Smart cities use networks of sensors, actuators, and centralized computing clusters to observe physical reality, derive information, and thereby influence citizens and authorities. Smart city applications therefore require three components to work: wireless sensor networks, geo-information systems, and frameworks for distributed analysis of sensor and geo-data. In this paper, we provide an overview on a set of concrete technologies for such information and communication infrastructures for smart cities. These technologies include a combination of WiFi-and PAN-based sensor networks, City GML data, a model-driven approach to collect and manage data, as well as distributed data analysis based on domain specific languages. We show how we use these technologies to research two typical smart city applications: earthquake early warning and traffic surveillance.
A community network must be usable for inexperienced end users; thus self-organization is essential. On the one hand, we propose an approach for self-organization in ad-hoc wireless multi-hop mesh networks, where the client is fully freed from such mundane tasks as IP configuration, etc. On the other hand, the community mesh network itself is fully self-organized thus no operator or provider is required. We present the architecture of the Berlin RoofNet (BRN) and a distributed realization of services like DHCP, ARP and Internet gateway discovery and selection. In addition, results of a detailed simulation and experimental evaluation comparing our distributed hash table based approach to traditional methods are presented. We show that our approach is more reliable, efficient and responsive.
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