Section: Application Domains

Smart Cities

It has been estimated that by 2030, 60% of the world's population will live in cities. On the one hand, smart cities aim at making everyday life more attractive and pleasant for citizens; on the other hand, they facilitate how those citizens can participate in the life of the city.

Smart cities share the constraint of mobility (both pedestrian and vehicular) with tactical military networks. Vehicular Ad-hoc NETworks (VANETs) will play an important role in the development of smarter cities.

The coexistence of different networks operating in the same radio spectrum can cause interference that should be avoided. Cognitive radio provides secondary users with the frequency channels that are temporarily unused (or unassigned) by primary users. Such opportunistic behavior can also be applied to urban wireless sensor networks. Smart cities raise the problem of transmitting, gathering, processing and storing big data. Another issue is to provide the right information at the place where it is most needed.