Qianjia Viewpoint | Simplifying Smart Cities

Challenges facing smart cities

When designing a smart city, perhaps the biggest challenge is where to start. Solutions may come from a single problem faced by a single sector, but to effectively address the full range of possibilities that support a smart city, understanding the issues across multiple sectors is key.

A city must have a clear strategy and a solid business case, as well as clear objectives and key performance indicators. Starting with a project that benefits multiple stakeholders encourages cities to choose technologies that are easily accessible, flexible, and scalable to meet a variety of needs.

Next, cities need to evaluate their current infrastructure and its future viability. Many cities already have cellular and wifi networks. Still, each technology presents different challenges in terms of coverage, battery life, and cost that can make smart city projects inefficient or too costly to achieve a return on investment (ROI).

Finally, smart cities are not “set it and forget it” projects. Success depends on evolving and expanding use cases based on emerging needs. As use cases grow, cities continue to benefit and their ROI grows.

Should cities bother?

On the surface, it seems that the successful deployment of smart cities and achieving a high ROI is still very difficult. Fortunately, viable, tested and certified solutions are available today to meet the challenges facing cities. Cities around the world, such as Calgary, Alberta, Canada, Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia, Berau, Germany, Cary, North Carolina, and Montevideo, Uruguay, are strong examples of successful deployments of smart city solutions.

These cities manage a multitude of use cases such as indoor and outdoor air quality, street lighting, asset management and theft prevention, demographics, pest control, water and waste management, flood/structure monitoring, building and parking, and traffic management.

Where to Start

When starting a project, cities need to look at their current pain points and how they might change based on urban development and planning initiatives. These identifiers will allow the city to identify its desired outcomes, or what it plans to achieve by adding smart technology. The next thing to consider is finding the right partners. These relationships are critical to the long-term development of ongoing projects because they have established a foundation of trust and understanding of the systems being used, so each use case deployment becomes easier.

In fact, cities are part of the massive Internet of Things (IoT) and require thousands of sensors to obtain the data they need to become smart. However, the data that each sensor needs to transmit is very small - whether the light is on or off, whether the city's water pipes are leaking, whether the vibration sensor on the bridge has triggered an alarm, etc. The best choice for transmitting small amounts of data is Low Power Wide Area Network (LoraWan) for many reasons:

It is an open standard that provides municipalities with multiple choices in terms of vendors and suppliers, meaning they are not locked into proprietary solutions from a single source. This goes hand in hand with the largest ecosystem and the most devices on the market, offering the widest choice of products from the most vendors.

1. LoraWan is certified as a multiRan solution and can therefore be used in conjunction with other network technologies to meet specific use case requirements or leverage existing infrastructure.
2. LoraWan is scalable, making it easy to add new applications to an existing network without having to (re)invest in new hardware to accommodate future growth.
3. With a 10 to 15 year battery life, LoraWan minimizes maintenance requirements and keeps solution costs low.
4. LoraWan can transmit over long distances and through concrete and metal, allowing it to cover areas that other technologies cannot.
5. The LoRa Alliance Certification Program supports LoraWan certified devices, so cities can have confidence that their solutions are future-proof and that the devices they deploy will perform as expected in urban environments.
6. Finally, LoraWan is a proven LPWAN technology with the most deployments and scale around the world.

The network is not isolated

Part of any city’s decision-making process must be the availability of products and services used on the network. At the same time, cities need to deploy equipment that they know will work as expected over the long term. This means they need the certainty that certified products provide and must include requirements for solutions using certified equipment in their bids and requests for proposals (RFPs).

Two of the biggest challenges cities face are tight budgets and a lack of cross-departmental communication. Each department has its own goals and requires unique use case solutions, which often makes collaborative goals difficult. However, solutions based on open standards will allow all departments within a city to benefit from infrastructure investments while having the flexibility to meet the specific needs of each department.

LoraWan is the ideal solution for this situation: Once a LoraWan network is deployed, it is easy and cost-effective to expand. Once the network is up and running, unlimited applications can be added to the network. These factors enable cities to scale efficiently, thereby maximizing efficiency and return on investment.

Smart cities must be secure

Smart city deployments that do not prioritize cybersecurity for all stakeholders are likely to cause more problems than they solve. The network, and the sensors and devices connected to it, must exhibit optimal security and be able to continually upgrade the security of the system as technology evolves.

The original developers of LoraWan understood this from the beginning and ensured that security was designed into the LoraWan standard from the beginning. LoraWan security uses 2 x 128-bit AES encryption keys to define network and application-level security. LoraWan has another feature that many LPWANs lack: the ability to transmit firmware updates over the air (FUOTA). This is another aspect of the technology that gives cities confidence in the long-term viability of the solution in terms of security and functionality.

Final Thoughts

Despite the challenges, the right solutions exist today to deploy smart city solutions that address municipalities’ desired outcomes, estimated costs, and ROI goals. There are many cities that have deployed LoraWan and achieved a high ROI while improving operational efficiency and the safety and health of their citizens.

To be successful, all stakeholders need to be involved and ensure alignment in decision making and deployment. They must ask the right questions and build confidence among all stakeholders in the solution, its reliability and benefits, and the value of the data it generates. With the largest IoT ecosystem, LoraWan solution providers are ideally suited to work with cities to ensure a fit-for-purpose solution is deployed to achieve their goals.