Most of the work to develop a smart city is how to connect physical urban infrastructure to the digital world to use it as a solution space for citizens and authorities to make best decisions to reach the best quality of life every day. Every city as a complex system needs to adequately manage their different dimensions. This chapter proposes the second approach with a top-down architecture identifying a set of information technologies linked in processes that every city service needs as part of their digital transformation process in their urban space. Hence, this chapter introduces six technological layers in a workflow pipeline that are explained as an approach to develop every smart system of a city. However, in the proposed workflow of technologies to implement, the authors give a central focus to the IoT infrastructure as the base to build information of quality, to have reliable services even after getting insights from analytics to come back to the IoT with their connected actuators to take actions.
TopIntroduction
Smart City is defining as a complex system that involves multiple factors and many interrelated processes that coexist, generating a holistic environment in which interconnected devices interact, providing relevant information that becomes services for human beings and intelligent decision makers. At present, urban areas are growing rapidly, which generates a greater number of interconnected devices, capable of developing and offering efficient services in the different areas that make up the Smart Cities (Schaffers et al., 2011).
The services that a Smart City can generate and deliver to citizens must go hand in hand with solutions that offer technologies capable of optimizing processes and services. All interested parties involved in the development of services require information about what is happening at each point of the city in order to design a customized, adequate and efficient solution for each one of them (Pettit et al., 2017).
Within a Smart City environment, systems that provide services to citizens are prone to be victims of malicious attacks that interfere with the communications of the Control System, for example by inserting data frames and denial of service attacks causing instability in the system, generating faults that can be chaotic when it comes to a traffic light control system.
The sensor networks that depend on data networks, the traffic of data, the capture of this information, the storage in data repositories, and perform an analytical to generate an adequate perception in the data visualization form a technological system complex that serves as the basis of a Smart City in which resilience and interoperability are important challenges to provide citizens with services that can guarantee a better quality of life (V. M. Larios, L. Gomez, O. B. Mora, R. Maciel, 2016).
The IoT had its origin in the manufacturing industry where M2M communication (machine-to-machine) enabled manufacturing with complex devices, later it was expanded to commercial use as device monitoring in a smart home, until now offering services to a city, a new era arises where the modules used provide a high availability of economic sensors and transmitters, standards and communication protocols (TCP/IP), robust infrastructure generating an interconnected and data-rich environment (Pettit et al., 2017).
IoT is defined as a global infrastructure for the information society, which allows advanced services interconnecting things (physical and virtual) based on existing and evolving interoperable information and communication technologies (“Internet of Things Global Standards Initiative,” n.d.). The term applies to several areas, some of them are: health, education, environment, etc. To cover the impact of device coverage in Smart Cities, it is necessary for IoT controllers to obtain the data and send it to a server in which they are analyzed and converted into the information required for the actors of the system. This interaction requires a solid, dynamic and reliable transport infrastructure between the IoT devices and the server that processes and stores the information.
Smart Traffic System, the use of IoT technologies generates an intelligent traffic monitoring system providing a good transportation experience by relieving traffic congestion, helping detect thefts, reporting traffic accidents, decreasing environmental pollution, the traffic lighting system can be adaptable to the climate to save energy.
Smart Environment, predicting natural disasters such as floods: fires, earthquakes, etc., will be possible thanks to the innovative technologies of the IoT, monitoring the quality of the air in the environment will generate a better quality of life for citizens.
Smart Home, the IoT provides solutions for home automation that allow remote control of appliances according to the needs of the user. Proper monitoring, the supply of energy and water will help save resources and detect water leaks, unexpected overloads, etc. The aim to reach the establish of a Smart Home is that the environment can be comfortable, have been defined social relationships between IoT’s to discover devices, service and resources, these provide distributed solutions effectives and efficient working in a SDN environment. (Kim & Lee, 2015).