Replication of Smart-City Internet of Things Assets in a Municipal Deployment

Recent efforts to integrate Internet of Things (IoT) technologies into Smart City constructs have proven successful through proof-of-concept deployments in multiple cities. To facilitate additional deployments, standardization, and dissemination of best practices for these technologies is critical. To that effort, this paper seeks to establish a framework in a set of IoT hardware, software, and wireless radio components that are flexible to address several use cases and easily replicable to new deployments. Moreover, the framework aims to be standards-based and to use best practices for cybersecurity to maintain security and privacy. The framework is developed, deployed, and tested through three subprojects in different domains and a live testbed housed by a municipal government, collecting over 160 million distinct sensor records from eight physical locations over a period of eight months. Additionally, the framework is replicated to a separate jurisdiction to prove ease of replicability. This paper identifies common barriers to IoT adoption and replication, both technological and organizational, and enumerates the approaches that were taken to overcome those barriers in these projects.

I. Introduction

The application of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies to the public space has become an important and very impactful area of research. Smart City is the concept of using sensing and data collection in municipal environments, and incorporates many IoT technologies. Many cities, communities, and municipal governments are looking to Smart-City technology as the next evolution of e-governance, enabling new interactions with the public or reducing overhead of existing policies. Municipal governments are also striving to take advantage of the advances of Information and Communication Technology, but specific implementation of the Smart City technology is often slowed down by the lack of generally accepted best practices and broadly deployed standard-based solutions, as well as by the necessary due processes for procurement and long budget cycles.