Smart cities address a broad array of use cases with applications and services with widely different performance requirements. They will capture vast volumes of data and content from various sources, aided by the massive deployment of the Internet of Things, including surveillance cameras. In addition, the services they deliver to citizens, such as wildfire alerts, will be dispersed across any location within their boundaries and in their region, will need wide-area networking, particularly for metropolitan areas.
A much-desired use case in cities is the timing of stoplights at cross points, based on actual traffic levels, instead of scheduling them at fixed time intervals. Data is collected from sensors, drones, and cameras and analyzed to time traffic lights in real-time, aided by 5G networks. It is estimated to lower stops by 40 percent and increase the pace of traffic flow by 26 percent.
Network slicing is one way to create private networks to meet the full range of performance needs of innovative city applications. Some cities are taking recourse to 5G private cellular networks. Smart cities are using small cells and mesh networks to bring coverage to individual blocks. Deployments of small cells help bring neighborhood services such as gunshot detection and vehicle-to-vehicle communications. Mesh networks are helpful to aggregate data from similar sources, such as intelligent lighting, before feeding it to a cellular network.
The adoption of smart city technology grew briskly between 2011 and 2019 before slowing down in 2020. From a negligible number in 2011, the number rose to 379 fully deployed smart-city projects in 61 countries in 2019. In 2020, 16 countries set in motion a total of 34 projects. In addition, densely populated cities of East Asia are rapidly increasing their consumption of innovative city applications; UBS projects that APAC will account for 40 percent of the global addressable market or $800 billion.
Smart cities are the leading users of 5G private networks, currently accounting for the highest share of private networks at 13 percent of the total. Projections indicate that they will have a share of 25 percent of all private networks by 2025.
Network slicing and private networks in smart cities
New Zealand’s plan for lowering the cost of policing by relegating routine patrolling to drones while reserving their staff for emergency response is an example of the value that 5G can bring. High-definition video from drones streams over a network slice capable of high bandwidth and high throughput to a central location for situational awareness and resource deployment to respond to any untoward incident or crisis.
By contrast, a network slice to collect data on the demand and supply of electricity in the grid will have altogether different requirements. For example, Vodafone installed a dedicated grid to gather data from sub-stations in the UK smart grid to respond to spikes in renewable energy supply. The excess supply can either be flexibly sold in the market at lower prices or stored to use in times when demand is high and sold at a premium. In this case, low latency for the gathering of real-time data is critical.
Peachtree Corners in Georgia, one of the first smart cities in the USA, has progressed to more advanced intelligent transportation solutions in partnership with Inseego for a private network. Latency-sensitive applications such as traffic management cameras affixed to streetlights send massive amounts of data to a central location insider the City Hall to feed information to a control center.
Las Vegas City has a private network that it uses for public safety. In collaboration with NTT Smart Solutions, it has placed micro data centers at the edge for aggregating data from sensors, surveillance cameras, and other IoT data before parsing it to detect criminal behavior. For example, vehicles that are the subject of Amber alerts or have license plates of stolen cars. Law enforcement authorities are notified only when evidence of criminal behavior is found.
Innovation in smart cities management
Digital twins provide a bird’s live eye view of activities. The digital twins are a digital representation of the physical facilities in a city. Data fed from the Internet of Things, superimposed on the visual presentation, allows pinpointing potential sources of trouble. For example, Seoul, the capital city of South Korea, created a 3D representation of the entire town, including its geospatial data. It helps to anticipate the spread of fires based on live data of wind velocity and direction and data from the forest department, which reports the incidence of fires in real-time.
Multi-storied building collapses are traumatic and highly destructive to human life. In Seoul, Korean Telecom works with KT Real Estate, to monitor buildings and equipment assets to anticipate building failures and alert property managers to act.
Conclusion
Smart cities pose unique problems in the IT architecture design that will go with their private networks. Cities will need a way to map their geographical span, including the topography, the multitude of the activities they govern, and their interdependence and impacts for determining courses of action every day. Aggregating the volume and variety of data and processing will create daunting challenges to integrate the edge and the core.
