Infrastructureless smart cities. Use cases and performance

Abstract

Smart cities are a hot topic nowadays for several reasons. For city managers and citizens a smart city is a concept that should allow providing better services and/or with more efficiency. For technicians a smart city represents one of the large-scale deployments of equipment for data capturing, storage and processing. For Internet researchers a smart city can become the first massive installments of the Internet of Things concept. Smart cities are commonly implemented in several parts: the data acquisition and actuation, the aggregation networks that connect sensors/actuators with the general purpose network, the platform where data is stored and processed and the application that use the information for informing the city managers and citizens. The most costly parts of a smart city are the sensor/actuator and the aggregation network. This cost is due mainly due to the deployment and maintenance of the equipment on the city street. This paper describes the different alternatives for building the aggregation networks and provides a novel approach to facilitate the deployment of a smart city. This new solution has been tested in a real scenario achieving satisfactory results. © 2014 IEEE.