Social internet of vehicles for smart cities

Open Access journa

Editorial: Smart Objects and Technologies

Smart objects are entering everyday life and are heavily modifying it. Healthcare, communication, art, entertainment, safety, environment, education, democracy, and human rights, are just a few examples of scenarios that are radically changing thanks to the use of smart objects and technologies. In this context, the popularity of portable computing devices, such as smartphones, tablets, or smart watches combined with the emergence of many other small smart objects with computational, sensing and communication capabilities coupled with the popularity of social networks and new human-technology interaction paradigms is creating unprecedented opportunities for each of us to do something useful, ranging from a single person to the whole world. Furthermore, Internet of Things, Smart-cities, distributed sensing and Fog computing are representative examples of modern ICT paradigms that aim to describe a dynamic and globally cooperative infrastructure built upon objects intelligence and self-configuring capabilities. These connected objects are finding their way into our pockets, vehicles, urban areas and infrastructure, thus becoming the very texture of our society and providing us the possibility, but also the responsibility, to shape it

Empowering citizens' cognition and decision making in smart sustainable cities

© 2019 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes,creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.Advances in Internet technologies have made it possible to gather, store, and process large quantities of data, often in real time. When considering smart and sustainable cities, this big data generates useful information and insights to citizens, service providers, and policy makers. Transforming this data into knowledge allows for empowering citizens' cognition as well as supporting decision-making routines. However, several operational and computing issues need to be taken into account: 1) efficient data description and visualization, 2) forecasting citizens behavior, and 3) supporting decision making with intelligent algorithms. This paper identifies several challenges associated with the use of data analytics in smart sustainable cities and proposes the use of hybrid simulation-optimization and machine learning algorithms as an effective approach to empower citizens' cognition and decision making in such ecosystemsPeer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

SymbioCity: Smart Cities for Smarter Networks

The "Smart City" (SC) concept revolves around the idea of embodying cutting-edge ICT solutions in the very fabric of future cities, in order to offer new and better services to citizens while lowering the city management costs, both in monetary, social, and environmental terms. In this framework, communication technologies are perceived as subservient to the SC services, providing the means to collect and process the data needed to make the services function. In this paper, we propose a new vision in which technology and SC services are designed to take advantage of each other in a symbiotic manner. According to this new paradigm, which we call "SymbioCity", SC services can indeed be exploited to improve the performance of the same communication systems that provide them with data. Suggestive examples of this symbiotic ecosystem are discussed in the paper. The dissertation is then substantiated in a proof-of-concept case study, where we show how the traffic monitoring service provided by the London Smart City initiative can be used to predict the density of users in a certain zone and optimize the cellular service in that area.Comment: 14 pages, submitted for publication to ETT Transactions on Emerging Telecommunications Technologie

Trends in Smart City Development

This report examines the meanings and practices associated with the term 'smart cities.' Smart city initiatives involve three components: information and communication technologies (ICTs) that generate and aggregate data; analytical tools which convert that data into usable information; and organizational structures that encourage collaboration, innovation, and the application of that information to solve public problems

Smart Cities for Real People

Accelerating urbanization of the population and the emergence of new smart sensors (the Internet of Things) are combining in the phenomenon of the smart city. This movement is leading to improved quality of life and public safety, helping cities to enjoy economies that help remedy some budget overruns, better health care, and is resulting in increased productivity. The following report summarizes evolving digital technology trends, including smart phone applications, mapping software, big data and sensor miniaturization and broadband networking, that combine to create a technology toolkit available to smart city developers, managers and citizens. As noted above, the benefits of the smart city are already evident in some key areas as the technology sees actual implementation, 30 years after the creation of the broadband cable modem. The challenges of urbanization require urgent action and intelligent strategies. The applications and tools that truly benefit the people who live in cities will depend not on just the tools, but their intelligent application given current systemic obstacles, some of which are highlighted in the article. Of course, all the emerging technologies mentioned are dependent on ubiquitous, economical, reliable, safe and secure networks (wired and wireless) and network service providers

Modeling the Internet of Things: a simulation perspective

This paper deals with the problem of properly simulating the Internet of Things (IoT). Simulating an IoT allows evaluating strategies that can be employed to deploy smart services over different kinds of territories. However, the heterogeneity of scenarios seriously complicates this task. This imposes the use of sophisticated modeling and simulation techniques. We discuss novel approaches for the provision of scalable simulation scenarios, that enable the real-time execution of massively populated IoT environments. Attention is given to novel hybrid and multi-level simulation techniques that, when combined with agent-based, adaptive Parallel and Distributed Simulation (PADS) approaches, can provide means to perform highly detailed simulations on demand. To support this claim, we detail a use case concerned with the simulation of vehicular transportation systems.Comment: Proceedings of the IEEE 2017 International Conference on High Performance Computing and Simulation (HPCS 2017

Using Delay Tolerant Networks as a Backbone for Low-cost Smart Cities

Rapid urbanization burdens city infrastructure and creates the need for local governments to maximize the usage of resources to serve its citizens. Smart city projects aim to alleviate the urbanization problem by deploying a vast amount of Internet-of-things (IoT) devices to monitor and manage environmental conditions and infrastructure. However, smart city projects can be extremely expensive to deploy and manage. A significant portion of the expense is a result of providing Internet connectivity via 5G or WiFi to IoT devices. This paper proposes the use of delay tolerant networks (DTNs) as a backbone for smart city communication; enabling developing communities to become smart cities at a fraction of the cost. A model is introduced to aid policy makers in designing and evaluating the expected performance of such networks. Preliminary results are presented based on a public transit network data-set from Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Finally, innovative ways of improving network performance in a low-cost smart city is discussed.Comment: 3 pages, accepted to IEEE SmartComp 201