New and Existing IoT Technologies Helping Allot in Building Connected Cities

Internet of Things IoT Solutions Provider
Sandip Malaviya
11-Nov-2017
Reading Time: 4 minutes

Many towns and cities around the world prefer IoT to solve urban troubles, for example, traffic congestion, and to improve the quality-of-life and safety of their citizens. High-tech sensors that are installed all over the city, in buildings & vehicles, and apps, as well as devices that are utilized by people who are working or living in the city, produce data which is utilized all over these connected cities. The data of IoT is used to make decisions on the way public spaces are designed, how to offer public services and utilities more effectively & efficiently and how to perfectly utilize resources.

Let’s Discuss the Applications of IoT inside the connected cities

Several of the major issues which are being addressed by applying Internet of things technologies at an urban scale comprises:

  • Energy management
  • Waste management
  • Safety of Environment
  • Citizen engagement
  • Emergency management and law
  • Transportation

Read About: How IoT Affected Digital Transformation

Energy management

The technologies of IoT that are being used to solve issues concerning energy management within connected cities involve smart grid technologies, smart street lighting platforms and smart metering technologies.

Smart grids make electricity make delivery extra efficient through concerning predictive analytics to data which is collected through sensors that are installed all over the grid with the aim to match capacity by demand. Monitoring of the grid through smart sensors are normally connected to Low-Power Wide-Area Networks (LPWAN) or neighborhood area networks (NANs) through networking technologies such as SigFox, NB-IoT, LoRa, or LTE-M.

Smart meters technology which is installed in smart buildings and homes allow for supply to be controlled remotely and energy consumption to be monitored remotely, which leads to price savings over labor-intensive meter reading & switching. Sensor components which are included in smart meter gadgets include accelerometers, hall sensors, shock sensors, PMUs and anisotropic magnetoresistance (AMR) sensors. These sensors monitor efficiency and energy usage, supervise the health of the smart meter technology itself, and also identify tampering with any of the gadgets.

Waste management

Waste management is another region where sensor data is utilized to reduce costs as well as perk up the efficiency in a connected city. Smart sensors can be retrofitted as part of present waste disposal procedures. For instance, connected cities can put in cellular-based sensors to garbage cans with the aim that trucks can be scheduled to gather trash just when they need emptying, & can use computer vision algorithms or on-street sensors over camera feeds to recognize areas where waste builds up, where extra trash cans must be installed.

Safety of Environment

Environmental sensors are utilized to monitor public parks, green spaces, and waterways, and the sensor data can be utilized to identify spaces that need protection or cleanup. Such environmental sensors are moreover utilized to track ambient conditions of the environment at locations all over the city, such as humidity, temperature, rainfall, and most conspicuously air quality.

In an urban region, wireless sensor networks are apt to interference which is triggered through weather conditions such as fog & rain and from reflective surfaces on buildings as well as water which cause signal interference due to multi-path fading while the signal takes manifold paths. The redundant paths offered by the mesh network topology enable the network to acclimatize by cleverly routing traffic around such problems. Moreover, channel hopping approaches can be implemented so that environmental (& many other) sensor data can appropriately be promulgated upstream to cloud base services for the analysis, processing, and storage.

Citizen engagement

Most of the benefits of connected cities come up from using cognitive computing to build insights from data which is gathered from sensors & further instrumented data. But, cities are citizen-centric, thus the data that is gathered from sensors should be complemented through input from citizens. Web and mobile apps offer opportunities for citizens to get in touch with local government and to provide feedback, communicate requests, or report faults with infrastructure and utilities – a kind of crowd-sourcing known as crowd sensing. Non-confidential data and de-identified, for example, crowd-sourced air quality observations with the time, can be termed as public assets as well as published as open data. Implementing standard data formats for both sensor-generated and citizen-contributed data is also significant to make sure that the data remains easy to get to individuals as well as businesses to extract value.

Law enforcement and Emergency management

Data from sensor networks offers real-time visibility on all what is happening inside the city for law enforcement companies & emergency responders to compose better decisions. This awareness of situation can be taken under use for everyday prediction, for planning and in times of crisis, to help with the quick response to the incidents.

Transportation

Connected cities perk up the experience of travelers by analyzing data from the road reporting systems incorporating roadside video cameras, road sensors, and variable speed signs. Employing IoT technologies to resolve transportation issues involves feeding the data which is collected from sensors into analytics services to generate actionable insights which are utilized directly to activate actuators that are associated to smart gadgets like adaptive traffic signals, or not applied directly, to inform decisions about policy and to modernize processes.

Adaptive traffic signals are adopted in major cities throughout the world including New Jersey, Sydney, and Toronto. Road sensor data and historical analysis of traffic can also be utilized to adjust tolls and speed limits, which controls traffic flow in the longer term. Apart from being utilized to route traffic at the incidents, sensors also report on the condition of bridges and roads so that repairs can be scheduled when needed.

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