An IoT based Framework for Smart City Services

Abstract

Smart city is an emerging concept that aims to improve the quality of city life, to enhance the efficiency of urban operations and services as well as to create a sustainable economic growth of the city. Internet-of-Things (IoT) and big data have emerged as key enabling technologies for smart city services infrastructure. A major issue in the design of smart city services is the provision of Internet connectivity anywhere within the cities through some suitable network infrastructure. Although the use cases for various smart city services and business models for delivering smart city services have been proposed in the literature over the past few years, none of them attempts to address the problem of dealing with heterogeneous technologies required for collecting and processing data to offer such services. Thus, this paper proposes a suitable framework for smart city services based on IoT to address the above-mentioned issues.

Full text

An IoT based Framework for Smart City Services
Pampa Sadhukhan
School of Mobile Computing & Communication
Jadavpur University
Kolkata, India - 700032
Email: pampa.sadhukhan@ieee.org
Abstract—Smart city is an emerging concept that aims to
improve the quality of city life, to enhance the efficiency of
urban operations and services as well as to create a sustainable
economic growth of the city. Internet-of-Things (IoT) and big
data have emerged as key enabling technologies for smart city
services infrastructure. A major issue in the design of smart city
services is the provision of Internet connectivity anywhere within
the cities through some suitable network infrastructure. Although
the use cases for various smart city services and business models
for delivering smart city services have been proposed in the
literature over the past few years, none of them attempts to
address the problem of dealing with heterogeneous technologies
required for collecting and processing data to offer such services.
Thus, this paper proposes a suitable framework for smart city
services based on IoT to address the above-mentioned issues.
Index Terms—Internet-of-Things (IoT), smart city, services,
middleware, Internet.
I. INTRODUCTION
The growing urge of the people to live in an urban envi-
ronment has significantly increased the city population, which
in turn demands for development of smart cities to improve
the quality of the city life as well as to enhance the efficiency
of urban operations and services by using information and
communication technologies (ICT) and other means. On the
other hand, the aim of a smart sustainable city should be not
only improving the quality of city life, but also to fulfill the
requirements of present and future generations with respect
to economic, social and environmental aspects [1]. A formal
and well understood definition of a smart city should be; it is
the seamless integration of various electronic equipments as
well as communication paradigms into a strategic way for the
well-being of the citizens as well as to create a sustainable
economic growth of the city. According to researchers in [2]
different components of smart cities are smart infrastructure,
smart transportation, smart environment and energy, smart
health care, smart governance and education etc.
Although the potential market of the smart city is predicted
to reach at hundreds of billions dollars by 2020 [3], there
are some obstacles to its realization from political, financial
and technical perspectives [4]. The major political barrier
to making a city smarter is the involvement of different
stakeholders into the decision-making process that focuses on
the strategic planning and management aspects of the smart
cities. A possible way out to remove this political barrier is
to assign this entire decision-making and execution power to
make the city smarter to a single dedicated department of
the city [4]. On the other hand, the major technical issue to
the design and implementation of a smart city is the non-
interoperability of the various technologies that are used to
offer services in urban and metropolitan areas. The Internet
of Things (IoT) can be used as building block to design a
unified urban-scale ICT platform that can easily address the
above-mentioned technical issue [17]. Finally, the lack of an
economically feasible business model is the primary obstacle
to the taking off of the smart city project from the financial
perspective. Moreover, the adverse global economic condition
has a negative impact on the potentially large smart city
market. These financial barriers can be removed by developing
some services that utilize the public resources with very clear
return on investment, such as intelligent transportation system
(ITS) [5], and intelligent parking system [6] and so on.
Another major challenge in provisioning of smart city
services throughout the whole city is the availability of Internet
connectivity anywhere within the city through some suitable
network infrastructure. Although the use cases for some smart
city services [7, 8, 9] as well as various platforms and business
models [4, 10, 11, 12, 16] for delivering smart city services
have been proposed over the past few years, none of them
provides a solution for integrating heterogeneous technologies
required for collecting data and monitoring purposes in order
to offer various utility services in the domain of transport, en-
vironment, health and education etc. Thus, this paper proposes
an IoT based framework for smart city services that include
the design of a suitable network infrastructure to provide high
bandwidth Internet connectivity anywhere within the city as
well as the design of an integrated platform incorporating
heterogeneous technologies to offer various utility services to
the citizens.
This paper is structured as follows. Section 2 provides a
literature review on existing use cases of various smart city
services as well as various smart city platforms proposed
over the past few years. Section 3 presents the proposed
framework for smart city services and finally Section 4 draws
the conclusion.
II. RELATED WORK
The researchers in [2] have provided a broad overview
of smart cities, stated the vast scope of research in the
domain of smart cities along with the detailed description
of various components of smart cities. The authors in [2]
have also highlighted various challenges and described the
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role of two emerging technologies IoT and big data in design
of smart city services. In [4], the researchers have pointed
out the major obstacles on the way of smart city market and
henceforth have proposed a procedure to bootstrap the smart
city business based on the concept of big data exploitation.
The proposed approach in [4] defines three stages to facilitate
sustainable smart city development. The first stage advocates
the deployment of various technologies and services that
would offer various smart city services with appropriate return
on investment. In the second and third stage, the system would
be made self-sustainable by developing services on top of
the existing smart city infrastructure. Several pilot projects
on smart cities have been initiated by the present European
Commission Programme FP7-ICT and CIP ICT-PSP. Among
these projects, Smart Santander project [7] aims to design
and implement some use cases such as bus tracking and air
quality (EKOBUS) as well as urban waste management by
considering a large testbed of sensor nodes. The ELLIOT
project [8] (Experimental Living Lab for Internet of Things)
launched by FP7-ICT programme in 2010 targets to design
several use cases for smart city services by using IoT. The
first use case aims to design some green services for air
quality and ambient noise pollution monitoring; the second
one targets to design some well being services for public
hospitals and the third one considers the logistic services in
order to facilitate product development by the professional
users. The objective of Peripheria project [9] initiated by the
European Commission ICT policy support programme is to
develop smart cities infrastructure and services for real life
urban environment in Europe.
On the other hand, several platforms as well as business
models for delivering smart city services have been proposed
in literature over the past few years. Among these, the smart
city platform proposed in [10] can successfully evaluate the
business model of new services offered by cities, whereas
those in [11, 12] can provide heterogeneous services to support
a variety of application domains. A coherent self-sustainable
business model for smart city services has been proposed in
[13]. Several new start-ups that provide innovative services
and deliver new applications and solutions for different smart
city areas have been proposed in [14, 15]. The researchers
in [16] aims to develop an environment that would help to
create the prototype of various smart City applications in
the domains of energy, health, education, etc. that would be
deployed over. In [16], the researchers have also presented
the functional architecture of a machine-to-machine (M2M)
middleware platform based distributed test bed over which
various smart city applications can be deployed. A multilevel
architecture for the smart city platform based on wireless
sensor networks and semantic web technologies has been
proposed in [18]. The prototype of an IoT based E-parking
system that addresses the problem of real-time detection of
improper parking by applying image processing technique and
automatic collection of parking charges, has been presented
in [22]. The proposed E-parking system [22] also provides
city wide parking management solution via a central server
Fig. 1. Architecture of proposed network model for smart cities
and enables the drivers to reserve some free parking lot via
android-based client application running at their smart phone.
III. PROPOSED FRAMEWORK FOR SMART CITY SERVICES
This section, at first, presents the design of a suitable
network infrastructure that ensures availability of Internet
anywhere within the city, then shows the use of the proposed
network model in invocation of various smart city services
from the portable devices and lastly provides the detailed
design of the proposed integrated platform that deals with het-
erogeneous technologies to offer various smart city services.
A. Design of Network Infrastructure Proposed for Smart City
Services
The first issue to focus on for making cities smarter is
ensuring the availability of high speed Internet connectivity
anywhere within the city. The deployment of broadband net-
work infrastructure combining cable, optical fiber and wireless
networks throughout the city can ensure the provision of high
bandwidth Internet anywhere within the city. The architecture
of the network infrastructure proposed for smart cities is shown
in fig. 1. The use of already deployed broadband network
infrastructure including cellular networks available within the
city as well as the deployment of low-cost Wi-Fi APs through-
out the city to provide Internet anywhere make the proposed
network model cost-effective. Two major important issues in
the development of some smart city services are collecting data
from the surrounding environment and sending notifications
of certain events to the environment. The proposed network
model addresses the above-mentioned issues by deploying IoT
410 International Conference on Communication, Computing and Internet of Things (IC3IoT)

Fig. 2. Use of proposed network infrastructure in development and invocation
of smart city services
based networks comprising sensor nodes, actuators, RFID tags,
and smart devices etc., which can be utilized for both data
collection and passing notifications required to design various
smart city services in the domain of transport, infrastructure,
environment and health. The proposed network infrastructure
comprises the following components.
•Wide Area Network (WAN) [19]: It is the backbone of
proposed network infrastructure. This network comprises
the main communication infrastructure of a city and is
used to provide Internet connectivity throughout the city.
•IoT Network: It is a network of various IoT nodes, which
is used as a backbone network for data collection and
monitoring purposes.
•IoT Nodes: IoT nodes include sensor nodes, actuators,
RFID tags and various kinds of mobile devices such as
such as smart phones, tablet or PDA.
•Sensor Cloud: The efficient management of large amount
of data gathered by wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is
a major challenge due to restricted capabilities of sensor
nodes in terms of memory, energy, computation and
scalability. A Sensor cloud [20] can provide a promising
solution to the above mentioned problem by combining a
powerful and scalable massive storage infrastructure with
the sensor networks for real-time processing and storing
the WSN data as well as their analyzes.
•Gateway (GW): It is used to interconnect the end devices
to the main communication infrastructure of the city. The
gateways are responsible for protocol translation as well
as for doing the functional mapping between the uncon-
strained protocols such as XML, HTTP and IPv4/IPv6
etc. used by host devices directly connected to Internet
and their corresponding constrained counterparts, e. g.
efficient XML interchange (EXI), constrained application
protocol (CoAP) and 6LoWPAN associated with the
IoT peripheral nodes to ensure both way communication
between the IoT nodes and the host devices.
•WSN Gateway (WSN GW): Similar to other gateways,
this gateway is used for two-way communication between
the sensor nodes within the WSN and the main commu-
Fig. 3. Outline of proposed integrated platform for providing various smart
city services
nication infrastructure of the city network, i.e, WAN.
•Wi-Fi access points (APs): Sufficient numbers of Wi-Fi
APs are deployed at every bus stop, park and other public
places like airport, railway stations and parking area
to ensure availability of Internet connectivity anywhere
within the city.
•Control Server: Some control servers are deployed
within the proposed city network infrastructure to store
the huge collection of data in its internal database. Those
data are processed and analyzed to generate various
value-added services. Thus, the control servers are very
important components of the smart city network infras-
tructure to deliver various smart city services.
B. Use of Proposed Network Model in Development and
Invocation of Smart City Services
Various smart city services in the domain of transportation,
infrastructure, environment, health and education etc. will be
developed using web services [21] and deployed on to the
control server as shown in fig. 2. IoT networks are utilized for
data collection and sending notification to the environment if
needed by some smart service. On the other hand, suitable
smart client applications are developed and deployed on the
smart portable devices like tablet, PDA or smart phone to
invoke the smart city services as depicted in fig. 2.
C. Design of an integrated platform to offer various smart
services
The proposed integrated platform to offer various smart
city services consists of three layers. These are IoT network
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infrastructure layer, the middleware layer and the application
layer. The novelty of this proposed platform lies in its ability
to collect data in different formats from heterogeneous IoT
peripheral nodes over the various communication technologies.
A schematic diagram of the integrated platform proposed for
providing various smart city services is shown in fig. 3 and
its constituent layers are described below.
•IoT Network Infrastructure: It is the lowest layer of
proposed integrated platform. It comprises various kinds
of IoT networks which are consisting of heterogeneous
types of IoT peripheral nodes such as sensor nodes,
actuators, RFID tags, smart devices and so on. This layer
is responsible for data collection, environment monitoring
and sending notifications or alerts to the user via IoT
nodes.
•Middleware: This layer is introduced into the pro-
posed smart city platform to deal with heterogeneous
technologies and to provide suitable interfaces for the
creation, management and discovery of various services,
subscription to services etc. The middleware is respon-
sible for managing the underlying heterogeneous kinds
of IoT networks via some network management API and
uses some data API to collect data in different formats
from those underlying IoT networks. Filtering or pre-
processing of data collected from various IoT nodes is
done by the middleware before passing them onto the
application layer. It also provides some security feature
to enable the invocation of different smart services in a
secured environment.
•Application Layer: This layer comprises various smart
city services, smart client applications to invoke the
services as well as scalable database systems required
to store necessary data for the smart city services. Vari-
ous smart city services in the domain of transportation,
infrastructure, environment, health and education will be
developed using web services.
IV. CONCLUDING REMARKS
This paper presents an IoT based framework for smart
city services to enable the development of various smart
city services in the domain of transport, environment, edu-
cation and health etc, invocation of such services via portable
devices along with availability of high bandwidth Internet
anywhere within the city. The proposed framework for smart
city services includes the design of an IoT based network
infrastructure as well as the design of middleware based smart
city platform. The proposed network model is cost-effective as
it uses the already deployed broadband network infrastructure
and also employs low-cost Wi-Fi APs throughout the city
to ensure the availability of Internet anywhere within the
city. On the other hand, the middleware based smart city
platform presented in this paper deals with heterogeneous
technologies and provides several features to ensure creation
and deployment of services and their invocation in secured
environment.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The authors gratefully acknowledge the facilities and sup-
port provided by the Director and all other staff members
of the School of Mobile Computing and Communication,
Jadavpur University, a Centre of Excellence set up under
the University with potential for Excellence Scheme of the
UGC.
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