Wireless Access Networks for Smart Cities

Abstract

Smart cities are envisioned to enable a vast amount of services in urban environments, so as to improve mobility, health, resource management, and, generally speaking, citizens' quality of life. Most of these services rely on pervasive, seamless and real-time access to information by users on the move, as well as on continuous exchanges of data among millions of devices deployed throughout the urban surface. It is thus clear that communication networks will be the key to enabling smart city solutions, by providing their core support infrastructure. In particular, wireless technologies will represent the main tool leveraged by such an infrastructure, as they allow device mobility and do not have the deployment constraints of wired architectures. In this Chapter, we present different wireless access networks intended to empower future smart cities, and discuss their features, complementarity and interoperability.