IoT data provides a foundation for smart city

Smart cities can make residents’ lives easier through real-time traffic information and public safety alerts.

The key features of a smart city are big data, information collected from many different sources, and its analysis, followed by the data’s intelligent use to improve the lives of its residents. This type of data collection requires fast and reliable connectivity from all possible data sources. It is important to note that a connected city is an IoT network but not necessarily a smart one. Being connected is a prerequisite of being a smart city, but being connected does not imply “smartness,” which requires regular data analysis and improvements based on that analysis.

Smart city software components and data sources

Smart city OSes provide open access to a very large amount of data/information about the city in a cloud server. They collect and share data from traffic cameras, road sensors, connected vehicles and connected infrastructure such as roadside units in traffic lights. Smartness is the result of analysis of this big data in real time to manage traffic and offline analysis of mobility patterns and areas of higher density — as well as spatial and temporal correlation to better understand the city dynamics to address urban planning. Smart city connectivity is often based on an IoT network that constantly provides information-rich data. The easiest use of this data is just to make it available after light data processing to put it into graphical form.

Some traditional use cases of IoT data include traffic status that includes average speed and bottleneck locations with color coding, or warning residents of expected natural disasters or adverse weather conditions with the instance’s severity and predicted locations.

To get this data, smart cities rely on personal mobile devices, computers and smart devices in residents’ homes and offices. The infrastructure also has networks of cameras and sensors to collect shared city information. These information nodes consist of sensors, modems, mobile devices and computers. Device software is connected through an IoT network but raises questions around data interoperability and formatting. This information and warning visualizations was traditionally conveyed with computers or geo-fixed warning systems such as loudspeakers. The current trend is to use mobile devices to offer on-demand, near-real-time information without the need to be near a computer. This capability also allows more personalized use of IoT information in comparison to the traditional mass warnings — such as road closures, COVID-19 alerts or public safety concerns — for a geographic area.