Smart City Wireless Platforms for Smart Cities

摘要

A wireless network (e.g. a mesh Wi-Fi network) covering most of the city is a key component in the development of a smart city. While such a network offers countless benefits, a key issue with city-wide wireless network is the high fixed costs associated with laying out the infrastructure, rolling out the services, making the bandwidth available, maintaining the services once the network is laid out. One key question is determining who will setup the network and who will fund it. Secondly, who will supply the bandwidth while broadband bandwidth is still in shortage in most cities? Lastly, who will pay for the supplied bandwidth? We believe involvement of the communities is important in building a city-wide wireless network. Could the city inspire and assist the communities to build their community wireless networks, and then coalesce them for a city-wide wireless network? To address the first question, we proposed in our separate work a model where municipality, communities and smart utility providers work together to create a platform, smart community wireless platform, for a community in the city where different sides work together toward achieving smart community objectives. In this paper, we address the second question by presenting the smart city wireless platform which is a superset and merger of the smart community wireless platforms. We present the smart city wireless platform with its various dynamics and describe a research plan for analyzing if this platform could be viable alternative to fulfill smart city objectives.