Month: September 2020

IoT helps to minimize the cost and risk, helps connecting and installing thousand and millions of heterogeneous system, provides safe and scalability services and provides better services are the pointed advantages of installing IoT devices on smart city.  Building, Environmental monitoring, Waste management, smart parking, smart health, navigation system for transportation, smart grid and autonomous driving are the applications of IoT and smart city. Device integration, networking, device management, security, data collecting protocols, analytics and visualizations supports are the requirements needed for IoT platform. While achieving smart cities IoT challenges are networking issues, transport issues, security issues, confidentiality, integrity, authentication, key and trust management, heterogeneity issues, Denial of service, big data management. The challenges solution provided are cloud, fog and edge computing but this is not sufficient solutions.

The massive deployment of Internet of Things (IoT) is allowing Smart City projects and initiatives all over the world. The IoT is a modular approach to merge various sensors with all the ICT solutions. With over 50 billion objects will be connected and deployed in smart cities in 2020. The heart of smart cities operations is the IoT communications. IoT is designed to support Smart City concept, which aims at utilizing the most advanced communication technologies to promote services for the administration of the city and the citizens. This paper is presenting a comprehensive review of the concepts of IoT and smart cities and their motivations and applications. Moreover, this paper describes the main challenges and weaknesses of applying the IoT technologies based on smart city paradigms.

IoT based smart city communication protocols consists of short ranges and long range technologies like Zigbee, Bluetooth, WI-FI, WiMAX, GPRS, LTE etc. These protocols are used based on the applications. For example, short range communication protocols can be used in smart metering, e-health, traffic management, parking etc. low cost, low power consumption, maximum quality of service, flexibility, security, reliability, scalability are the requirements of IoT based smart city solutions. Fiware, ocean, OM2M and open daylight IoT data management are the open IoT platforms. The authors identified busan green u-city, smart Santander, Chicago are case studies running for IoT smart city solutions. Security, privacy, trust, interoperability, big data are the challenges in IoT based smart city solutions.

The authors details the concept of smart city, IoT based smart city model and cloud computing model. 6LowPAN, RPL, CoAP are the proposed several protocols for resource constrained devices by IETF.  IoT connects the physical infrastructures to digital world and makes the task of city easier and efficient. The cloud computing architecture consists of master nodes directory, data center nodes, set-top box node and nodes on other connected devices. Data in master nodes are well protected and can be accessed from anywhere by the connected devices. Transportation, healthcare, buildings, telecom, utilities, tourism, education are the applications of IoT based smart cities used in Dubai in cloud platform. In addition, the researchers proposed PaaS and IaaS fo IoT based healthcare framework.

A city is a large and permanent human ecosystem which provides a lot of services and opportunities to its citizens. The rapid urbanization and increasing population have put a lot of strains on city infrastructures and service deliveries. The current urbanization requires strong strategies and innovative planning to modernize the urban life. Many cities are enhancing quality and performance of urban services by being digitalized, intelligent and smarter. The policymakers and city authorities are exploring solutions to deliver the new services in an efficient, responsive and sustainable manner for a large population. The study explores all the possible services among various city dimensions which can make a city smart. The ideas related to smart services are collected from the peer vetted creative crowdsourcing process performed online in India. A directed qualitative conventional content analysis is used to analyze the collected ideas. The unique ideas are clustered into 19 different service categories. The findings suggest multi-dimensional service classification along with required basic infrastructural development. Further, the Smart City Transformation Framework (SCTF) is proposed to help the policy makers, urban developers, government officials and service providers in terms of understanding and to draw more insights from the suggested smart solutions for development of smart cities. There are four key areas (Planning, Physical infrastructure, ICT infrastructure and Deploying Smart solutions) discussed in the proposed framework to illustrate the city transformation. The proposed SCTF is supported by literature and examples adopted by various smart cities across the world to illustrate its effectiveness. Moreover, a mind map is designed to illustrate the interrelationships among the collected ideas in an attractive and procedural visualization for city transformation process.