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40 Internet of Things Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda
Smart Information Communication and Technology, Smart Planning, Smart
Citizen and Smart Governance. There will be about 40 smart cities globally
by 2025.
The role of the cities governments will be crucial for IoT deployment.
Running of the day-to-day city operations and creation of city development
strategies will drive the use of the IoT. Therefore, cities and their services
represent an almost ideal platform for IoT research, taking into account city
requirements and transferring them to solutions enabled by IoT technology.
In Europe, the largest smart city initiatives completely focused on IoT
is undertaken by the FP7 Smart Santander project [20]. This project aims at
deploying an IoT infrastructure comprising thousands of IoT devices spread
across several cities (Santander, Guildford, Luebeck and Belgrade). This will
enable simultaneous development and evaluation of services and execution
of various research experiments, thus facilitating the creation of a smart city
environment.
Similarly, the OUTSMART [33] project, one of the FI PPP projects, is
focusing on utilities and environment in the cities and addressing the role of
IoT in waste and water management, public lighting and transport systems as
well as environment monitoring.
A vision of the smart city as “horizontal domain” is proposed by the BUT-
LER project [34], in which many vertical scenarios are integrated and concur
to enable the concept of smart life. An illustrative example is depicted in
the storyline of Figure 2.17. The figure depicts several commons actions that
may take place in the smart day, highlighting in each occasion which domain
applies. Obviously such a horizontal scenario implies the use of heterogeneous
underlying communication technologies and imposes the user to interact with
various seamless and pervasive IoT services.
In this context there are numerous important research challenges for smart
city IoT applications:
• Overcoming traditional silo based organization of the cities, with
each utility responsible for their own closed world. Although not
technological, this is one of the main barriers
• Creating algorithms and schemes to describe information created
by sensors in different applications to enable useful exchange of
information between different city services