Enable Close Proximity Services for Smart Cities with Information Centric LTE System

Abstract

In the urban city life, a human usually uses his/her owned user equipment (UE) to request services provided in smart cities. In order for UEs to communicate with the public service providers, the network traffic is generated in the cellular network (e.g. Long Term Evolution (LTE) network) and the Internet very frequently. And the returned results cannot be shared among UEs although they may request the same piece of information. With the information centric architecture applied to the LTE system, the LTE logical nodes can have the name-based routing, the in-network storage and processing capabilities. This paper proposes that by leveraging those capabilities, the LTE logical nodes can be delegated to provide close proximity services to UEs. The paper illustrates the proposed solutions by the use case of restaurant recommendation based on nearby parking availability. The proposed solutions provide collaborations and interactions between different public services in smart cities and significant decreasing in network traffic generated through the Evolved Packet Core (EPC) and the Internet.