An IoT Infrastructure for Smart Cities: The SusCity Project Use-Case
Authors
Abstract
The Internet of Things (IoT) is supposed to seamlessly combine a large number of heterogeneous devices (sensors and actuators) enabling the rise of a new set of services that support a Smart City solution. Hence, the outcome of the services performed on Smart Cities relies on the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to interconnect the devices in the IoT, to store and process data (data handling tools), and generate the required results for the services (e.g. dashboards). The design of an efficient and appropriated ICT architecture including the selection of the tools for each component are the key steps in the design of a Smart City Platform. To enable an efficient use of storage and processing resources, and provide scalability and elasticity to the services, usually a Cloud Computing infrastructure is used to support all the data collecting, storage, and handling tools of the platform.The SusCity project focuses at the development and integration of tools and services in a platform aiming to improve the resource consumption with minimum environmental impact in the city of Lisbon, Portugal, using data generated at urban level (city council, utilities, state agencies, companies, buildings, environment and traffic), focusing on services related to Smart Buildings, Smart Mobility, and Smart Grids. To achieve this goal, it is important to carefully consider the IoT infrastructure and the data handling tools that are going to provide the technological support to the SusCity services.
This paper presents the proposed IoT architecture (sensor infrastructure plus data handling tools) to collect, store, process, and represent the data from heterogeneous sources, and deliver it to the different services that are provided to the citizens, companies, and the city administration. A prototype of the architecture was implemented, and a set of sensors were deployed to gather data related to typical Smart Cities indicators to demonstrate the prototype functionality, as a proof-of-concept.