Smart City Challenges

Perhaps the biggest challenge when designing a smart city is where to start. Solutions may arise from a single problem faced by a single sector, but understanding the problems across multiple sectors is key to effectively addressing all possibilities to support smart cities.

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

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

In the end, smart cities are not "one and done" projects. Success depends on continuously evolving and expanding use cases based on emerging needs. Cities continue to benefit and ROI grows as use cases increase.

Should cities bother?

On the surface, successful deployment and high ROI in smart cities may seem difficult. Fortunately, viable, tested and certified solutions are available today to address the challenges facing cities. Cities around the world, such as Calgary, Alberta, Canada; Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia; Bellau, Germany; Cary, North Carolina; and Montevideo, Uruguay, are good candidates for the successful deployment of smart city solutions. example.

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

where to start

When starting a project, cities need to look at their current pain points and possible changes based on urban development and planning plans. These identifiers will allow the city to determine what outcomes it wants, or what it plans to achieve by adding smart technology. The next thing to consider is finding the right partner. These relationships are critical to the long-term development of ongoing projects, as they already establish a foundation of trust and understanding of the systems being used, so deployment becomes easier for each use case.

In fact, cities are part of the massive Internet of Things (IoT), requiring thousands of sensors to capture the data they need to become smart. However, the amount of data that each sensor needs to transmit is tiny—whether a light is on or off, whether a city's water mains are leaking, whether a bridge's vibration sensor has triggered an alarm, and so on. The best choice for transferring small amounts of data is Low Power Wide Area Network (LoraWan) for a number of reasons:

It is an open standard that offers municipalities a wide choice in terms of vendors and suppliers, meaning they are not limited to proprietary solutions from a single source. This is complemented by the largest ecosystem and largest number of devices on the market, offering the widest selection of products from most vendors.

1. LoraWan is proven to be a multiRan solution and as such can be combined 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 existing networks without (re)investing in new hardware to accommodate future growth.
3. LoraWan has a battery life of 10 to 15 years, which minimizes maintenance requirements and keeps solution costs low.
4. LoraWan can transmit over long distances, as well as through concrete and metal, allowing it to reach areas that other technologies cannot.
5. The LoRa Alliance Certification Program supports LoraWan certified devices, so cities can be confident 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 around the world and at the largest scale.

The network is not an 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 devices they know will work as intended over the long term. This means that they need the certainty that certified products provide and must include requirements for solutions using certified equipment in their request for bids and proposals (RFP).

Two of the biggest challenges facing cities are tight budgets and a lack of communication across sectors. 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 enable all sectors within a city to benefit from infrastructure investments, while having the flexibility to meet the specific needs of each sector.

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 allow cities to scale efficiently, thereby maximizing efficiency and ROI.

Smart cities must be secure

Smart city deployments without all stakeholders making cybersecurity a top priority can create more problems than they solve. The network, and the sensors and devices connected to it, must exhibit optimal security and be able to continuously upgrade the security of the system as technology evolves.

The original developers of LoraWan understood this from the beginning and made sure 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 safety and functionality.

write at the end

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 high ROI while improving operational efficiency and the safety and health of citizens.

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