Page:Catalyzing the Internet of Things and Smart Cities ： Global City Teams Challenge.pdf/1



Sokwoo Rhee Smart Grid and Cyber-Physical Systems Program Office National Institute of Standards and Technology US Department of Commerce http://www.nist.gov/manuscript-publication-search.cfm?pub_id=920338 sokwoo.rhee@nist.gov

April 11, 2016

Proceedings First International Workshop on Science of Smart City Operations and Platforms

Abstract Many smart city and Internet of Things (IoT) solutions are suffering from fragmentation and lack of economies of scale. To address this issue, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) initiated the Global City Teams Challenge (GCTC) to catalyze collaboration among different stakeholders. The goal is to design and deploy IoT and smart city solutions that are replicable, scalable, and sustainable, thereby leading to the identification and adoption of a consensus framework for smart city technologies. The second round of GCTC is currently in its first phase. Future smart city projects would benefit from a widely distributed IoT communications fabric that can serve as an infrastructure for the deployment of truly sharable and replicable smart city solutions.

Index Terms Internet of Things, Smart City, Global City Teams Challenge, GCTC, Replicability, IoT Fabric

Research Areas Electronics & Telecommunications, Information Technology, Measurements

The concept of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) or Internet of Things (IoT), which has been around for more than a decade , is currently creating a great deal of buzz in the marketplace and media, with a promise to enhance the way we live our lives. There are three major arenas for IoT applications—in the consumer, industrial, and public sectors. Recent interest has mainly focused on the consumer side, including consumer appliances, home area networks and other applications. Industrial applications are promising to improve business outcomes for many sectors, including manufacturing, asset management and healthcare.

In the case of public sector applications, the Internet of Things is a major enabling concept to accelerate the development and deployment of smart city solutions. This article discusses the overall architecture of IoT and the issues of current practice of smart city deployments. The article then presents a new collaborative approach that uses the concept of a “challenge” for the acceleration of broader and faster adoption.

To understand the basic characteristics of IoT and smart cities, it is useful to analyze the composition of a typical IoT solution and show how the architecture can be mapped to that of smart cities. Figure 1 illustrates a simplified layered architecture of IoT.



At the bottom of the structure is the Hardware layer, where tangible hardware elements such as sensors, actuators, chips, and radios are found. The elements in this layer typically interact directly with the environment, with other hardware elements, or sometimes with the users/consumers.

The next layer is the Communications layer, which is sometimes called “connectivity.” This layer connects and binds different components in the Hardware layer so that information can flow between layers or between hardware components. This is where well-known technologies such as Ethernet, WiFi, cellular, and short-range wireless are found. For some applications, the Communications layer is minimal (e.g., scaled down to an internal bus or to simplified connectivity among different hardware components).

The next layer is the Data Analytics layer. This layer receives data from the Communications layer, and then stores, analyzes, and processes them. This is where “big data” applications could reside, for example, in the case of applications that require collection and analysis of data from a large number of sources. However, it should also be noted that this layer could be relatively thin and simple, especially in the case of embedded applications. In other words, the Data Analytics layer does not necessarily imply the need for a huge database and an extremely fast processor.