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Smart City: Vision and Reality

A special issue of Sensors (ISSN 1424-8220). This special issue belongs to the section "Sensor Networks".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (15 August 2016) | Viewed by 169597

Special Issue Editors

Department of Information Engineering, University of Padova, 35131 Padova PD, Italy
Interests: smart cities; internet of things; 5G systems
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Centre for Telecommunications Research, Department of Informatics, King's College London, London, UK
Interests: ultra-low latency communications and networking; network virtualization; V2X communications
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Future cities are envisioned with embodied cutting-edge ICT solutions in their very fabric in order to become more efficient, green, and accessible living environments. Offering better services to citizens at lower costs is, indeed, attractive for various stakeholders. Residents dream of cities with high-tech and very efficient management of traffic, pollution, noise, public transportation, lighting, waste management, parking, public offices, and more. Entrepreneurs seeks new business opportunities in the deployment, maintenance, and management of services, as well as added value through data analytics and information aggregation from such dream cities. Academics and researchers, also, find a fertile ground for developing new network/service models and communication protocols, designing new intelligent devices, and developing new data processing algorithms. It is worthwhile to mention that the Smart City vision has recently materialized through proof-of-concept services and pilot deployments all over the world, with more and more cities that offer “smart” transportation, parking, public lighting, waste collection, and other similar services.

Despite the fervor and excitement around the subject, there is still a long way to go to fully turn the Smart City vision into a consolidated reality. The technological scenario is still quite fragmented, with a number of different systems that compete to gain the leading role in this golden rush. Short-range mesh solutions, which dominated the Internet of Things (IoT) scene until a few years back, are now challenged by cellular technologies, adapted to support machine-type traffic, and by a new generation of low-power wide area network solutions (LPWAN), which have been flourishing in the last few years thanks to massive investments from important players in the IoT arena. In parallel, an increasing number of platforms are being proposed for collecting, managing, and processing the data, offering simple ways to access the data and deploy new services on top of it.
The objective of this Special Issue is to collect a vision of the current and future trends regarding services, technologies, and platforms in Smart Cities, in order to gain a better understanding of the state-of-the-art, fundamental challenges that still need attention, as well as the roadblocks that may hinder the path towards the achievement of the Smart City dream

To this end, we solicit unpublished and novel contributions that may help to provide a clearer vision of the current interpretations of the Smart City concept, as well as its possible development in coming years. Papers covering theoretical aspects, new technologies and services, experimental studies, practical experiences, and comparison between different proposals and solutions are welcome.

The topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

  • Smart City enabling communication technologies and protocols
    • Massive Machine-Type-Communications
    • Lowe-power Wide Area Network technologies
    • Near field communications
    • Energy efficiency
    • Mobility
  • Smart City and services
    • Data analytics for smart city applications
    • Characterization of service requirements
    • Geolocalized services
    • Social networking and crowd computing
    • Health-oriented applications
  • Smart City software architecture and infrastructure
    • NFV
    • Cloud Services
    • Multi-tenancy
    • UDC
    • Service-oriented communications
    • Security aspects for smart city applications
  • Experimentation and deployments
    • Proof-of-concept
    • pilot deployments
    • Performance evaluation
    • System design, modelling and evaluation

Prof. Andrea Zanella
Dr. Toktam Mahmoodi
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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Published Papers (22 papers)

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908 KiB  
Article
mDARAL: A Multi-Radio Version for the DARAL Routing Algorithm
by Francisco José Estévez, José María Castillo-Secilla, Jesús González, Joaquín Olivares and Peter Glösekötter
Sensors 2017, 17(2), 324; https://doi.org/10.3390/s17020324 - 09 Feb 2017
Cited by 3 | Viewed by 3656
Abstract
Smart Cities are called to change the daily life of human beings. This concept permits improving the efficiency of our cities in several areas such as the use of water, energy consumption, waste treatment, and mobility both for people as well as vehicles [...] Read more.
Smart Cities are called to change the daily life of human beings. This concept permits improving the efficiency of our cities in several areas such as the use of water, energy consumption, waste treatment, and mobility both for people as well as vehicles throughout the city. This represents an interconnected scenario in which thousands of embedded devices need to work in a collaborative way both for sensing and modifying the environment properly. Under this scenario, the majority of devices will use wireless protocols for communicating among them, representing a challenge for optimizing the use of the electromagnetic spectrum. When the density of deployed nodes increases, the competition for using the physical medium becomes harder and, in consequence, traffic collisions will be higher, affecting data-rates in the communication process. This work presents mDARAL, a multi-radio routing algorithm based on the Dynamic and Adaptive Radio Algorithm (DARAL), which has the capability of isolating groups of nodes into sub-networks. The nodes of each sub-network will communicate among them using a dedicated radio frequency, thus isolating the use of the radio channel to a reduced number of nodes. Each sub-network will have a master node with two physical radios, one for communicating with its neighbours and the other for being the contact point among its group and other sub-networks. The communication among sub-networks is done through master nodes in a dedicated radio frequency. The algorithm works to maximize the overall performance of the network through the distribution of the traffic messages into unoccupied frequencies. The obtained results show that mDARAL achieves great improvement in terms of the number of control messages necessary to connect a node to the network, convergence time and energy consumption during the connection phase compared to DARAL. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Smart City: Vision and Reality)
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886 KiB  
Article
Design of a Mobile Low-Cost Sensor Network Using Urban Buses for Real-Time Ubiquitous Noise Monitoring
by Rosa Ma Alsina-Pagès, Unai Hernandez-Jayo, Francesc Alías and Ignacio Angulo
Sensors 2017, 17(1), 57; https://doi.org/10.3390/s17010057 - 29 Dec 2016
Cited by 36 | Viewed by 8714
Abstract
One of the main priorities of smart cities is improving the quality of life of their inhabitants. Traffic noise is one of the pollutant sources that causes a negative impact on the quality of life of citizens, which is gaining attention among authorities. [...] Read more.
One of the main priorities of smart cities is improving the quality of life of their inhabitants. Traffic noise is one of the pollutant sources that causes a negative impact on the quality of life of citizens, which is gaining attention among authorities. The European Commission has promoted the Environmental Noise Directive 2002/49/EC (END) to inform citizens and to prevent the harmful effects of noise exposure. The measure of acoustic levels using noise maps is a strategic issue in the END action plan. Noise maps are typically calculated by computing the average noise during one year and updated every five years. Hence, the implementation of dynamic noise mapping systems could lead to short-term plan actions, besides helping to better understand the evolution of noise levels along time. Recently, some projects have started the monitoring of noise levels in urban areas by means of acoustic sensor networks settled in strategic locations across the city, while others have taken advantage of collaborative citizen sensing mobile applications. In this paper, we describe the design of an acoustic low-cost sensor network installed on public buses to measure the traffic noise in the city in real time. Moreover, the challenges that a ubiquitous bus acoustic measurement system entails are enumerated and discussed. Specifically, the analysis takes into account the feature extraction of the audio signal, the identification and separation of the road traffic noise from urban traffic noise, the hardware platform to measure and process the acoustic signal, the connectivity between the several nodes of the acoustic sensor network to store the data and, finally, the noise maps’ generation process. The implementation and evaluation of the proposal in a real-life scenario is left for future work. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Smart City: Vision and Reality)
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2211 KiB  
Article
Semantic Agent-Based Service Middleware and Simulation for Smart Cities
by Ming Liu, Yang Xu, Haixiao Hu and Abdul-Wahid Mohammed
Sensors 2016, 16(12), 2200; https://doi.org/10.3390/s16122200 - 21 Dec 2016
Cited by 12 | Viewed by 5476
Abstract
With the development of Machine-to-Machine (M2M) technology, a variety of embedded and mobile devices is integrated to interact via the platform of the Internet of Things, especially in the domain of smart cities. One of the primary challenges is that selecting the appropriate [...] Read more.
With the development of Machine-to-Machine (M2M) technology, a variety of embedded and mobile devices is integrated to interact via the platform of the Internet of Things, especially in the domain of smart cities. One of the primary challenges is that selecting the appropriate services or service combination for upper layer applications is hard, which is due to the absence of a unified semantical service description pattern, as well as the service selection mechanism. In this paper, we define a semantic service representation model from four key properties: Capability (C), Deployment (D), Resource (R) and IOData (IO). Based on this model, an agent-based middleware is built to support semantic service enablement. In this middleware, we present an efficient semantic service discovery and matching approach for a service combination process, which calculates the semantic similarity between services, and a heuristic algorithm to search the service candidates for a specific service request. Based on this design, we propose a simulation of virtual urban fire fighting, and the experimental results manifest the feasibility and efficiency of our design. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Smart City: Vision and Reality)
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2955 KiB  
Article
Enabling SDN in VANETs: What is the Impact on Security?
by Antonio Di Maio, Maria Rita Palattella, Ridha Soua, Luca Lamorte, Xavier Vilajosana, Jesus Alonso-Zarate and Thomas Engel
Sensors 2016, 16(12), 2077; https://doi.org/10.3390/s16122077 - 06 Dec 2016
Cited by 36 | Viewed by 11134
Abstract
The demand for safe and secure journeys over roads and highways has been growing at a tremendous pace over recent decades. At the same time, the smart city paradigm has emerged to improve citizens’ quality of life by developing the smart mobility concept. [...] Read more.
The demand for safe and secure journeys over roads and highways has been growing at a tremendous pace over recent decades. At the same time, the smart city paradigm has emerged to improve citizens’ quality of life by developing the smart mobility concept. Vehicular Ad hoc NETworks (VANETs) are widely recognized to be instrumental in realizing such concept, by enabling appealing safety and infotainment services. Such networks come with their own set of challenges, which range from managing high node mobility to securing data and user privacy. The Software Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm has been identified as a suitable solution for dealing with the dynamic network environment, the increased number of connected devices, and the heterogeneity of applications. While some preliminary investigations have been already conducted to check the applicability of the SDN paradigm to VANETs, and its presumed benefits for managing resources and mobility, it is still unclear what impact SDN will have on security and privacy. Security is a relevant issue in VANETs, because of the impact that threats can have on drivers’ behavior and quality of life. This paper opens a discussion on the security threats that future SDN-enabled VANETs will have to face, and investigates how SDN could be beneficial in building new countermeasures. The analysis is conducted in real use cases (smart parking, smart grid of electric vehicles, platooning, and emergency services), which are expected to be among the vehicular applications that will most benefit from introducing an SDN architecture. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Smart City: Vision and Reality)
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Article
Optimized Energy Harvesting, Cluster-Head Selection and Channel Allocation for IoTs in Smart Cities
by Saleem Aslam, Najam Ul Hasan, Ju Wook Jang and Kyung-Geun Lee
Sensors 2016, 16(12), 2046; https://doi.org/10.3390/s16122046 - 02 Dec 2016
Cited by 18 | Viewed by 5086
Abstract
This paper highlights three critical aspects of the internet of things (IoTs), namely (1) energy efficiency, (2) energy balancing and (3) quality of service (QoS) and presents three novel schemes for addressing these aspects. For energy efficiency, a novel radio frequency (RF) energy-harvesting [...] Read more.
This paper highlights three critical aspects of the internet of things (IoTs), namely (1) energy efficiency, (2) energy balancing and (3) quality of service (QoS) and presents three novel schemes for addressing these aspects. For energy efficiency, a novel radio frequency (RF) energy-harvesting scheme is presented in which each IoT device is associated with the best possible RF source in order to maximize the overall energy that the IoT devices harvest. For energy balancing, the IoT devices in close proximity are clustered together and then an IoT device with the highest residual energy is selected as a cluster head (CH) on a rotational basis. Once the CH is selected, it assigns channels to the IoT devices to report their data using a novel integer linear program (ILP)-based channel allocation scheme by satisfying their desired QoS. To evaluate the presented schemes, exhaustive simulations are carried out by varying different parameters, including the number of IoT devices, the number of harvesting sources, the distance between RF sources and IoT devices and the primary user (PU) activity of different channels. The simulation results demonstrate that our proposed schemes perform better than the existing ones. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Smart City: Vision and Reality)
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6661 KiB  
Article
Co-Creating the Cities of the Future
by Verónica Gutiérrez, Evangelos Theodoridis, Georgios Mylonas, Fengrui Shi, Usman Adeel, Luis Diez, Dimitrios Amaxilatis, Johnny Choque, Guillem Camprodom, Julie McCann and Luis Muñoz
Sensors 2016, 16(11), 1971; https://doi.org/10.3390/s16111971 - 23 Nov 2016
Cited by 35 | Viewed by 8971
Abstract
In recent years, the evolution of urban environments, jointly with the progress of the Information and Communication sector, have enabled the rapid adoption of new solutions that contribute to the growth in popularity of Smart Cities. Currently, the majority of the world population [...] Read more.
In recent years, the evolution of urban environments, jointly with the progress of the Information and Communication sector, have enabled the rapid adoption of new solutions that contribute to the growth in popularity of Smart Cities. Currently, the majority of the world population lives in cities encouraging different stakeholders within these innovative ecosystems to seek new solutions guaranteeing the sustainability and efficiency of such complex environments. In this work, it is discussed how the experimentation with IoT technologies and other data sources form the cities can be utilized to co-create in the OrganiCity project, where key actors like citizens, researchers and other stakeholders shape smart city services and applications in a collaborative fashion. Furthermore, a novel architecture is proposed that enables this organic growth of the future cities, facilitating the experimentation that tailors the adoption of new technologies and services for a better quality of life, as well as agile and dynamic mechanisms for managing cities. In this work, the different components and enablers of the OrganiCity platform are presented and discussed in detail and include, among others, a portal to manage the experiment life cycle, an Urban Data Observatory to explore data assets, and an annotations component to indicate quality of data, with a particular focus on the city-scale opportunistic data collection service operating as an alternative to traditional communications. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Smart City: Vision and Reality)
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1808 KiB  
Article
A Harmonized Perspective on Transportation Management in Smart Cities: The Novel IoT-Driven Environment for Road Traffic Modeling
by Pavel Masek, Jan Masek, Petr Frantik, Radek Fujdiak, Aleksandr Ometov, Jiri Hosek, Sergey Andreev, Petr Mlynek and Jiri Misurec
Sensors 2016, 16(11), 1872; https://doi.org/10.3390/s16111872 - 08 Nov 2016
Cited by 66 | Viewed by 13168
Abstract
The unprecedented growth of today’s cities together with increased population mobility are fueling the avalanche in the numbers of vehicles on the roads. This development led to the new challenges for the traffic management, including the mitigation of road congestion, accidents, and air [...] Read more.
The unprecedented growth of today’s cities together with increased population mobility are fueling the avalanche in the numbers of vehicles on the roads. This development led to the new challenges for the traffic management, including the mitigation of road congestion, accidents, and air pollution. Over the last decade, researchers have been focusing their efforts on leveraging the recent advances in sensing, communications, and dynamic adaptive technologies to prepare the deployed road traffic management systems (TMS) for resolving these important challenges in future smart cities. However, the existing solutions may still be insufficient to construct a reliable and secure TMS that is capable of handling the anticipated influx of the population and vehicles in urban areas. Along these lines, this work systematically outlines a perspective on a novel modular environment for traffic modeling, which allows to recreate the examined road networks in their full resemblance. Our developed solution is targeted to incorporate the progress in the Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, where low-power, embedded devices integrate as part of a next-generation TMS. To mimic the real traffic conditions, we recreated and evaluated a practical traffic scenario built after a complex road intersection within a large European city. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Smart City: Vision and Reality)
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8874 KiB  
Article
An Arrival and Departure Time Predictor for Scheduling Communication in Opportunistic IoT
by Riccardo Pozza, Stylianos Georgoulas, Klaus Moessner, Michele Nati, Alexander Gluhak and Srdjan Krco
Sensors 2016, 16(11), 1852; https://doi.org/10.3390/s16111852 - 04 Nov 2016
Cited by 3 | Viewed by 5248
Abstract
In this article, an Arrival and Departure Time Predictor (ADTP) for scheduling communication in opportunistic Internet of Things (IoT) is presented. The proposed algorithm learns about temporal patterns of encounters between IoT devices and predicts future arrival and departure times, therefore future contact [...] Read more.
In this article, an Arrival and Departure Time Predictor (ADTP) for scheduling communication in opportunistic Internet of Things (IoT) is presented. The proposed algorithm learns about temporal patterns of encounters between IoT devices and predicts future arrival and departure times, therefore future contact durations. By relying on such predictions, a neighbour discovery scheduler is proposed, capable of jointly optimizing discovery latency and power consumption in order to maximize communication time when contacts are expected with high probability and, at the same time, saving power when contacts are expected with low probability. A comprehensive performance evaluation with different sets of synthetic and real world traces shows that ADTP performs favourably with respect to previous state of the art. This prediction framework opens opportunities for transmission planners and schedulers optimizing not only neighbour discovery, but the entire communication process. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Smart City: Vision and Reality)
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1952 KiB  
Article
Complex IoT Systems as Enablers for Smart Homes in a Smart City Vision
by Per Lynggaard and Knud Erik Skouby
Sensors 2016, 16(11), 1840; https://doi.org/10.3390/s16111840 - 02 Nov 2016
Cited by 31 | Viewed by 8122
Abstract
The world is entering a new era, where Internet-of-Things (IoT), smart homes, and smart cities will play an important role in meeting the so-called big challenges. In the near future, it is foreseen that the majority of the world’s population will live their [...] Read more.
The world is entering a new era, where Internet-of-Things (IoT), smart homes, and smart cities will play an important role in meeting the so-called big challenges. In the near future, it is foreseen that the majority of the world’s population will live their lives in smart homes and in smart cities. To deal with these challenges, to support a sustainable urban development, and to improve the quality of life for citizens, a multi-disciplinary approach is needed. It seems evident, however, that a new, advanced Information and Communications Technology ICT infrastructure is a key feature to realize the “smart” vision. This paper proposes a specific solution in the form of a hierarchical layered ICT based infrastructure that handles ICT issues related to the “big challenges” and seamlessly integrates IoT, smart homes, and smart city structures into one coherent unit. To exemplify benefits of this infrastructure, a complex IoT system has been deployed, simulated and elaborated. This simulation deals with wastewater energy harvesting from smart buildings located in a smart city context. From the simulations, it has been found that the proposed infrastructure is able to harvest between 50% and 75% of the wastewater energy in a smart residential building. By letting the smart city infrastructure coordinate and control the harvest time and duration, it is possible to achieve considerable energy savings in the smart homes, and it is possible to reduce the peak-load for district heating plants. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Smart City: Vision and Reality)
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603 KiB  
Article
Component-Based Modelling for Scalable Smart City Systems Interoperability: A Case Study on Integrating Energy Demand Response Systems
by Esther Palomar, Xiaohong Chen, Zhiming Liu, Sabita Maharjan and Jonathan Bowen
Sensors 2016, 16(11), 1810; https://doi.org/10.3390/s16111810 - 28 Oct 2016
Cited by 20 | Viewed by 5978
Abstract
Smart city systems embrace major challenges associated with climate change, energy efficiency, mobility and future services by embedding the virtual space into a complex cyber-physical system. Those systems are constantly evolving and scaling up, involving a wide range of integration among users, devices, [...] Read more.
Smart city systems embrace major challenges associated with climate change, energy efficiency, mobility and future services by embedding the virtual space into a complex cyber-physical system. Those systems are constantly evolving and scaling up, involving a wide range of integration among users, devices, utilities, public services and also policies. Modelling such complex dynamic systems’ architectures has always been essential for the development and application of techniques/tools to support design and deployment of integration of new components, as well as for the analysis, verification, simulation and testing to ensure trustworthiness. This article reports on the definition and implementation of a scalable component-based architecture that supports a cooperative energy demand response (DR) system coordinating energy usage between neighbouring households. The proposed architecture, called refinement of Cyber-Physical Component Systems (rCPCS), which extends the refinement calculus for component and object system (rCOS) modelling method, is implemented using Eclipse Extensible Coordination Tools (ECT), i.e., Reo coordination language. With rCPCS implementation in Reo, we specify the communication, synchronisation and co-operation amongst the heterogeneous components of the system assuring, by design scalability and the interoperability, correctness of component cooperation. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Smart City: Vision and Reality)
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538 KiB  
Article
Data Analytics for Smart Parking Applications
by Nicola Piovesan, Leo Turi, Enrico Toigo, Borja Martinez and Michele Rossi
Sensors 2016, 16(10), 1575; https://doi.org/10.3390/s16101575 - 23 Sep 2016
Cited by 21 | Viewed by 9420
Abstract
We consider real-life smart parking systems where parking lot occupancy data are collected from field sensor devices and sent to backend servers for further processing and usage for applications. Our objective is to make these data useful to end users, such as parking [...] Read more.
We consider real-life smart parking systems where parking lot occupancy data are collected from field sensor devices and sent to backend servers for further processing and usage for applications. Our objective is to make these data useful to end users, such as parking managers, and, ultimately, to citizens. To this end, we concoct and validate an automated classification algorithm having two objectives: (1) outlier detection: to detect sensors with anomalous behavioral patterns, i.e., outliers; and (2) clustering: to group the parking sensors exhibiting similar patterns into distinct clusters. We first analyze the statistics of real parking data, obtaining suitable simulation models for parking traces. We then consider a simple classification algorithm based on the empirical complementary distribution function of occupancy times and show its limitations. Hence, we design a more sophisticated algorithm exploiting unsupervised learning techniques (self-organizing maps). These are tuned following a supervised approach using our trace generator and are compared against other clustering schemes, namely expectation maximization, k-means clustering and DBSCAN, considering six months of data from a real sensor deployment. Our approach is found to be superior in terms of classification accuracy, while also being capable of identifying all of the outliers in the dataset. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Smart City: Vision and Reality)
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2373 KiB  
Article
Friendly-Sharing: Improving the Performance of City Sensoring through Contact-Based Messaging Applications
by Jorge Herrera-Tapia, Enrique Hernández-Orallo, Andrés Tomás, Pietro Manzoni, Carlos Tavares Calafate and Juan-Carlos Cano
Sensors 2016, 16(9), 1523; https://doi.org/10.3390/s16091523 - 18 Sep 2016
Cited by 13 | Viewed by 6374
Abstract
Regular citizens equipped with smart devices are being increasingly used as “sensors” by Smart Cities applications. Using contacts among users, data in the form of messages is obtained and shared. Contact-based messaging applications are based on establishing a short-range communication directly between mobile [...] Read more.
Regular citizens equipped with smart devices are being increasingly used as “sensors” by Smart Cities applications. Using contacts among users, data in the form of messages is obtained and shared. Contact-based messaging applications are based on establishing a short-range communication directly between mobile devices, and on storing the messages in these devices for subsequent delivery to cloud-based services. An effective way to increase the number of messages that can be shared is to increase the contact duration. We thus introduce the Friendly-Sharing diffusion approach, where, during a contact, the users are aware of the time needed to interchange the messages stored in their buffers, and they can thus decide to wait more time in order to increase the message sharing probability. The performance of this approach is anyway closely related to the size of the buffer in the device. We therefore compare various policies either for the message selection at forwarding times and for message dropping when the buffer is full. We evaluate our proposal with a modified version of the Opportunistic Networking Environment (ONE) simulator and using real human mobility traces. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Smart City: Vision and Reality)
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1786 KiB  
Article
Semantic Framework of Internet of Things for Smart Cities: Case Studies
by Ningyu Zhang, Huajun Chen, Xi Chen and Jiaoyan Chen
Sensors 2016, 16(9), 1501; https://doi.org/10.3390/s16091501 - 14 Sep 2016
Cited by 56 | Viewed by 9186
Abstract
In recent years, the advancement of sensor technology has led to the generation of heterogeneous Internet-of-Things (IoT) data by smart cities. Thus, the development and deployment of various aspects of IoT-based applications are necessary to mine the potential value of data to the [...] Read more.
In recent years, the advancement of sensor technology has led to the generation of heterogeneous Internet-of-Things (IoT) data by smart cities. Thus, the development and deployment of various aspects of IoT-based applications are necessary to mine the potential value of data to the benefit of people and their lives. However, the variety, volume, heterogeneity, and real-time nature of data obtained from smart cities pose considerable challenges. In this paper, we propose a semantic framework that integrates the IoT with machine learning for smart cities. The proposed framework retrieves and models urban data for certain kinds of IoT applications based on semantic and machine-learning technologies. Moreover, we propose two case studies: pollution detection from vehicles and traffic pattern detection. The experimental results show that our system is scalable and capable of accommodating a large number of urban regions with different types of IoT applications. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Smart City: Vision and Reality)
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9577 KiB  
Article
A Semantic Approach with Decision Support for Safety Service in Smart Home Management
by Xiaoci Huang, Jianjun Yi, Xiaomin Zhu and Shaoli Chen
Sensors 2016, 16(8), 1224; https://doi.org/10.3390/s16081224 - 03 Aug 2016
Cited by 14 | Viewed by 5971
Abstract
Research on smart homes (SHs) has increased significantly in recent years because of the convenience provided by having an assisted living environment. The functions of SHs as mentioned in previous studies, particularly safety services, are seldom discussed or mentioned. Thus, this study proposes [...] Read more.
Research on smart homes (SHs) has increased significantly in recent years because of the convenience provided by having an assisted living environment. The functions of SHs as mentioned in previous studies, particularly safety services, are seldom discussed or mentioned. Thus, this study proposes a semantic approach with decision support for safety service in SH management. The focus of this contribution is to explore a context awareness and reasoning approach for risk recognition in SH that enables the proper decision support for flexible safety service provision. The framework of SH based on a wireless sensor network is described from the perspective of neighbourhood management. This approach is based on the integration of semantic knowledge in which a reasoner can make decisions about risk recognition and safety service. We present a management ontology for a SH and relevant monitoring contextual information, which considers its suitability in a pervasive computing environment and is service-oriented. We also propose a rule-based reasoning method to provide decision support through reasoning techniques and context-awareness. A system prototype is developed to evaluate the feasibility, time response and extendibility of the approach. The evaluation of our approach shows that it is more effective in daily risk event recognition. The decisions for service provision are shown to be accurate. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Smart City: Vision and Reality)
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3508 KiB  
Article
Policy 2.0 Platform for Mobile Sensing and Incentivized Targeted Shifts in Mobility Behavior
by Ivana Semanjski, Angel Javier Lopez Aguirre, Johan De Mol and Sidharta Gautama
Sensors 2016, 16(7), 1035; https://doi.org/10.3390/s16071035 - 05 Jul 2016
Cited by 37 | Viewed by 6255
Abstract
Sustainable mobility and smart mobility management play important roles in achieving smart cities’ goals. In this context we investigate the role of smartphones as mobility behavior sensors and evaluate the responsivity of different attitudinal profiles towards personalized route suggestion incentives delivered via mobile [...] Read more.
Sustainable mobility and smart mobility management play important roles in achieving smart cities’ goals. In this context we investigate the role of smartphones as mobility behavior sensors and evaluate the responsivity of different attitudinal profiles towards personalized route suggestion incentives delivered via mobile phones. The empirical results are based on mobile sensed data collected from more than 3400 people’s real life over a period of six months. The findings show which user profiles are most likely to accept such incentives and how likely they are to result in more sustainable mode choices. In addition we provide insights into tendencies towards accepting more sustainable route options for different trip purposes and illustrate smart city platform potential (for collection of mobility behavior data and delivery of incentives) as a tool for development of personalized mobility management campaigns and policies. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Smart City: Vision and Reality)
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4387 KiB  
Article
An Improved Simulated Annealing Technique for Enhanced Mobility in Smart Cities
by Hayder Amer, Naveed Salman, Matthew Hawes, Moumena Chaqfeh, Lyudmila Mihaylova and Martin Mayfield
Sensors 2016, 16(7), 1013; https://doi.org/10.3390/s16071013 - 30 Jun 2016
Cited by 27 | Viewed by 6692
Abstract
Vehicular traffic congestion is a significant problem that arises in many cities. This is due to the increasing number of vehicles that are driving on city roads of limited capacity. The vehicular congestion significantly impacts travel distance, travel time, fuel consumption and air [...] Read more.
Vehicular traffic congestion is a significant problem that arises in many cities. This is due to the increasing number of vehicles that are driving on city roads of limited capacity. The vehicular congestion significantly impacts travel distance, travel time, fuel consumption and air pollution. Avoidance of traffic congestion and providing drivers with optimal paths are not trivial tasks. The key contribution of this work consists of the developed approach for dynamic calculation of optimal traffic routes. Two attributes (the average travel speed of the traffic and the roads’ length) are utilized by the proposed method to find the optimal paths. The average travel speed values can be obtained from the sensors deployed in smart cities and communicated to vehicles via the Internet of Vehicles and roadside communication units. The performance of the proposed algorithm is compared to three other algorithms: the simulated annealing weighted sum, the simulated annealing technique for order preference by similarity to the ideal solution and the Dijkstra algorithm. The weighted sum and technique for order preference by similarity to the ideal solution methods are used to formulate different attributes in the simulated annealing cost function. According to the Sheffield scenario, simulation results show that the improved simulated annealing technique for order preference by similarity to the ideal solution method improves the traffic performance in the presence of congestion by an overall average of 19.22% in terms of travel time, fuel consumption and CO2 emissions as compared to other algorithms; also, similar performance patterns were achieved for the Birmingham test scenario. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Smart City: Vision and Reality)
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1196 KiB  
Article
Sensor Network-Based and User-Friendly User Location Discovery for Future Smart Homes
by Ehsan Ahvar, Gyu Myoung Lee, Son N. Han, Noel Crespi and Imran Khan
Sensors 2016, 16(7), 969; https://doi.org/10.3390/s16070969 - 27 Jun 2016
Cited by 11 | Viewed by 5717
Abstract
User location is crucial context information for future smart homes where many location based services will be proposed. This location necessarily means that User Location Discovery (ULD) will play an important role in future smart homes. Concerns about privacy and the need to [...] Read more.
User location is crucial context information for future smart homes where many location based services will be proposed. This location necessarily means that User Location Discovery (ULD) will play an important role in future smart homes. Concerns about privacy and the need to carry a mobile or a tag device within a smart home currently make conventional ULD systems uncomfortable for users. Future smart homes will need a ULD system to consider these challenges. This paper addresses the design of such a ULD system for context-aware services in future smart homes stressing the following challenges: (i) users’ privacy; (ii) device-/tag-free; and (iii) fault tolerance and accuracy. On the other hand, emerging new technologies, such as the Internet of Things, embedded systems, intelligent devices and machine-to-machine communication, are penetrating into our daily life with more and more sensors available for use in our homes. Considering this opportunity, we propose a ULD system that is capitalizing on the prevalence of sensors for the home while satisfying the aforementioned challenges. The proposed sensor network-based and user-friendly ULD system relies on different types of inexpensive sensors, as well as a context broker with a fuzzy-based decision-maker. The context broker receives context information from different types of sensors and evaluates that data using the fuzzy set theory. We demonstrate the performance of the proposed system by illustrating a use case, utilizing both an analytical model and simulation. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Smart City: Vision and Reality)
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8146 KiB  
Article
The Traffic Adaptive Data Dissemination (TrAD) Protocol for both Urban and Highway Scenarios
by Bin Tian, Kun Mean Hou and Haiying Zhou
Sensors 2016, 16(6), 920; https://doi.org/10.3390/s16060920 - 21 Jun 2016
Cited by 14 | Viewed by 5544
Abstract
The worldwide economic cost of road crashes and injuries is estimated to be US$518 billion per year and the annual congestion cost in France is estimated to be €5.9 billion. Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs) are one solution to improve transport features such [...] Read more.
The worldwide economic cost of road crashes and injuries is estimated to be US$518 billion per year and the annual congestion cost in France is estimated to be €5.9 billion. Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs) are one solution to improve transport features such as traffic safety, traffic jam and infotainment on wheels, where a great number of event-driven messages need to be disseminated in a timely way in a region of interest. In comparison with traditional wireless networks, VANETs have to consider the highly dynamic network topology and lossy links due to node mobility. Inter-Vehicle Communication (IVC) protocols are the keystone of VANETs. According to our survey, most of the proposed IVC protocols focus on either highway or urban scenarios, but not on both. Furthermore, too few protocols, considering both scenarios, can achieve high performance. In this paper, an infrastructure-less Traffic Adaptive data Dissemination (TrAD) protocol which takes into account road traffic and network traffic status for both highway and urban scenarios will be presented. TrAD has double broadcast suppression techniques and is designed to adapt efficiently to the irregular road topology. The performance of the TrAD protocol was evaluated quantitatively by means of realistic simulations taking into account different real road maps, traffic routes and vehicular densities. The obtained simulation results show that TrAD is more efficient in terms of packet delivery ratio, number of transmissions and delay in comparison with the performance of three well-known reference protocols. Moreover, TrAD can also tolerate a reasonable degree of GPS drift and still achieve efficient data dissemination. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Smart City: Vision and Reality)
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10062 KiB  
Article
Energy Efficient IoT Data Collection in Smart Cities Exploiting D2D Communications
by Antonino Orsino, Giuseppe Araniti, Leonardo Militano, Jesus Alonso-Zarate, Antonella Molinaro and Antonio Iera
Sensors 2016, 16(6), 836; https://doi.org/10.3390/s16060836 - 08 Jun 2016
Cited by 80 | Viewed by 9282
Abstract
Fifth Generation (5G) wireless systems are expected to connect an avalanche of “smart” objects disseminated from the largest “Smart City” to the smallest “Smart Home”. In this vision, Long Term Evolution-Advanced (LTE-A) is deemed to play a fundamental role in the Internet of [...] Read more.
Fifth Generation (5G) wireless systems are expected to connect an avalanche of “smart” objects disseminated from the largest “Smart City” to the smallest “Smart Home”. In this vision, Long Term Evolution-Advanced (LTE-A) is deemed to play a fundamental role in the Internet of Things (IoT) arena providing a large coherent infrastructure and a wide wireless connectivity to the devices. However, since LTE-A was originally designed to support high data rates and large data size, novel solutions are required to enable an efficient use of radio resources to convey small data packets typically exchanged by IoT applications in “smart” environments. On the other hand, the typically high energy consumption required by cellular communications is a serious obstacle to large scale IoT deployments under cellular connectivity as in the case of Smart City scenarios. Network-assisted Device-to-Device (D2D) communications are considered as a viable solution to reduce the energy consumption for the devices. The particular approach presented in this paper consists in appointing one of the IoT smart devices as a collector of all data from a cluster of objects using D2D links, thus acting as an aggregator toward the eNodeB. By smartly adapting the Modulation and Coding Scheme (MCS) on the communication links, we will show it is possible to maximize the radio resource utilization as a function of the total amount of data to be sent. A further benefit that we will highlight is the possibility to reduce the transmission power when a more robust MCS is adopted. A comprehensive performance evaluation in a wide set of scenarios will testify the achievable gains in terms of energy efficiency and resource utilization in the envisaged D2D-based IoT data collection. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Smart City: Vision and Reality)
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7333 KiB  
Article
Street Viewer: An Autonomous Vision Based Traffic Tracking System
by Andrea Bottino, Alessandro Garbo, Carmelo Loiacono and Stefano Quer
Sensors 2016, 16(6), 813; https://doi.org/10.3390/s16060813 - 03 Jun 2016
Cited by 10 | Viewed by 5994
Abstract
The development of intelligent transportation systems requires the availability of both accurate traffic information in real time and a cost-effective solution. In this paper, we describe Street Viewer, a system capable of analyzing the traffic behavior in different scenarios from images taken with [...] Read more.
The development of intelligent transportation systems requires the availability of both accurate traffic information in real time and a cost-effective solution. In this paper, we describe Street Viewer, a system capable of analyzing the traffic behavior in different scenarios from images taken with an off-the-shelf optical camera. Street Viewer operates in real time on embedded hardware architectures with limited computational resources. The system features a pipelined architecture that, on one side, allows one to exploit multi-threading intensively and, on the other side, allows one to improve the overall accuracy and robustness of the system, since each layer is aimed at refining for the following layers the information it receives as input. Another relevant feature of our approach is that it is self-adaptive. During an initial setup, the application runs in learning mode to build a model of the flow patterns in the observed area. Once the model is stable, the system switches to the on-line mode where the flow model is used to count vehicles traveling on each lane and to produce a traffic information summary. If changes in the flow model are detected, the system switches back autonomously to the learning mode. The accuracy and the robustness of the system are analyzed in the paper through experimental results obtained on several different scenarios and running the system for long periods of time. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Smart City: Vision and Reality)
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1985 KiB  
Article
A Novel Location-Centric IoT-Cloud Based On-Street Car Parking Violation Management System in Smart Cities
by Thanh Dinh and Younghan Kim
Sensors 2016, 16(6), 810; https://doi.org/10.3390/s16060810 - 02 Jun 2016
Cited by 30 | Viewed by 8114
Abstract
Nowadays, in big cities, parking management is a critical issue from both the driver’s side and the city government’s side. From the driver’s side, how to find an available parking lot in a city is a considerable concern. As a result, smart parking [...] Read more.
Nowadays, in big cities, parking management is a critical issue from both the driver’s side and the city government’s side. From the driver’s side, how to find an available parking lot in a city is a considerable concern. As a result, smart parking systems recently have received great interest, both in academia and industry. From the city government’s side, how to manage and distribute such a limited public parking resource efficiently to give every visitor a fair chance of finding an on-street parking lot is also a considerable concern. However, existing studies of smart parking management focus only on assisting the driver’s side to find available parking spaces. This study aims to raise a new perspective on such smart parking management and to propose a novel location-centric IoT-cloud-based parking violation management system. The system is designed to assist authoritative officers in finding parking violations easily and recommends the least cost path for officers so that officers can achieve their highest productivity in finding parking violations and issuing parking tickets. Experimental results show that the system not only improves the productivity of officers in finding parking violations and issuing tickets, but also helps reduce the traveling cost of officers and to reduce the average violation period of violating cars considerably. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Smart City: Vision and Reality)
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Review

Jump to: Research

1438 KiB  
Review
State of the Art, Trends and Future of Bluetooth Low Energy, Near Field Communication and Visible Light Communication in the Development of Smart Cities
by Gonzalo Cerruela García, Irene Luque Ruiz and Miguel Ángel Gómez-Nieto
Sensors 2016, 16(11), 1968; https://doi.org/10.3390/s16111968 - 23 Nov 2016
Cited by 56 | Viewed by 13999
Abstract
The current social impact of new technologies has produced major changes in all areas of society, creating the concept of a smart city supported by an electronic infrastructure, telecommunications and information technology. This paper presents a review of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), Near [...] Read more.
The current social impact of new technologies has produced major changes in all areas of society, creating the concept of a smart city supported by an electronic infrastructure, telecommunications and information technology. This paper presents a review of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), Near Field Communication (NFC) and Visible Light Communication (VLC) and their use and influence within different areas of the development of the smart city. The document also presents a review of Big Data Solutions for the management of information and the extraction of knowledge in an environment where things are connected by an “Internet of Things” (IoT) network. Lastly, we present how these technologies can be combined together to benefit the development of the smart city. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Smart City: Vision and Reality)
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