How IoT is influencing the infrastructure of smart cities
IoT strategies are becoming part of a smart city infrastructure that can battle the tension of city growth, from traffic regulator to environmental matters.
With the continuous growth of population in cities, Internet of Things technologies are becoming an interesting option to turn to in order to alleviate this chaos. Smart City has been a buzzword on recent tech events. The use of connected devices has led people to think about interconnecting functions within cities.
So, what is a Smart City?
A Smart City will increase efficiency, productivity, ecological awareness, it will reduce pollution and improve quality of life in a world of increasing urban complexity.
A Smart City typically can include all or some of the terms listed below:
Smart energy production and conservation
Smart mobility
Smart economy
Smart living
ICT economics
Smart environment
Smart governance
Standard of living
Smart society
A city to be labeled Smart, it must have implemented at least all of the three initiatives below:
A strong and reliable communication network, preferably based on fiber optics.
Government (Local and Central) involvement to provide added value to the citizens.
Initiatives to promote the use of renewable energy, waste management, air quality monitoring, traffic flow and congestion etc.
Smart City concept
Smart City market is estimated at hundreds of billion dollars by 2025, with an annual spending reaching nearly 16 billion. This market springs from the synergic interconnection of key industry and service sectors, such as Smart Governance, Smart Mobility, Smart Utilities, Smart Buildings, and Smart Environment. These sectors have also been considered in the European Smart Cities project (http://www.smart-cities.eu) to define a ranking criterion that can be used to assess the level of “smartness” of European cities.
On the technical side, the most relevant issue consists in the noninteroperability of the heterogeneous technologies currently used in city and urban developments.
In this respect, the IoT vision can become the building block to realize a unified urban scale ICT platform, thus unleashing the potential of the Smart City vision.
Finally, concerning the financial dimension, a clear business model is still lacking, although some initiative to fill this gap has been recently undertaken. The situation is worsened by the adverse global economic situation, which has determined a general shrinking of investments on public services. This situation prevents the potentially huge Smart City market from becoming reality. A possible way out of this impasse is to first develop those services that conjugate social utility with very clear return on investment, such as smart parking and smart buildings, and will hence act as catalyzers for the other added value services.
In the following, we overview some of the services that might be enabled by an urban IoT technology and that are of potential interest in the Smart City context because they can realize the win–win situation of increasing the quality and enhancing the services offered to the citizens while bringing an economical advantage for the city administration in terms of reduction of the operational costs.
Waste Management
Waste management is a primary issue in many modern cities, due to both the cost of the service and the problem of the storage of garbage in landfills. A deeper penetration of ICT solutions in this domain, however, may result in significant savings and economical and ecological advantages.
For instance, the use of intelligent waste containers, which detect the level of load and allow for an optimization of the collector trucks route, can reduce the cost of waste collection and improve the quality of recycling. To realize such a smart waste management service, the IoT shall connect the end devices, i.e., intelligent waste containers, to a control center where an optimization software processes the data and determines the optimal management of the collector truck fleet.
Air Quality
The European Union officially adopted a 20-20-20 Renewable Energy Directive setting climate change reduction goals for the next decade. The targets call for a 20% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 compared with 1990 levels, a 20% cut in energy consumption through improved energy efficiency by 2020, and a 20% increase in the use of renewable energy by 2020. To such an extent, an urban IoT can provide means to monitor the quality of the air in crowded areas, parks, or fitness trails. In addition, communication facilities can be provided to let health applications running on joggers’ devices be connected to the infrastructure. In such a way, people can always find the healthiest path for outdoor activities and can be continuously connected to their preferred personal training application. The realization of such a service requires that air quality and pollution sensors be deployed across the city and that the sensor data be made publicly available to citizens.
Noise Monitoring
Noise can be seen as a form of acoustic pollution as much as carbon oxide (CO) is for air. In that sense, the city authorities have already issued specific laws to reduce the amount of noise in the city centre at specific hours. An urban IoT can offer a noise monitoring service to measure the amount of noise produced at any given hour in the places that adopt the service. Besides building a space-time map of the noise pollution in the area, such a service can also be used to enforce public security, by means of sound detection algorithms that can recognize, for instance, the noise of glass crashes or brawls. This service can hence improve both the quiet of the nights in the city and the confidence of public establishment owners, although the installation of sound detectors or environmental microphones is quite controversial, because of the obvious privacy concerns for this type of monitoring.
City Energy Consumption
Together with the air quality monitoring service, an urban IoT may provide a service to monitor the energy consumption of the whole city, thus enabling authorities and citizens to get a clear and detailed view of the amount of energy required by the different services (public lighting, transportation, traffic lights, control cameras, heating/cooling of public buildings, and so on). In turn, this will make it possible to identify the main energy consumption sources and to set priorities in order to optimize their behavior.
In order to obtain such a service, power draw monitoring devices must be integrated with the power grid in the city. In addition, it will also be possible to enhance these service with active functionalities to control local power production structures (e.g., photovoltaic panels).
Traffic Congestion
On the same line of air quality and noise monitoring, a possible Smart City service that can be enabled by urban IoT consists in monitoring the traffic congestion in the city.
Even though camera-based traffic monitoring systems are already available and deployed in many cities, low-power widespread communication can provide a denser source of information.
Traffic monitoring may be realized by using the sensing capabilities and GPS installed on modern vehicles, and also adopting a combination of air quality and acoustic sensors along a given road. This information is of great importance for city authorities and citizens: to organize and to discipline traffic and to send officers where needed and for the latter to plan in advance the route to reach the office or to better schedule a shopping trip to the city center.
