Interoperability issues on heterogeneous wireless communication for smart cities

Keywords: Smart cities Heterogeneous wireless communication Architecture Low cost Interoperability a b s t r a c t Smart cities have become a reality around the world. They rely on wireless communication technologies, and they have provided many benefits to society, such as monitoring road traffic in real-time, giving continuous healthcare assistance to residents and managing the environment. This article revisits key interoperability questions in heterogeneous wireless networks for smart cities, and outlines a simple, modular architecture to deal with these complex issues. The architecture is composed by sensing, access network, Internet/cloud and application layers. Different features provided by the architecture, such as interoperability among technologies, low cost, reliability and security, have been evaluated through experiments and simulations under different scenarios. The QoS support and the seamless connectivity between pairs of heterogeneous technologies are proposed through a policy-based management (PBM) framework and MIH (Media Independent Handover). Moreover, an 802.11 mesh backbone composed of different types of mesh routers has been deployed for interconnecting the sensors and actuators to the Internet. Key results from experiments in the backbone are examined. They compare: (i) the performance of a single-path routing protocol (OLSR) with a multipath one (MP-OLSR); (ii) the monitoring delays from the proposed low cost sunspot/mesh and arduino/mesh gateways; and (iii) the authentica-tion mechanisms employed. Significant results from simulations allow the analysis of the reliability on vehicular/mesh networks under jamming attacks by applying the OLSR and MP-OLSR routing protocols. Finally, this article provides an overview of open research questions. In the last decade, there has been a growing demand for more attractive and efficient cities, in an attempt to reduce the effects of urbanization. Researchers believe that following the pattern of social change of the 1990s in some countries, new policies for sustainable urban planning are required as a result of the huge migration of people from rural areas to only a few large cities [1,2]. The high concentration of people raised different challenges for the government, such as uncontrolled growth, traffic congestion, crime, waste resource management and others. Furthermore, owing to globalization, cities started to compete with each other to attract the best professionals, by providing them attractive environments where they could live [2]. These challenges have led governments to adopt technologically-based approaches and handle the negative effects of urbanization via broadband interconnected cities, known as Smart Cities. Governments around the world, including the Japanese, Germany and Brazilian ones, have …