Abstract
A smart city is an environment where a pervasive, multi-service network is employed to provide citizens improved living conditions as well as better public safety and security. Advanced communication technologies are essential to achieve this goal. In particular, an efficient and reliable communication network plays a crucial role in providing continue, ubiquitous, and reliable interconnections among users, smart devices, and applications. As a consequence, wireless networking appears as the principal enabling communication technology despite the necessity to face severe challenges to satisfy the needs arising from a smart environment, such as explosive data volume, heterogeneous data traffic, and support of quality of service constraints. An interesting approach for meeting the growing data demand due to smart city applications is to adopt suitable methodologies to improve the usage of all potential spectrum resources. Towards this goal, a very promising solution is represented by the Cognitive Radio technology that enables context-aware capability in order to pursue an efficient use of the available communication resources according to the surrounding environment conditions. In this paper we provide a review of the characteristics, challenges, and solutions of a smart city communication architecture, based on the Cognitive Radio technology, by focusing on two new network paradigms—namely, Heterogeneous Network and Machines-to-Machines communications—that are of special interest to efficiently support smart city applications and services.
Highlights
The worldwide urbanization process represents a formidable challenge and attracts attention toward cities
Motivated by the fact that a reliable, robust, secure, and scalable communication architecture plays a crucial role for the successful operation of a smart environment, this paper provides an overview of the communication infrastructure of a smart city and the related enabling technologies
A smart city is based on a functional integration of software systems, network infrastructures, heterogeneous user devices, and collaboration technologies
Summary
The worldwide urbanization process represents a formidable challenge and attracts attention toward cities. In the near future, the quality of life of billions of people will depend on capability of cities of saving energy, reducing harmful emissions, improving the living conditions and increasing citizens security. These challenges need to be addressed through the implementation of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) intelligent solutions in the urban ecosystem. In the final part of the paper, CR technology is investigated as a viable solution for mitigating the spectrum shortage that can arise from the use of two key technologies—Heterogeneous Networks (HetNets) and Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communications—that nowadays are envisaged as two promising communication paradigms for future smart cities, characteristics, challenges, and literature solutions are discussed
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