Narrowb and IoT (NBIoT) for Smart Cities

Abstract

Smart cities are being developed across the world to improve the services and facilities in the urban areas. In the smart city initiatives, all the traditional infrastructures are linked with the information and communication technologies (ICT) networks. Through the ICT support, qualities of all the basic services and public facilities are improved. Basically, the emerging technologies such as the Internet of things (IoT) are pivotal in the provision of high quality services in the modern urban areas. In this article, the basic goals of smart city projects are demonstrated and their requirements are analyzed. Research work demonstrates that smart city projects are large and need a large scale deployment of IoT devices and components. This implies that smart cities need energy efficient forms of IoT for their long term success and sustainability. Narrowband IoT (NBIoT) is one of such energy and resource efficient version of the IoT available for deployment. In this article, the suitability of NBIoT for smart cities in the long term is demonstrated and the advanced features and standards of NBIoT are presented. Comparing with the smart city requirements research work validated the use of NBIoT for smart cities. For long term sustainability of smart cities, the ICT support networks should be energy efficient and easily deployable over large areas. NBIoT provides all these features and thus can be a natural choice for smart cities.