Internet of Things for Smart Cities
The Internet of Things (IoT) shall be able to incorporate transparently and seamlessly a large number of different and heterogeneous end systems, while providing open access to selected subsets of data for the development of a plethora of digital services. Building a general architecture for the IoT is hence a very complex task, mainly because of the extremely large variety of devices, link layer technologies, and services that may be involved in such a system. In this paper, we focus specifically to an urban IoT system that, while still being quite a broad category, are characterized by their specific application domain. Urban IoTs, in fact, are designed to support the Smart City vision, which aims at exploiting the most advanced communication technologies to support added value services for the administration of the city and for the citizens. This paper hence provides a comprehensive survey of the enabling technologies, protocols, and architecture for an urban IoT. Furthermore, the paper will present and discuss the technical solutions and best practice guidelines adopted in the Padova Smart City project, a proof of concept deployment of an IoT island in the city of Padova, Italy, performed in collaboration with the city municipality. Key Terms Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) Efficient XML Interchange (EXI) network architecture, sensor system integration, service functions and management, Smart Cities, testbed and trials, 6lowPAN.