Providing Ubiquitous Wireless Connectivity in Smart Cities through Dense Small Cell Deployment

Information and Communication Technologies are a key enabler for the realization of future Smart Cities. These technologies can provide pervasive and ubiquitous wireless connectivity to citizens, thanks to which citizens will be able to contribute to the improvement of several urban services. Such connectivity is generally realized through mobile broadband wireless devices, such as smart phones and tablets. However, the severe increase in mobile subscriptions and data usage, pose severe challenges to mobile network operators in meeting the growing demand, without creating new network complexity. Small cell networks have been proposed as a viable solution to offload the macrocell network. However, the wide spread adoption of dense small cell networks is challenging, due to potential interference and increased energy consumption, that may prevent to achieve the potential benefits of this technology. This paper describes the challenges and overviews a framework to enable dense deployments of small cell networks. The framework includes techniques for selective activation, inference prediction, energy harvesting and computation offloading, with the ultimate goal of providing user efficient and pervasive connectivity to meet the demand of future Smart Cities.