Section: Application Domains

Smart Cities

One major characteristic of modern societies is that they are prevalently urban. In coherence, the contributions of the Agora team are in particular applied to provide solutions tailored to the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) and to Smart Cities applications. A major motivation of the team is the forthcoming explosion of the number of connected devices. In particular, low cost - small data devices are supposed to be densely deployed in our environment, fostering the interest for a convergence of the traditional wireless networking paradigms.

Smart City is a constantly reshaped concept, embracing the future of dense metropolitan areas, with references to efficient and sustainable infrastructure, improving citizens’ quality of life and protecting the environment. A consensus on the Smart City philosophy is however that it will be primarily achieved by leveraging a clever integration of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in the urban tissue. Indeed, ICTs are enabling an evolution from the current duality between the real world and its digitized counterpart to a continuum in which digital contents and applications are seamlessly interacting with classical infrastructures and services. Smart Cities are often described by the digital services that should be provided which are inherently dependent on dense measurements of the city environment and activities, the collection of these data, their processing into information, and their redistribution. The networking infrastructure plays therefore a critical role in enabling advanced services, in particular the wireless infrastructure supporting density and mobility.

From a wireless networking viewpoint, the digitization of cities can be seen as a paradigm shift extending the Internet of Things (IoT) to a citizen-centric model in order to leverage the massive data collected by pervasive sensors, connected mobiles or fixed devices, and social applications.