Escaping from ancient Rome! Applications and challenges for designing smart cities

Abstract

From ancient Europe, the renaissance and industrialisation eras, to the modern times, urban planning paradigms have evolved in many ways, advancing the environments where people live in. Nevertheless, the recent development of wireless and wired communication network technologies and low-power miniature sensors for various application domains provide us with another chance of revolutionising cities by making them smarter. Smart cities, propelled by a city-scale infrastructure, where information provided from different application systems integrate together, will initiate the development of new applications that can benefit our everyday lives. This article presents an overview of representative applications that consist a smart city with their respective challenges and application requirements. Furthermore, we share our experiences obtained from designing and deploying examples of such smart systems in multiple application domains and summarise the remaining challenges for making the vision of designing smart cities a reality.

Smart cities: an effective urban development and management model?

“…As a result, urban spaces have been started strategically designed and developed with the help of technological innovation (Shin and Shin 2012). According to Heo et al (2014), the remarkable development of cutting-edge technology over the last few decades, such as high-performance computing systems, high-speed communication networks and low-power embedded sensing technologies, which enable the 'Internet of Things', have acted as a catalyst in bringing up the need for smart cities. They see smart power grids, structural and surveillance, transportation and traffic management, water treatment and monitoring and ubiquitous health care applications amongst the most popular smart urban technologies.…”

“…Whilst the technical barriers particularly due to the size of application ground, city, is vast, Heo et al (2014) stress the major constraints and challenges in this area as identifying and standardising the city-scale cloud infrastructure and interfaces; device addressing; network scalability; system interoperability; increasing the sensing modalities; and security and privacy concerns. On the contrary, according to Shin and Shin (2012), in fact socio-economic aspects are much challenging to deal with than technical ones as innovation and advancements in the field moving forward so rapidly that these issues do not cause a major threat to smart city formation.…”

“…Smart cities are claimed to provide such effective model with their successful management capabilities accompanied by the stimulus and location for the world's creativity and innovation along with providing high quality of life and place, and low impact on the environment (Angelidou 2014;Heo et al 2014). According to Caragliu, Del Bo, and Nijkamp (2011), these cities are 'smart' when it comes to investments in human and social capital and traditional (transport) and modern (information and communication technology [ICT]) communication infrastructure that fuel sustainable economic development and a high quality of life, with a wise management of natural resources, through participatory action and engagement.…”

DualMOP-RPL

“…With the support of various standardization communities such as the IEEE, IETF, and Zigbee, IoT systems are equipped with protocols and application profiles that can initiate large-scale deployments [Ed. et al 2012;IEEE Std 802.15.4-20032003Montenegro et al 2007]. However, because these standards themselves are new and are being applied to new and rapidly evolving networks and applications, it is inevitable that flaws in the protocol design are sometimes discovered after standardization.…”

“…Research concepts such as smart dust made it look like smart electrical grid [Cisco 2015], smart city management [Heo et al 2014], smart home and building automation, industrial and environmental monitoring [German Federal Ministry of Education and Research 2015;Adler et al 2005;Paek et al 2014], health care [Ko et al 2010], and the Internet of Things (IoT) with millions and billions of interconnected devices were in close reach. However, after a decade since the initial kickoff of WSN research, the vision still seems elusive without many real-life industrial-scale deployments.…”