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Openness in Smart City Systems
Diving Deeper Into Openness
It is widely accepted that openness is a key criterion when selecting a smart city system. We could not agree more.
Thinking about openness when choosing a street lighting system is key because you can use that system as a backbone for many smart city applications. Let us dive deeper in what openness means for every layer of an all-in-one smart city system that allows smart street lighting.
For the Hardware and Controls
Open to different brands of hardware, control and sensors
Smart city projects tend to develop over time. A city installs a street lighting system for an area, and then wants to expand both to other areas and other applications. This requires the hardware architecture to be open to some extent :
- Can you add sensors or controls from a different vendor to your street lights?
- How easy is it to integrate them, and will it require extra adaptation devices?
- Can sensors work with your software system or your street light controllers’ network?
Open to Legacy Hardware
This factor is related to the above but is so important that it is worth stating it separately. Cities often cannot afford to get rid of old street lights all at once and replace them with new ones. They might be able to do it in some areas, but there will probably also be areas where street lights will not be replaced for a long time. Some systems make it easier than others to connect these legacy street lights. If this is an important factor for you, it is worth asking your smart lighting vendors if they can support you in connecting older, non-LED street lights to the system.
For the Network Connectivity
Open to Combining Different Types of Connectivity
One type of smart city connectivity that has received a lot of press is meshed Wi-Fi. In the context of smart city applications, it means wireless connectivity that is used both to connect devices to a central management software system and to offer Internet access to passers-by. This type of connectivity is a good choice for offering Internet access to busy tourists or commercial areas in the city centre.
However, using it across the whole city is prohibitively expensive and impractical (not least because it would require a new fibre or high-speed network drop at least every kilometre).
A logical approach would be to have meshed Wi-Fi in a small area in the city centre, as a commercial incentive, and use a different kind of network connectivity elsewhere for IoT applications. For this approach to work, the smart city system needs to allow a combination of connectivity types.
A few of the popular options for connecting smart city applications :
- Cellular connectivity (3G, 4G-LTE, LTE Cat M1, NB-IoT)
- Wireless mesh network (RF 802.15.4 and its various versions of stacks)
- LoRaWAN networks
- Power line networking
Open to Scale Cost Effectively
Some types of connectivity have physical or cost limits to scale that you might not immediately realize. One obvious example is the Wi-Fi mesh network discussed above. Another is regular Wi-Fi connectivity, which requires an additional router about every 100 metres, so extending the network also means adding more routers. It is important to understand what connecting another 20,000 street lights might mean for your smart city system.
A recent Gartner report recommends: “Evaluate your smart city aspirations using cross-disciplinary committees and consider what applications your city will need to support over the next decade. Planning ahead will save money.”
Also bear in mind that not everything has to be streamed on a high-band network. In certain image or sound recognition applications for example, new devices can execute the analytical functions at the edge – locally, and then simply communicate results in a smaller format such as an explicit alarm (sound of a gun or car crash detected), or a string of text (ALPR – automated licence plate recognition) just to name a few. Distributed intelligence is a key enabler to build an efficient and affordable low-band communication network, perfectly scaled for smart city IoT applications.
For the Software
Open to Other Brands of Devices or Sensors
What it really means:
- Can the software manage devices from a single vendor only, or can it also manage other vendors’ devices?
- Can the software become a platform where new application types will be created, defined and managed in the future?
Open to Various Hosting Models
Some manufacturers offer only one way of using their software – more and more popular is the SaaS (software as a service) model that leverage cloud infrastructure to host and analyze the data. Others offer several ways you can host the system. Sometimes the choice is yours – you buy a perpetual licence and decide where and how to host the software (on the vendor’s server, your own server or a third-party server). It is critical to think through this aspect of your smart city system and decide what you are willing to accept.
Open to Data Exchange and Interactions With Other Applications
Most smart city software systems allow you to extract data from them to use elsewhere. But some are more advanced than others in making true interoperability possible. Some systems offer open APIs (application programming interfaces). Open, well-documented APIs allow these systems to exchange data with other systems (e.g., ERP or GIS systems), and also allow third parties to develop applications for various specific needs. For example, the city of Montréal in Canada is implementing digital parking signs which share the same wireless mesh network and will be remotely edited through an external application connected via the APIs of the Dimonoff | SCMS IoT management platform designed for smart lighting management.
Choose Wisely
As you think about selecting a smart city system, consider which aspects of openness are most important to you. No system is perfectly open, but some are much more open and flexible than others.
Witness the openness of Dimonoff | SCMS:
Learn how to choose an open and future-proof smart city system and understand the market in order to choose the best smart city vendor.
