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Review of Smart Cities Development Basedon Internet of Things

Hayder Khzaali, Firas Aswad, Ahmed MohammedDepartment of Electrical Sciences and EngreeringFlorida Institute of Technology, Melbourne, USA

habdulrasool2014@my.fit.edu, faswad2013@my.fit.edu, mohammeda2015@my.fit.edu

Abstract—For any city development around theworld, Internet of things is the best technology keyfor integrating many points like big data and analyt-ics, mobility, and cloud services. It attains sustainableeconomic developments and high quality of life. Smartcities, are intelligent management systems, offer thesolution of current challenges besides presenting newservices. This paper presents review of smart cities forInternet of things about maximizing the efficiency ofdistribution and consumption of energy on the one sideand vision for smart cities in the future on the other.

Keywords: Smart City, Internet of Things(IoT), SmartBuilding, Privacy.

I. IntroductionSmart city concept: There isn’t any unanimous decision

from experts on one definition for the concept called”Smart City” . However, most recent identifications sharethe same common theme which is using the up to datetechnology to take advantage of whatever public resourcesavailable to enhance the quality and quantity of servicesprovided to the them and the table below illustrates someof these definitions.

• ”Smart Cities are a future reality for municipalitiesaround the world. These cities will use the powerof ubiquitous communication networks, highly dis-tributed wireless sensor technology, and intelligentmanagement systems to solve current and future chal-lenges and create exciting new services [1]”.

• ” Smart city is a city that uses digital technologies toenhance the quality of life and standard of living ofits citizens ” [2].

• ” Smart City is a powerful paradigm that applies themost advanced communication technologies to urbanenvironments, with the final aim of enhancing thequality of life in cities and provide a wide set of value-added services to both citizens and administration [3].

• ” Smart cities make governess more transparent byconnecting citizens to their local governments andencouraging direct participation, interaction and col-laboration.

• ”Smart city is a city that has deployed, or is currentlypiloting the integration of, ICT solutions across threeor more of mobility and transport, energy and sus-tainability, physical infrastructure, governance, and

safety and security city-functions in order to improveefficiency, manage complexity and enhance citizenquality of life, leading to a sustainable improvementin city operation [4].

• ”A city connecting the physical infrastructure, theIT infrastructure, the social infrastructure, and thebusiness infrastructure to leverage the collective in-telligence of the city” [5].

II. Smart City ServicesTo appreciate the necessity for smart cities, we will shed

the light on few of its services1) Structural Health of Important buildings:

Some buildings such as historical buildings need spe-cial care and continues attention to identify anyvulnerable or week points that might occur in itsstructure due to external events that effects thesebuildings with time to keep it in a good workingcondition. In a smart city this issue had been solvedby deploying specific types of sensors like deformationor vibration sensors that are connected wirelessly to asink which report the data to the central managementto dispatch a team to repair any reported issues ifhappened instead of doing a periodic checking thatwill waste both money and human resources.

2) Waste Management:One of the most important issues in each and everycountry is waste management problem because oftwo existing facts, one is the storage of garbage inany specific location and the other is related to theoperational cost, It’s noticeable that the same garbagetruck comes to the same place twice or three timesa day. An effective approach to solve both problemsin a smart city is by putting special sensors thatmeasure the level of garbage in the container andsends information to the management which in turnnotify the garbage truck driver in charge of that areato collect it and presenting him with the shortest andmost effective route to the destination. This processwill cause a significant economical impact for thecountry.

3) Air Quality:Smart city services in this field provide means tomonitor air quality in crowded areas, fitness trails,

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parks and the like [6] people can now know whichpath is more healthy to select for out-door activitiesfor example. This can be made true by deploying airpollution sensors which sense the weather and reportthe measured data back to the public.

4) Traffic Congestion:Although the old method for traffic monitoring usingcamera- based technology is currently being used inmany countries, using a low powered sensors with aGPS connection capability and wide range communi-cations can provide a more dense source of informa-tion if these sensors being deployed in modern vehicles[7].

5) Reveal new information:with the deployment of many types of sensors orinformation gathering equipments, city leaders willbe able to uncover their cities as never before. Forexample In San Francisco, the police officials assumedthat crime rate was very low because they believedthat residents would call to report a gun fire 80% ofthe time. However, many acoustic sensors that weremodified to detect gun fires were deployed after that.The shocking news after reading the measurementsfrom the sensors was that it appeared the residentscalled 911 when they heard a gun fire only 10% ofthe time[paper 1]. People can also know hidden factsat home, for example, residents pay their electric billsevery month without knowing the details about theelectric expenditure of each and every electric devicein their homes. This problem can be handled by theuse of smart plugs that has the capability of accurateprofiling or monitoring, thus providing details aboutthe electric power consumed at the appliance level.

6) Smart lighting:In the indoor lighting, the energy consumption oflight can be decreased by 70% with the installationof smart light systems that depend on the existenceof day light and the use of blending technology ofthe electrical light with it. However, with out-doorlighting, still many cities around the world uses theantiquated or very old design street lights whichwastes electric energy, money and cause pollution aswell. In the smart city this is not the case, eachlamppost’s old electrical light is replaced with an LEDlight and not only that, It’s also connected to anaccess point to form a mesh network. In this approachwe can cover major parts of the city with Internetservices in addition to the ability of controlling theelectric power and brightness of the color of everylamppost. This will make a drastic change to theeconomy.

III. Stages of Smart city developmentThe Basic structure is to use information and commu-

nication to enhance the citizens quality of life. Althougha fully integrated Smart city is still a future reality formost advanced countries, many steps had been takento reach this vision. Issues and problems for most city

leaders are nearly the same for example a pre maturetechnology infrastructure compared to other departmentor some cultural factors that affect the progress of smartcit development. Therefore, a maturity model with severalstages has been created (by IDC government insights) fora smart city to help city leaders determine where they areand what to do next as illustrated in Figure 1.There are many reasons that derive the investment in asmart city project. However, these reasons differs from cityto city depending on where the city located in the smartcity maturity model and what are the priorities that cityleaders prefer to achieve first. A general theme would beto reduce the operational cost but there are other factorsthat are differs for each city. A traffic congestion maydrive city leaders invest in real time traffic informationsystems by developing specific types of sensors that hascertain capabilities and can solve this issue or if citizenscomplained about the availability of parking spaces thenthat will drive city leaders invest in that area as well.Figure 2 shows the current city base line by departmentbeing analyzed at the worldwide level.It’s obvious here that public safety and works locatedin the ad-hoc stage while transportation departments arefound between opportunistic and ad-hoc stage for datapractice area. In the same time, public safety are moremature then transportation departments in the processpractice area. In general we can notice that there isunequal maturity between departments and also withineach department as well and that what decreases theoverall smart city growing.

IV. The smart city visionAchieving smart city vision requires answering few ques-

tions first:1) How does citizens apperieate new ideas that will make

a huge and siginficant impact on their life?This is a crucial factor that often lead to either apotential failure or success for city leaders. This is be-cause unless these people have the will to experiencenew ideas and ready to cooperate with their govern-ment departments and stakeholders and embrace theprocess for building upon failures and success untilfinding what works well, the whole smart city dreamwill diminish.

2) How to find out a sponsor for this long term projectvision?The required budget for this long-standing projectis tremendous and it’s not sufficient nor convenientto rely only on what the central government gives.This is because it means that cities has to dependonly on governments opinion of what projects shouldbe invested in that they think necessary for the cityignoring the vision of the city itself which suits it’sneeds.

3) What should the city leaders consider first when choos-ing types of services?Cities need leaders who can figure out or develop a

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Fig. 1. Stages in smart city development [1]

Fig. 2. Current city baseline by department : IDC Governmentinsights, 2013

digital master plan that covers the whole city. Build-ing this plan is essential and represent the buildingblock for the smart city project and the first servicethat leaders should think of because this is not a tenor fifteen years old budgeting plan but rather a longterm one that require a thorough view of the keychallenges that faces the city and what should be doneto solve these issues.

4) Smart Buildings The smart building is an essentialcomponent for modern smart cities and potential labor test bed for city solutions and IT infrastructure toscale results in global areas. A smart building is anyconstruction that has a certain design supported withtechnology to enhance or maximize its functionalitiesand services for its occupants while extending the lifeof its physical structure and decreases the operationalcost [8]. Therefore the four basic elements that everysmart building should has are the followings [9].• Physical structure• Systems• Services

• ManagementFigure 3 illustrates the relation between theseelements

(a) Smart building serviceAs opposed to smart city services, smart building canoffer may services like lighting, power and electricity,water management and waste management, parking,security, physical user interface, communication cen-ter, operations control center and HAVIC which isrelated to humidity, ventilation and air conditioningsystem.Domestic or local consumption of electric power is onthe rise and now concludes 60% of the total electricityconsumed in public and private buildings in Europe[10] so it’s obvious that this sector plays a majorpotential role for energy efficiency improvement. Em-bedded Distributed devices like sensors or systemswhich are connected to the Internet that has theability to control physical processes like HAVIC andgather information will become a vital tool to achieveefficiency and enhancement in energy for smart build-ings.All services provided by smart buildings have somesort of sensor devices and actuators for the manage-ment of their operations. The service of lighting forexample has sensors that saves energy by shuttingdown the light when it’s not needed or even somesystems filter the natural light by the use of automaticcurtains.One of the important services that smart buildingoffers is the waste management, for example, theorganic waste can be used as a fertilizer for green areaswhile other types of waste like metals and plastic canbe recycled again by a specific program and the wholeoperation is systemized by sensor technology [11].

(b) ICT Role For Smart BuildingsICT or information and communication technologiestask is a tough one because data that arrives fromvarious sensing devices comes in different formats andvalues depending on the manufacturer. The idea hereis to unify these formats and values into an interfacethat the end user can access the data from with ease.The basic approach to solve this issue is to find aninfrastructure that is ubiquitous in nature. In otherwords, this new infrastructure should deal with thecontext of the received sensing data from varioussensors in order to make a good sense out of it to en-able end user programming of data aggregation fromdifferent sensing devices [ref 12 paper 3] A significantamount of research has been devoted to this areawhich included developing several algorithms for dataautomated analysis from residential users.Figure 4 illustrates the number of cities involvedin a smart city development and their associatedinvestment in this field taking into account impor-tant functions which include: mobility and transport,

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Fig. 3. Smart building [9]

governance, energy and sustainability, safety, securityand physical infrastructure [12].

V. Internet of Things (IoT)The most envision to a near future is the Internet of

Things (IoT). Things around us will be carried with micro-controllers and small chips in order to communicate witheach other [13]. In this future, the intelligence locked inour devices and flows into the universe of physical objects.Technologists have struggled to name this emerging phe-nomenon [14].

The concept of IoT itself tries to consider the Internetinvolve even more in the way of being impressive andpervasive. Additionally, make the access to all devicesaround more easily interaction with wide range of otherdevices. For example, track temperature in houses, secu-rity cameras, and alarm systems [15] Figure 5.

It is obvious that the idea of IoT will have strongreflection in our life such as Android application developedby MIT, ”where is my car?” . The importance of IoTlisted the 6th ”Disruptive Civil Technologies” according toUnited State National Intelligence Council [16]. Accordingto their study they claim, by 2025 everything that we knowwill have Internet of nodes such as furnitures, food boxes,and papers.In this survey, application of the IoT paradigm will be ex-plained with urban as particular intention [18]. Although,there are other points must be considered when such aIoT technology was built. For instance, security issue interm of spreading information all over the Internet wouldbe high risk because of the threads that happen every dayand the information that exposed to the hackers [19].

A. Security and PrivacyNormally, people like to be safe in everything. In term

of having their data loaded and shared through the webwould make them resistance to the idea of IoT. Threading

Fig. 4. Number of smart city by function [12]

Fig. 5. Internet of Things scenarios [17]

the confidential of information is a big users concern. Thuspeople are looking to such a technology that can provideboth the modernity and privacy in the same time [20].

1) Security: As we mentioned in section V-A. Securityis important element to people. The way of implementingIoT ha to be simple to work fluency, it can not affordto build as complex system. Thus it is more likely tobe vulnerable to attack in different way. For example,physically it will be easy to access and been distorted,also software attack since the network most of the timewill be unattended precisely: integrity of information andauthentication. Exchanging information between IoT De-vices will lead to power and CPU consumption [21].

There are many papers proposed solutions in wirelesssensor network in term of having the nodes connectedto the Internet as gateway. While in IoT technology,this scenarios will be different since IoT require such acommunication with nodes even if it is not belong to thesame network, and that leads to have problems in security.Most of the solutions have problem and weak side againstattaches such as Man In The Middle (MITM). The prob-lem of (MITM) or PROXY attach, is that user informationcould easily captured from the attacker because of thesecurity communication weakness.

Data integrity in IoT is important and must guarantee

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the information that travels through the network willnever change. It must has methods that have the ability todetect any change that might happen to the data when it isgoing through the networks nodes [22]. Recently, memoryof network’s node can also be attached. Thus, engineersmust also provide security method to make sure that thememory is protected and user information is safe such aspasswords, accounts and personal information. This whythe length of password, must be considered regardless ofwhat most technology propose.

Lastly, in wireless senor network the quality of serviceis not important as much as the importance of powerconsumption and energy save. Most of the proposed so-lutions for IoT security is not good enough in term of thefact, these methods and algorithms will consume power inboth sensor sides on the sender and receiver node. Radio-frequency identification (RFID) suggest method that de-pends on light symmetric key cryptographies scheme.However, it is still far away from being reliable and moreresearch are needed [23].

2) Privacy: In IoT the number of information is muchmore than the one that we know now. For that, people areconcern about the their inforamtion that travel throughthe network. It will not be easy to control the flow ofdata in the context of keeping the information privacy.People need their personal life to be protected from beingexposed. It is part of the requirements for most civiliancountries [24]. We have to make sure that the collected in-formation using IoT is secure and will be used by only theauthorized person, company, or organization. This is whyprivacy broker is proposed. The user with service side willinteract with the proxy to make sure that service provider(SP) receive information about certain user. However ithas problem in scalability.

Finally, the bright side is the price of data storage whichis getting low. Thus, there is no need to save informationin network, Regardless of some providers are allowingusers to share their personal information such as flicker.Applying same idea on IoT will not considered a solutionand need further research effort.

VI. Urban IoTThe main idea behind designing urban IoT is to support

the vision of Smart Cities. There are many advantagesof urban IoT, such as services in day-life. For example,lighting in street, cars parking, monitoring and schools[25].

A. Urban and Smart Cities ServicesQuality and enhancement of the services have positive

reflection on economy and operational costs. We list someof services that developed by urban IoT which are usefulfor Smart Cites.

• Building with Healthy Structural• Traffic Crowding• Public Building• Smart Parking such as voice park [26]

Fig. 6. Zanella 2014: Conceptual representation of an urban IoTnetwork based on the web service approach

• Air Pureness• Noise Tracking• Smart Lighting• City and Power Consumption

B. Urban IoT ArchitectureThe idea of building urban IoT system is being con-

tractible and supports all other technologies. Anotherimportant factor that is the collected data using IoT mustbe available to people and authorized provider. In orderto solve problem related to the cities we must increasethe awareness and responsiveness of citizen and authorities[27].

Figure 6 shown urban IoT system with the componentssuch as web service scheme and link layer technology thathas ability to communicate between parts

VII. ConclusionIn this paper, we have presented a rather extensive

survey on the solutions currently available for the im-plementation of smart cities with IoTs, but a questionis still been asking ”How to build typical smart cities”.The answer on it is not limited on few ideas. Every cityaround the world has certain privacy to present services forits citizens and connect them with their local governmentservices. In this paper, it was luminous that great efforthas been done and, Right now, it is still being continuedto find optimal configuration in the smart cities market.

VIII. AcknowledgmentThe authors are grateful to thank Dr. Carlos Otero, as-

sociate professor in Florida Institute of Technology (FIT,USA) for his unlimited support and significant advices tomake this paper. The authors wish to thank TajudeenOlasupo, Ph.D candidate in FIT also for his invaluablesupport in providing experimental tools concerning wire-less sensor networks.

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Hayder Khzaali is a student who’s currentlystudying his Master degree at FIT and startedin May of 2015. He obtained his bachelor de-gree in computer engineering and informationtechnology from University of Technology -Baghdad - Iraq since 2008. He has 6 monthsof experience in a private telecommunicationcompany working as transmission AssociateEngineer, five years of experience working as anetwork administrator in a federal company inhis country and 6 years of experience working

part time in private internet company as an ISP. He is a memberof CISCO and Microsoft families and has the following certificates:CCNA, CCNP (local) , MCSE, MCTS, MCIP. His research Interestareas includes but not limited to: RF Propagation, Satellite Commu-nication, WBB, CISCO routing and switching.

Firas Aswad Firas Aswad is a PhD studentin Computer Science at Florida Institute ofTechnology. He obtained his B.Sc from Mosuluniversity and M.Sc from Technology univer-sity in Baghdad in Computer Science. He has 6years teaching experience, Operating SystemsConcepts, Linux and build server. He is inter-ested in Complex Networks topics.

Ahmed N. Mohammed is a Ph.D. stu-dent in Electrical Engineering at Florida In-stitute of Technology. He obtained his B.Sc.in Electronics and Communications and Ms.c.in Computer Networks and Communicationsfrom University of Mosul, Iraq. He has 5years of experience in communications andcomputer networks labs as an engineer, thena lecturer in Mosul University. His primaryresearch interests include various topics in cel-lular system and wireless, network