IoT In Smart Cities: Challenges And Major Applications

The Advantages of IoT in Smart Cities

IoT is an advanced technology which is used for communication purpose and the main advantage of this technology is that it provides a platform to create communication between two or more devices by using the internet. There are many examples of IoT smart cities such as public transports information system, monitoring and controlling system for traffic jams, and detection of pollution status, real-time location, and energy consumption (Centenaro, Vangelista, Zanella, & Zorzi, 2016).There are many aims of IoT smart cities such as produce more opportunities and support for a better living, to make a improved utilization of the municipal services and capitals, decreasing the operational cost of public resources, and change the way of communication.

The main purpose of this paper is to describe role of IoT in smart cities and how IoT change the way of communication (Ji, Ganchev, O’Droma, Zhao, & Zhang, 2014). The main problem occur in this technology is lack of security and also produce many security risks which is explain in this paper and it is evaluated that in 2030 around 60% of individuals will embrace this innovation and furthermore moves towards the keen urban communities (Memos, Psannis, Ishibashi, Kim, & Gupta, 2018).

            Although IoT smart cities implementation has emerged with several benefits in urban areas especially in terms of productivity, efficiency and sustainability, it has also introduced brought about many challenges on its implementation. Considering the fact that this technology has emerged in an era where cyber-security is a major concern, it is without any reasonable doubt that this technology will be among others on the receiving end of cybersecurity threats.

For that matter, we can classify the major challenges facing this technology into three categories; vulnerability to attacks, security and privacy concerns, lack of skills needed to correctly interpret massive data and lastly the problem of interoperability. Excluding the last two, the first two can be comfortably put under cybersecurity concern bracket (Petrolo, Loscri & Mitton, 2017).

Major IoT Smart city applications and the challenges

Healthcare

            In its invention, IoT smart city technology was aimed at making it possible for urban residents to be able to locate ambulances easily through the online platform in case of emergencies, check the availability of blood and organs for transplants if need be and enable remote monitoring of patients under health programs as well as tracking the hospital beds among others (AlEnezi, AlMeraj & Manuel, 2018). This was totally a superb idea until the privacy issues were considered bearing in mind that health status should remain private. When we consider the US federal laws, in the Privacy Act which was passed in the year 1974, individuals are guaranteed the rights of protection against unwarranted invasions to their privacy which covers the collection, maintenance, usage and disclosure of their personal information. This is similar to almost all the other privacy laws in different countries including Australia (Eckhoff & Wagner, 2017).

            This new technology of Smart cities will allow the authorities to have a track record of people’s locations at all times through the use of video feeds in the entire cities where it has been adopted (inside the busses as well as stores) and which will apply facial recognitions sensor technologies to achieve that. It’s important to note that, despite of the fact that individual activities may be carried out publicly; such information can never remain private (Mehmood, Ahmad, Yaqoob, Adnane, Imran & Guizani, 2017).

IoT in Healthcare

For example, people will always need to visit HIV clinics for testing, visit psychiatrists as well as abortion clinics. But who would dare do that knowing that he or she is being monitored somewhere by somebody who he does not know? Definitely people will shy away from some of these incidences which are likely to interfere with their privacy especially when under circumstances like these ones and that will definitely have negative impacts of the country’s health sector.

Public Transport and Traffic

            Through IoT smart city technologies will make public transportation more efficient for both the government and its citizens. The public will be in a position to monitor what is going on the highways as well as the arrival of trains and buses through GPS sensors which will be installed in the vehicles at the manufacturing level (Ahmed, Yaqoob, Gani, Imran & Guizani, 2016). On the other hand, drivers will also stand a position of monitoring traffic jam in different roads through special sensors which will be placed on different parts of the roads and that will enable them make a choice of the routes to follow in order to escape the traffic jams. On the side of local authorities, the technology will be used to control traffic lights which will in turn alleviate traffic in the roads. Still, the information from the sensors placed on roads will be utilized to help in rescuing people in times of accidents.

            Well, this appears as a great milestone as far as public transport will be concerned until we consider the impacts of this technology on the security of the country. I mean, all the security enforcement team relies mainly on the road transport to respond to criminal activities across the country and for that case criminals will have an easy time if they manage to gain access to the monitoring systems being used by the transport authority because they will be in control of all what the police officers are doing to stop criminal activities (Alur, Berger, Drobnis, Fix, Hager, & Rexford, 2016).

Considering the fact that currently hacking of systems is not a big deal, criminals will only need to invest in hackers to gain access of the monitoring systems and through that way they will have the freedom to continue with the criminal activities since they will be monitoring the policy officer’s reactions from a distant to navigate escape routes.

Environment Conditions

            In its invention, IoT smart city technology was aimed at providing healthier environments for the urban residents. To achieve that goal, networked sensors would be deployed across all the city streets to monitor all the environmental hazardous activities taking place in the city such as greenhouse gas emissions and noise pollution (Zhang, Ni, Yang, Liang, Ren & Shen, 2017). This data would be used to devise ways on how to reduce pollution and other environmental hazards through the enactment of policies by the local authorities. Well, that was great considering that global warming is becoming a major threat to agricultural sectors of different countries.

IoT in Transportation

            However, considering that in city streets there is a lot of activities taking place, monitoring the streets may result into an increase in crime rates all over the country (Menouar, Guvenc, Akkaya, Uluagac, Kadri & Tuncer, 2017). For instance, bank ATMs are found in those streets and people have been used to withdrawing money at any time of the day. If criminals gain access to these monitoring systems, the criminal activities will have to escalate because what they need to do is just to invest in the monitoring process to ensure they get to know people who are withdrawing lump sum amounts of money and then they can follow them even out of the major towns where there is monitoring to the outskirts and then steal from them.

Conclusion

            Generally from the above discussion, it is clear that IoT smart city technology will have considerable benefits as far as health, transport and environmental sectors are concerned. However, the technology has also appeared with its own challenges as far as privacy of citizens and security agencies is concerned and if not closely monitored will result into uncontrollable crime rates within the countries of implementation.

Literature review

There are numerous writers that research on the internet of thing and provided any information and data which are discus in this chapter.

As the development of IOT applications are growing rapidly day by day, the adoption of such technologies are rendering our daily lifestyle. The adoption of IOT is widely increasing in several sector as healthcare, farming and business. IOT provides multiple opportunities in those sectors. However, the range of IOT applications are not limited to these sectors. IOT applications are used to construct a smart environment around us. Even though. Such applications are very limited now, the future growth of technology can create multiple opportunities in terms of effectiveness and efficiency.

Mainly, IOT applications provide broadband network and wireless communication protocols while its convergence point is the Internet. Several technologies are integrated with each other in order to provide an optimal functionality. For instance, RFID technology is widely adopted in several field which contains multiple tags. This technology is used to monitor objects in real life. RFID system used am antenna to transmit data and the RFID tags are responsible for receive and send data.  This is just a small chief encoded with wireless facilities which plays a vital role in IOT.

It is mainly used to track movements, temperature, and location and supply units. In short sensors are acting like as bridges between physical and digital world. The next best technology is the combination of both RFID and sensor that is known as RFID Sensor Networks (RSN). It has both sensing, computing and as well as RFID readers which adds more power for network operation.

According to the author, there are multiple technology and services towards the architecture of smart city. There are several technology along with the mechanism assist to construct a smart city. The role of IOT in smart city cannot be ignored and becoming a focusing area. Due to the rapid growth the infrastructure and services are required to provide the necessities of the city residents. Most of the devices has the capability to interact with each other which brings economic advantages in terms of reduction of operational cost.

Challenges Faced in IoT Smart Cities

The rapid development of IOT technologies such as actuators, smart phone and sensors (Anagnostopoulos, Zaslavsy, Medvedev, & Khoruzhnicov, 2015). The potential of such technologies can offer enhanced services to the citizens. Even though there are several aspect of the IOT development in the smart city such as smart security, smart food and water tracking system, smart voice monitoring, smart water monitoring, smart way in checking air quality, smart health, smart home, smart transport and mobility  smart energy. Health, home, energy and transport are considered as a four Pillars of Smart City vision.

Vehicles embedded with the IOT technologies is capable of communication via internet which offers several opportunities and rise to wealth of new opportunities. Other than that, there are several technologies which is capable of providing enhanced driving experience with customization. Experts believes that Internet of Energy (IoE) will represent future trends for smart transportation and mobility applications (Anagnostopoulos, Zaslavsy, Medvedev, & Khoruzhnicov, 2015). They also believes IOT will bring automation in transport as it will increase the quality and enhance the services offered to the citizens while bringing an economical advantage for the city administration in terms of reduction of the operational costs.

With the development of radio access network such as WiMAX, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, the smart home approach is taking a step further to the evolution. Almost every house has multiple electronics devices such as AV receiver, TV and other devices which provides comfort, security and assist citizens to enhance the lifestyle. Such technologies also enables smart ways to control certain things in the house. For instance, Windows, lights and other devices embedded with wireless system can be operated remotely with just a click from anywhere. The whole automation approach is possible by the rapid development of IOT. IOT applications are also used to provide enhance security and remote controlling.

One of the other main pillar of smart city is health. Health is considered as a one of the main aspect of daily life. IOT provides several opportunities to develop the typical health monitoring approach. Wearable devices are widely adopted by millions of citizens. This type of applications provide multiple advantages over the typical process (Anagnostopoulos, Zaslavsy, Medvedev, & Khoruzhnicov, 2015).

These devices are capable of transferring critical data associate with patient health in real-time. There are various wearable devices available in market such as smart wristwatch, Heart rate, Pulse rate, BAN devices etc. are widely used for monitoring the patient’s continuously. Due to the huge number of ubiquitous wearable devices in healthcare systems take the advantages of heterogeneous mobile networks such as cellular network, Wi-Fi, WiMAX, Bluetooth, ZigBee etc.

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Methodology:

In order to understand develop certain knowledge about the chosen topic and provide a broad illustration, secondary research has been conducted. Secondary research is involved with the findings from pre published literatures such as journal articles and books. These resources are very useful to understand the development of IOT in smart city and gain several useful insights. Several literatures are reviewed and evaluated in order to extract appropriate information which are later used in this report.

Security and Privacy Concerns

Several literatures are collected from different sources such as CSU library, internet and books. Authors describes their knowledge and understanding of the subject with multiple perspectives. Some of the literatures are very professional and consist of complex framework and case study. The result of the case studies were very useful to understand the current development fi IOT in the smart city. Some authors wee more focused on the urban areas where the development process is hindering due to certain limitation. After collecting several literatures, some of them are chosen specifically and broadly described in this paper.

Recommendation

IoT play a significant part in the field of Smart cities but there are few drawbacks of this technology such as power consumption, less secure, increase security risks, and more complex to design. This type of problem can be reduced by improving the efficiency of electronic devices and components. To reduce security risks they can improve quality and security systems when IoT is used for communication purpose. Use encryption method when data transfer from one device to another which can reduce security risks.

Future Research

There are several writers studied on this subject and they investigated that there is main two common problems occur when IoT used in smart cities such as lack of security, and power consumption (Anagnostopoulos, Zaslavsy, Medvedev, & Khoruzhnicov, 2015).  In the future research, authors can provide implementation method to reduce this type of problem in smart cities. In future research, we can identify various resources to reduce drawbacks of IoT technology and also evaluate the different process to increase the overall efficiency of this technology (Orsino, Araniti, Militano, Alonso, Molinaro, & Iera, 2016).

Future Scope:

• The widespread and development of ICT infrastructures, considered like
• Increase social cohesion
• increase innovation and entrepreneurship
• increase urban wealth
• To provide better public services and e-services also using Web 2.0 technology
• To provide better public services and e-services also using Web 2.0 technology
• Increase the adoption of Community Network to supply e-government services (this aspect is more relevant especially among Smart/Digital Cities in Europe
• Data sharing and open data
• Internet more accessible and affordable for many people to reduce digital divide
• Internet diffusion among citizens in everyday life

The adoption of green policies for a smart growth, in order to

Achieve sustainable urban development and a better urban landscape

• Improve mobility services to reduce traffic congestion and then pollution
• Reduce CO2 emissions and greenhouse gases
• reduce issues about urban crowding in terms of pollution reduction, improvement of urban planning, safety and sanitary conditions, power demand sustainable, and so on (these aspects is more relevant especially among Chinese Smart/Digital Cities)
• Advantages

• More efficient
• Flexible
• Required less time
• Low in cost (Rathore, Ahmad, Paul, & Rho, 2016).

Disadvantages

• Compatibility
• More complex to design
• Less insecurity
• High-security threats and risks (Bohli, Skarmeta, Moreno, García, & Langendörfer, 2015).

Conclusion

IoT is a modern technology which is used for communication purpose and it provides a platform to intact with devices by using an internet connection. In smart cities, it plays a significant role because it changed the way of communication. This paper has explained the importance of the internet of thing in smooth cities and how people use this innovation for communication purpose. There are main two key factors which are the main problem for this technology such as lack of security, and power consumption. There are many examples of smart cities such as traffic lights, transportation systems, tracing of any signal, and automatic lighting systems. The problem of power can be reduced by improving the efficiency of all electronic devices and components.

The IOT development in smart cities is growing day by day. The surrounding and environments of the smart cities are widely integrated with IOT applications. Some of the technologies and their functionality are discussed in these paper. Experts also believed there is more opportunities and possibilities to enhance the development process. Even though the development of IOT to construct a smart city is a vast area, they can visualize the future pretty clear. Nowadays, several technologies is used in the smart city such as RFID tags and remote sensors. However, the development process is still at stake in urban areas.

Lack of Interoperability

There are very small opportunities to adopt such technologies due to the bad environment. The technologies that can be used to enhance functionality of web-enabled sensor devices are also discussed. Furthermore, the enabling technologies have reached a level of maturity that allows for the practical realization of IoT solutions and services The Smart city concept is now gaining the more and more in terms of field which implies many cities have implemented the IoT for smart city to utilize intelligent systems and sensors to preserve the rights of the smart city citizens. Many states are also going to adopt the vision already available technologies in the context of smart city.

References

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AlEnezi, A., AlMeraj, Z., & Manuel, P. (2018, April). Challenges of IoT Based Smart- Government Development. In Green Technologies Conference (GreenTech), 2018 (pp. 155-160). IEEE.

Alur, R., Berger, E., Drobnis, A. W., Fix, L., Fu, K., Hager, G. D., … & Rexford, J. (2016) Systems computing challenges in the Internet of Things. arXiv preprint.

Anagnostopoulos, T., Zaslavsy, A., Medvedev, A., & Khoruzhnicov, S. (2015, June). Top–k Query Based Dynamic Scheduling for IoT-enabled Smart City Waste Collection. In Mobile Data Management (MDM), 2015 16th IEEE International Conference on, 2, pp. 50-55.

Arasteh, H., Hosseinnezhad, V., Loia, V., Tommasetti, A., Troisi, O., Shafie-Khah, M., & Siano, P. (2016). Iot-based smart cities: a survey. In Environment and Electrical Engineering (EEEIC), 2016 IEEE 16th International Conference on, 15(3), pp. 1-6.

Bohli, J. M., Skarmeta, A., Moreno, M. V., García, D., & Langendörfer, P. (2015, April). SMARTIE project: Secure IoT data management for smart cities. In Recent Advances in Internet of Things (RIoT), 2015 International Conference on, 17, pp. 1-6.

Centenaro, M., Vangelista, L., Zanella, A., & Zorzi, M. (2016). Long-range communications in unlicensed bands: The rising stars in the IoT and smart city scenarios. IEEE Wireless Communications, 23(5), 60-67.

Eckhoff, D., & Wagner, I. (2017). Privacy in the Smart City—Applications, Technologies,Challenges, and Solutions. IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials, 20(1), 489-516.

Ji, Z., Ganchev, I., O’Droma, M., Zhao, L., & Zhang, X. (2014). A cloud-based car parking middleware for IoT-based smart cities: Design and implementation. Sensors, 14(12), 22372-22393.

Latre, S., Leroux, P., Coenen, T., Braem, B., Ballon, P., & Demeester, P. (2016). City of things: An integrated and multi-technology testbed for IoT smart city experiments. In Smart Cities Conference (ISC2), 2016 IEEE International, 14, pp. 1-8.

Mehmood, Y., Ahmad, F., Yaqoob, I., Adnane, A., Imran, M., & Guizani, S. (2017). Internet-of- things-based smart cities: Recent advances and challenges. IEEE Communications Magazine, 55(9), 16-24.

Memos, V. A., Psannis, K. E., Ishibashi, Y., Kim, B. G., & Gupta, B. B. (2018). An efficient algorithm for media-based surveillance system (EAMSuS) in IoT smart city framework. Future Generation Computer Systems, 83, 619-628.

Menouar, H., Guvenc, I., Akkaya, K., Uluagac, A. S., Kadri, A., & Tuncer, A. (2017). UAV enabled intelligent transportation systems for the smart city: Applications and challenges. IEEE Communications Magazine, 55(3), 22-28.

Orsino, A., Araniti, G., Militano, L., Alonso-Zarate, J., Molinaro, A., & Iera, A. (2016). Energy efficient IoT data collection in smart cities exploiting D2D communications. Sensors, 16(6), 836.

Petrolo, R., Loscri, V., & Mitton, N. (2017). Towards a smart city based on cloud of things, a survey on the smart city vision and paradigms. Transactions on EmergingTelecommunications Technologies, 28(1), e2931.

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