Utilizing M2M Technologies for Building Reliable Smart Cities

With a large majority of the world´s population moving towards urban environments in the foreseeable future, the notion of Smart City is emerging globally as an important research topic. The population movement will affect the consumption rate of natural resources i.e. water, soil, and plants. Therefore, innovative management and monitoring systems are required to enhance citizen´s quality of life. Additionally, the power grid complexity is increasing as more private or enterprise buildings become virtual power generation facilities by deploying clean energy generators based on renewable energy sources (e.g. Photo voltaic cells). By installing small smart and affordable devices in key points around the city, the information about environment status and resources consumption can be collected and transmitted (over different network technologies) to higher level control systems. This will support predictions, decision making, trigger prompt actions at device domain or notifying the consumers about possible actions adapt to the current power grid resources. When the predictions and control over demand behavior and reduction of unnecessary power generation are improving, there will be a positive impact on the costs and CO2 emissions, rendering the entire city smarter. This paper introduces an infrastructure for reliable Smart City, investigates a number of use cases scenario and propose possible solutions. The proposed architecture is based on a Smart City platform and an ETSI M2M/ oneM2M compliant Machine-to-Machine communication framework.