For the last year, a lot has been discussed about smartCities and the internet of things and the role that protocols will probably play on all this.
At a conceptual and technological level, the future smartCity will rely on two main concepts:
- Fully interoperable devices, with a common and open protocol which guarantees they all can "talk" to each others.
- Protocol-specific devices, central managed.
The interoperable smartCity
Briefly,at the interoperable smartCity multiple vendors of devices will coexist, and they will all use the same communication protocol. In the same way, it's very important the role of the certification agent, who will certify and guarantee that they will interoperate.
About devices, there will probably be two main kinds of different devices, and each of them will offer value differently.
First, WSN (Wireless Sensor Network) infraestructure devices. As there will be a common protocol, the most cost-efective and logical solution will create a common infraestructure, on which services can be mounted inside the smartCity. Whis way, we are talkin about devices whose functionality would be close to a Wifi router, they will manage connectivity. Anyway, we are talking about WSN conectivity (Zigbee, 6LowPAN, etc).
Then, there will be application devices. They will be the ones that will make possible the different services: street lighting, waste management, enviromental monitoring, etc... and all of that over the WSN infraestructure. They are responsible for physical environment interaction: meassurement and actuation, mainly.
The multiprotocol smartCity
In the situation that no protocol is massively adopted, multiple WSN solution vendors will exist, one solution for each problem to solve in the smartCity. The main difference from the interoperable smartCity will be that it does not exist a unique WSN infraestructure in the city and each vendor will provide a complete solution.
This doesn't exclude that several standarized solutions will appear for each application, i.e. street lighting interoperable systems. However, the main difference will be that there won't be a common infraestructure but individual and specialized systems.
All these systems will have a common joint point, hopefully the Internet. In this way, despite having different systems, all the information will be available to be centrally managed by the city council or by the local-service management companies and they could even offer almost the same functionalities as the interoperable smartCity.
As always, there are nuances and it's difficult to classify, but in general terms those will be the big scenarios we could predict in smartCities, about WSNs. In the next posts, we will go into details about technologies, protocols and, above all, viability and bussiness questions in these applications.
