Smart Cities: a state of the art

The world is constantly evolving, and technology is a tool designed to make life easier for everyone living on this planet. Technological growth has even transformed the way today's cities operate, to meet the challenges of managing ever-more enormous metropolises. The new concept of the intelligent city, more often referred to as the smart city, is changing our whole idea of how a city works.

For example, energy management mechanisms enable us to meet the instantaneous needs and demands of the city's various sectors, while optimizing the use of available conventional and renewable energy resources:

• Thanks to smart grids, the distribution and dynamic exchange of energy have been redefined, abandoning the previous unidirectional and rigid way of working, from the power station that produced the energy to the end consumer, who could only be a passive player;

• Today, consumers have become much more active. They can now analyze their consumption in detail in real time, customize their home consumption budget and even resell surplus energy produced by a system of solar panels installed in their garden.

However, intelligent management of this kind requires the measurement of various control variables, and therefore interfaces for upper-layer applications and mechanisms. These interfaces are based on sensor networks, distributed throughout the city and even inside buildings and other structures to provide interconnectivity in the context of the Internet of Things ( – IoT).

This means that every object in a home, hospital or office can connect to the Internet. The big challenge lies in the exponential growth in the number of connected objects, which will reach several trillion in the coming years. For an entire city, network coordination mechanisms and the processing of high volumes of data will be the challenge.

Ensuring the connectivity of nodes throughout the city obviously requires a large-scale network. This network must meet the latency, capacity, availability, storage and flexibility requirements of a wide range of applications:

• In this context, we can refer to the new cloud-based paradigms, but also to software-defined networks, which provide the flexibility demanded by network traffic dynamics. Management, on the other hand, enables rapid, centralized reconfiguration of the various network sections;

• Rapid development of these technologies is needed to enable the entire network infrastructure to operate flexibly and agilely. The need for low latency is extremely important in real-life situations such as remote surgery or autonomous vehicle systems....