Adoption of Smart Cities with a Practical Smart Building Implementation (magazine paper)

This is a short overview of Smart Cities and company’s IoT product deployment case study, which is based on the article “Adoption of Smart Cities with a Practical Smart Building Implementation“ [1] by Marcin Dryjański, Mateusz Buczkowski, Youssouf Ould-Cheikh-Mouhamedou, and Adrian Kliks which is a magazine article in IEEE Internet of Things Magazine.

Abstract [1]

Smart cities, driven by the rapid urbanization of the world, are currently a hot topic among decision-makers (mayors, city councilors, economic planners, policy-makers), as well as industries (communications and cloud computing providers, device manufacturers, big data analytics companies). Within this category, applications for buildings, using automation and wireless communication for efficiency purposes, are prominent examples of this trend. It is especially the case for residential buildings due to the recent trends in population growth of urban areas. This is also known as PropTech. This article discusses the position of the Internet of Things (IoT) in the context of smart cities and presents an example of practical implementation in a smart building. The realized IoT system uses state-of-the-art technologies, namely cloud computing, virtualization, and automation, for infrastructure management. The authors focus on the monitoring and management aspects of IoT deployment, which are important when delivering solutions with a multitude of gateways and sensors for scalability reasons.

Smart City Adoption Challenges and High-Level Architecture

The main challenges for the Smart Cities adoption include:

• Lack of consistent and ubiquitous infrastructure;
• Requirements for funding for deployments;
• Skills, both organizational and technical;
• Legal aspects including privacy;
• Current silos solutions (and verticals) for separate applications.

The high-level architecture on a Smart City IoT Systems include the following layers:

• Sensors layer (including both sensors and actuators);
• Communications layer (a.k.a. connectivity layer);
• Platforms layer (for data processing and management);
• Applications layer (including user interface, and web/mobile applications);
• Security layer (laying vertically across all layers including technical mechanisms and policies).

Smart Building IoT Platform

Souly is an IoT platform dedicated to Smart Hotels and Dormitories, composed of Sensors and Actuators, IoT Gateways, Cloud platform, Administration Panel (for general building management) and Mobile Application (for tenant’s temperature control). Souly Architecture is presented in the figure below.

Souly platform was proposed as a system integrating the Wi-Fi infrastructure with building automation system, API to integrate with 3^rd party systems (e.g., booking application) and energy management control allowing to steer the room’s configuration and monitor temperature settings globally and locally. The main challenges within the deployment come with the scale namely, the number of rooms and tenants to serve, the number of gateway and sensors, the amount of data to be processed, the dense Wi-Fi radio environment (2 devices per AP and an AP per room), the required consistency of software between different gateways. The provided implementation of the Souly system in one of the dormitories as an example of deployment are gathered in the Table below [1].

Summary

The different angles from which the Smart City application can be looked at, include: challenges, the architecture of IoT systems, technologies and implementation details, mechanisms for IoT system operation, and a realistic case study. An important segment within the Smart City ecosystem, is PropTech and Smart Building, being part of it is subject to the following challenges: separate infrastructures to maintain (internet access and building management systems), lack of integration between different systems and lack of control for energy waste for buildings of mass residence. Thanks to the use of the implemented system within the dormitory, the energy fees were lower of about 30% during the heating season compared to a similar dormitory of similar size and utilization. The key aspects of the development and maintenance perspective are the monitoring and management of the IoT infrastructure and environment. The Souly IoT platform is realized with the use of state-of-the-art technologies including cloud computing, virtualization, and automation for self-management and monitoring. Those technologies used together allow for efficient maintenance and development of the system, where the main challenge is operating at scale.

You can find the paper within our knowledge base under this link.

[1] M. Dryjanski, M. Buczkowski, Y. Ould-Cheikh-Mouhamedou, A. Kliks, “Adoption of Smart Cities with a Practical Smart Building Implementation”, March 2020, IEEE Internet of Things Magazine, vol. 3, issue 1