An Urban Sensing Architecture as Essential Infrastructure for Future Smart Cities Research

Abstract

Half the global population resides in urban areas, with around 3 million people migrating to cities weekly. Coping with increased urbanization strains public services. Smart cities offer solutions, allowing city councils to enhance services and citizens' lives. Despite decades of existence, the smart cities concept hasn't fully realized its potential, often limited to pilot projects funded by research grants.Our work addresses challenges in urban data collection, analysis, and maintaining city infrastructure securely. We present four contributions. First, we outline the scope of urban data—from citizens to city-scale—for creating smart cities. Digitalization and the Internet of Things (IoT) facilitate data collection, providing opportunities for analysis, cost reduction, and increased productivity.To implement smart cities, research organizations collaborate with city councils, deploying proprietary IoT infrastructure. Managing the operation of this infrastructure, considering security and privacy challenges, is challenging. Second, we review these challenges to guide future smart city projects, reducing implementation time and ensuring secure and resilient infrastructure.Organizations often deploy independent infrastructure in public spaces, leading to duplication and similar requirements. Our third contribution is a smart city framework, allowing sharing of IoT infrastructure among projects and organizations. This fosters co-created smart cities, accelerates new service implementation, improves resource management, and reduces costs.The infrastructure includes an edge component connecting endpoints to the cloud, handling data storage, processing, and running urban applications. Our fourth contribution investigates meeting mixed-criticality Quality of Service (QoS) requirements in multi-communication networks for IoT applications.This thesis addresses challenges in smart city research, aiming to bring smart city milestones closer to reality. We hope our work inspires future research on shared infrastructure, resilience, smart cities, and efficient deployment and management of smart city infrastructure. The key contribution is a conceptual architecture derived from smart city projects, along with the use of a multi-protocol gateway at the edge to enhance network resilienc