarios for air traffics, traffic control systems, and environmental monitoring and control systems.…”

A STUDY OF MALAYSIA’S SMART CITIES INITIATIVE PROGRESS IN COMPARISON OF NEIGHBOURING COUNTRIES (SINGAPORE & INDONESIA)

“…Other than that, "Smart Cities are, by definition, focused on using emerging technologies and innovation to make cities more livable, and offer new services and economic opportunities" [25]. IoT technologies play an important role in overcoming common challenges that will be faced by Smart Cities [26]. IoT devices can be distributed into the Smart Cities at large scale, this will help to form Smart Cities.…”

Artificial intelligence and internet of things for sustainable development – emerging technological and social opportunities and threats

“…Results including number of works assigned to the most popular list of topics and the most commonly used engineering controlled terms and keywords compared to full texts analysis, map out sustainable development's areas of AI and IoT deployment: power sector [5,11,19,20], smart city [7,9,11,[21][22][23][24][25][26], architectural design and smart buildings [27][28][29], transportation, tracking systems, traffic congestion and smart roads [7,9,11,13,25], company operations, business development [8,[30][31][32], manufacturing and industrial control [9,10,16,[33][34][35][36], product design and lifecycle [34,37], threat identification systems, earlywarning systems, emergency services, tracking and surveillance [7,9], agriculture [38,39], natural resources management, especially water resources [4,6,7,40], waste management [9][10][11], health...…”

“…The IoT is an abstraction of limitless objects with unique identities, equipped with some level of Internetaddressable AI and connected to create an ultimate cyber-physical pervasive framework. Connected virtual and physical objects collect data automatically or manually, monitor and transmit data to facilitate a new level of automation [10][11][12][13]. Such network is comprised of hardware (sensors, sensor actuators, embedded communications board, RFID), midware (cloud computing, data storage, data centers), and visualization systems (human-computer interaction interfaces, data interpretation, and event resolving) [6,14,15].…”