Sensors for Sustainable Smart Cities: A Review

Abstract

Experts confirm that 85% of the world’s population is expected to live in cities by 2050. Therefore, cities should be prepared to satisfy the needs of their citizens and provide the best services. The idea of a city of the future is commonly represented by the smart city, which is a more efficient system that optimizes its resources and services, through the use of monitoring and communication technology. Thus, one of the steps towards sustainability for cities around the world is to make a transition into smart cities. Here, sensors play an important role in the system, as they gather relevant information from the city, citizens, and the corresponding communication networks that transfer the information in real-time. Although the use of these sensors is diverse, their application can be categorized in six different groups: energy, health, mobility, security, water, and waste management. Based on these groups, this review presents an analysis of different sensors that are typically used in efforts toward creating smart cities. Insights about different applications and communication systems are provided, as well as the main opportunities and challenges faced when making a transition to a smart city. Ultimately, this process is not only about smart urban infrastructure, but more importantly about how these new sensing capabilities and digitization developments improve quality of life. Smarter communities are those that socialize, adapt, and invest through transparent and inclusive community engagement in these technologies based on local and regional societal needs and values. Cyber security disruptions and privacy remain chief vulnerabilities.

IoT-Enabled Smart Cities: A Review of Concepts, Frameworks and Key Technologies

“…For IoT-based solutions, the achievement of a higher scalability represents the possibility to efficiently collect and process increasingly larger amounts of data, which often leads to a higher accuracy in data analysis and often enables real-time or near real-time processing [114]. These aspects imply important social involvement, for instance, in security and resilience, since they allow the building of more resilient tools that are able to perform real-time analysis and simulations, e.g., those used by local public authorities for early warnings and alerts in critical events, such as disaster management [99] and resilience planning. Moreover, many IoT solutions are still oriented toward traditional programming environments, while the most recent trends show an advancement in the exploitation of visual paradigm languages (VPL) [15,32], including Node-RED, for implementing workflows for IoT applications.…”

“…As for smart water, sensing devices that are devoted to the assessment of water quantity and quality typically measure parameters such as pH, conductivity, turbidity, total dissolved solids, etc. [99]. Electromagnetic and ultrasonic sensors are employed to measure the pressure for water consumption rate analysis [100].…”

“…Smart environment applications and services are typically based on ambient and chemical sensors, which are used to measure physical quantities expressing environmental parameters and conditions, such as temperature, humidity, pressure [7] and different kinds of pollutants. Smart sensing and visualization technologies (satellites, LiDAR) are applied to greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) and land usage [99]. Location-based services and GIS data are also employed.…”

“…For instance, smart mobility solutions [3,66,[79][80][81][82] are aiming to establish near-to-zero emissions and reduced traffic flows and to also enhance the adoption of smart transportation and IoT paradigms. These aspects will bring relevant influences and improvements for the quality of life in smart cities [92]; • Climate Action: Smart environment technologies [3,66,102,103] that are focused on monitoring air quality and pollutant levels [99,104] contribute to analyzing and controlling air quality and fossil combustion, as well as their environmental impact in terms of CO2, NO, NO2, etc. (which are the main effects of fossil combustion); • Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions: Smart governance solutions [3,38,39,[46][47][48][49][50][51][52][53][54] contribute to providing institutions with data-driven decision-making processes [39], which makes citizens' participation more inclusive and deliberative, thus creating a consensus for the public good and enhancing equality and social justice [38].…”

A Holistic and Interoperable Approach towards the Implementation of Services for the Digital Transformation of Smart Cities: The Case of Vitoria-Gasteiz (Spain)

“…The proliferation of smart city initiatives across Europe, is creating a number of urban ‘living labs’ where pilot projects can be tested and evaluated. Outside Europe, Asia, and America are the continents with the largest number of Smart City implementations reported [ 25 ]. High-income countries, such as the United States and China, have a high number of smart city deployments in different locations.…”