IoT and Smart Cities: Your smart city planning guide

By Rashmi Nanda

The Internet of Things (IoT) not only connect people but will connect ‘smart’ homes, appliances, cars, offices, factories, cities, basically the world. This book discusses how smart cities strive to deploy and interconnect infrastructures and services to guarantee that the authorities and citizens have access to reliable and global customized services. The book describes a wide range of topics present in the design, development, and running of smart cities, ranging from big data management, Internet of Things, and sustainable urban planning. The technical aspects of smart cities enabled primarily by the Internet of Things, the socio-economic motivations and impact of smart city development are covered in this book.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BPB Online LLP
• Release date: Oct 9, 2019
• ISBN: 9789388511834

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Why India needs Internet of Things (IoT) for bringing in core and key transformations

Internet of Things may take few more years for proliferating in a global scenario as well as in India. Experts of industry from Accenture, Vodafone, L&T Tech, Tata Communications, and Parallel Wireless paint use cases and future pictures of India’s IoT. There are numerous cases in which IoT has been used currently and extensively by the organizations and consumers. IoT touches all companies that include realms of manufacturing, transportation, retail, healthcare, energy, and telecom. In India, Internet of Things have lots of use cases on the basis of nation’s cultural, geography, and demography set-up (Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1: IoT in Smart City

As per the annual 2017-2018 barometer report of IoT, percentage of industries having more than 50 thousand active connected devices has become double in last twelve months. 84 percent of adopters of IoT say that their IoT usage has increased form the last year. Indian companies that had been a part of research (81 percent) felt that Internet of Things is integral in modification which should be digital.

As per the Deloitte studies, current numbers of Indian IoT devices has been around sixty million, which will grow to 1.9 billion units till 2020. Our country’s IoT market has been poised for reaching Dollar 15 billion by 2020. It accounts to be 5 percent of market that has been global, according to report of NASSCOM (Figure 1.2).

Figure 1.2: Overview of IoT Structure and Technology

India’s adoption of IoT

Like in the rest part of the world, initial deployments shall be in metropolitan and urban nation parts. But, initiative of smart cities by government, which means that only tier 3 and tier 2 cities might get witness with few IoT project deployment. Consumer IoT emerges with specified focus on smart lifestyle and connected homes. - Rajesh Mishra, CTO, Founder, and President of Parallel Wireless.

Rajesh Mishra also told that providers of service have begun to work for maximizing the profits from flourishing and emerging market. Telco’s is coming up along with new services and items for addressing this market. But, as of today, stress has been on IoT that is industrial.

Telco’s uses the solutions of IoT for enhancing their operational efficiencies and for monitoring the remote cell towers. Efficient data analysis helps them in predicting failures. So, better maintenance of network is done.

India looks forward to overcome the old challenges with IoT around. Challenges have been encountered on factors like education, extreme climatic calamities, efficient value chain of farming, healthcare, and civic issues. India with its technological competency has been driving globalized innovations. This will helps in realizing the possibilities which otherwise seems to appear virtual only. - Keshab Panda, MD & CEO, of L&T Technology Services.

Our nation (India’s) IoT use cases

Tracking is IoT’s essential utilization scenario in India. Organizational agnostics have been deployed by large, small, and medium industries in insurance, banking, beverage, logistics, food, and automobile sectors. - Nick Gliddon, Director of Vodafone Business Services.

In Indian agricultural, smart tractors are being in use which will help in improving the productivity of crops in farms; or In utility and energy sector, millions of meters are connected for becoming smart meters further on extending to utility like gas and water. It reduces distribution and transmission losses. Other use case of energy is to monitor the diesel generators forth for fuel usages and power outputs.

Gliddon said that use case that is unique for India’s growth is Mobile POS- card on demand. It presently has been utilized in numerous cases such as payments linked by Aadhaar or fair priced payments of shop (Figure 1.3).

Figure 1.3: Mobile POS Card

Future directions and difficulties faced by Internet of Things (IoT)

Potential of growth for embedded industries has been enormous. Forward paths are becoming clearer by each passing day. It is the time that all of us begin to build system of IoT in turn to give value to customers. IoT connects 28 billion things by 2020 to internet. It ranges from devices that are wearable like smart watches to industrial equipment, automobiles, and appliances. In this book, we shall focus at various solutions of IoT developed till date, their technology, functionality used and thereby concluding with numerous complexities that must be paid heed for giving way to solutions which is better and helps the community in general.

The tern IoT had been invented in the year 1998. This is network-of-networks typically where; larger sensor or object number is connected by means of data and communication infrastructure for providing services added by value. It assured us the world in which all materials around us has been connected to internet. So, there is a communication with one another along with minimal intervention of humans. Ultimate aim is the creation of excellent world for human beings.

As per other definition, IoT refers to the distributed global network of physical commodities that has capability of acting or sensing on environments. There is ability of communicating with each other and varied computers or machines. These smart products come in wider ranges of capacities and sizes that include simple items with industrial robots, trains, cars, household appliances, embedded sensors, and wearable things like shirts, watches, or bracelets.

Nowadays, IoT is high on rise from the realms that are under its true effect completely. From cities that are smart, safe, having healthy environment, good transport – health facility, IoT has revitalized such factors totally and completely.

IoT solution’s functionality

IoT is understood sometimes as becoming synonymous with the systems that are smart. It can be smart enterprises, smart wearable, smart environment, smart city, and smart homes.

Smart wearable

Smart wearable is a networked device which tracks activities, customizes experiences with user desires, needs, and collects the data. A wearable is designed to perform various functions and can be worn on different body part like legs, head, fingers, eyes, hands, waist, and wrist or embedded onto numerous attire element.

Devices that are wearable have been classified as per two standards:

Body-dressed (trousers, coat, and underwear), foot-worn (socks and shoes), head-mounted (helmet and glass) and hand-worn (as gloves, watch and bracelet).

Functions of commodities. It includes information consulting (smart watch and smart glass), somato-sensory control (somato-sensory controller) and healthy living (smart bracelet and sport wristband).

Smart homes

Smart homes is the integration of services and technology by means of home networking. It ensures better living quality. A different technology in relation with smart home is emerging. It makes living experience at home much more pleasant and convenient. Few solutions of smart homes pay attention on giving assistance to elderly (chest (band), hand (gloves), waist (band), fingers (rings), body (cloth), head (helmet), legs (socks), eyes (glasses), foot (shoes), and wrist (bands/watch)) people on monitoring health care and for conducting their daily chores. Large potential of market with more solution of smart home is establishing its way into market of today.

Smart city

Smart city is an urban place which is highly modern with respect to market viability, ultra-modern structure overall, communication, and real estate which is sustainable. It is a city in which Information Technology is the principal modern organization with basis for provision of crucial services to dwellers. Still, in this there are lots of platforms that are technological. Today smart city is becoming reality because its Movement is unfolding. Urbanized IoT is designed for supporting vision of smart city with ambition of exploiting most updated and advanced communication technology. This supports value added services for citizen and city administration. Application of paradigm of IoT to urban context has been a particular interest. It responds to stronger pushing of varied national governments for adopting solutions of ICT in public affair management.

Smart environment

Smart environment comprises of smart buildings, smart mobility, smart governance, and smart utilities. Services that has been enabled by paradigm of IoT in environment of smart city ranges from waste management, health building monitoring, traffic congestion, smart parking, air quality monitoring, smart lightning, monitoring of water quality, monitoring of natural disaster, noise monitoring, to smart farming. Example is Air Quality Egg (AQE), it’s a community led system of sensor which assists in better quality of air of community.

Amrita Centre for Wireless Networks and Applications (Amrita WNA) is a detection system of wireless landslides that possess capability to release alerts regarding landslides. This is caused by torrential raining in season.

Smart enterprise

IoT enterprise solutions are designed for supporting general purpose infrastructure and functionality in place that is industrial. Current strategies of enterprise have acknowledged few interfaces for smart items. But with the rise of communication and computational capabilities of such products, power does shift towards network edge. As an intelligent mechanisms for conversion, data aggregation, fusion, and filtering is executed at and deployed to edge of network or within network. Software is the driver of key innovation in various organizations with lots of new models of business of future relying heavily on usage of these items. Few of very promising ones has been production, integrity of supply chain, logistics, transportation, health, and manufacturing. Consider an example, Wattics which is smart meter solution managing consumption of energy at machine level and appliance which is individual. Optimal and timely strategies of replenishment have been determined from data of context that is in relation with the patterns of usage. en.Gauge, INC (Engaugeinc) is monitoring system of fire extinguisher remote (Figure 1.4).

Figure 1.4: How IoT Services impacts our lives

IoT’s Technical Backbone

There are three components of IoT that ensures pervasive seamless computing:

Hardware that is made up of actuator, hardware of embedded communication, and sensors.

Middleware that consists of tools of computing and on demand storage for analytics of data.

Presentation which comprises of novel easiness to have a knowhow of interpretation and visualization tools which is accessed widely on various platforms.

Challenges in IoT development

In this section we will going to discuss few of core and integral challenges required for being addressed for building IoT. Issue solutions need to come from background that is financial, technological, business, legal, and social. This is done for getting wide acceptance from community of IoT.

Interoperability and standards: These are crucial for existence of markets for new technology standards. In case, if devices from various manufacturers have no utilization of similar standards, then interoperability becomes difficult. It needs extra gateways for translating from one standard to next. Additionally, industries controlling varied vertical market parts dominate market, in turn creating barriers with stifling of competition for entrepreneurs and small players. Lots of different information standards tend towards locking of consumers onto one item family. If customers do not transfer easily their information while replacing device along with other device from a separate and different manufacturer, then they shall certainly lose information which they have accumulated over the time (Figure 1.5).

Figure 1.5: IoT Challenges

Security: As IoT connects numerous devices with each other, it provides entry points that are more decentralized for malware. Less costly devices which have been in locales are compromised physically and are subjected more to tampering. Varied layers of M2M communication, integration middleware, software, and APIs do create new risks of security along with more complexity. Please expect to visualize various vendors and techniques to address such issues together with approaches that are driven by policy towards provisioning and security.

Privacy and trust: With sensors that are remote and are monitor by using key use cases for Internet of Things, there are heightened sensitivities for controlling data ownership and accessibility. Two recent highly profiled breach of security is present at Home Depot and Target is achieved by going across third party vendor’s stolen credential for gaining access to system of payment. Vetting of partner shall become more critical ever. Compliance continues as the core issue in assisted living and medical applications. This has ramifications of death and life. New frameworks of compliance evolve and address with unique issues of IoT. Political and social concerns in this area also hinder the adoption of IoT.

Issues of integration, complexity, and confusion: With lots of platforms, large API numbers, different protocols, testing and system integration of IoT becomes a difficulty. Confusion around evolving standard has been almost surer to slower an adoption. API rapid evolution likely consumes developmental resources that are unanticipated along with diminishing of ability of teams of project for adding integral new functionalities. Adoption which is slow with the requirement of development unanticipated resource likely slips schedule and slower timing towards revenues. This need funding that must be additional for long runways, IoT projects and start-ups.

Competing standards, evolving architectures, and protocol wars: With numerous players that are involved along with IoT, there is a chance of on-going turf wars. Legacy industries seek for protecting their system of proprietary’s benefits with proponent of open system. They try for setting the newer standards. Lots of present benchmarks evolve depending on the determined requirements by uses, device class, capabilities, and requirement of power. This does present the opportunity for advocate of open source and vendor of platform for influencing and contributing future standards.

Compelling propositions of value and use cases that are concrete: Lack of strong examples of ROI or use cases, slows down the IoT adoption. Although use case that is theoretical, future concept, and technical specification suffice for few earlier adopters, mainstream IoT adoption needs customer oriented, well-grounded messaging, and communication around. Queries rise as to what is available for masses. Providers of IoT need to explain an integral advantages of services of theirs.

Future of IoT

IoT acceleration to reality from lofty concept has been predicated on exponential projected growth of device that is smart with data confluence, low cost establishment, and connectivity.

To decline the costs of device, pervasive, and widespread connection, with ever increasing heed on operational productivity, and efficiency is leading forth to wider IoT solution deployment. Such a rapid growth has been based on the IoT expectations that bring tangible benefit to people and business. These advantages take varied forms for governments, citizens, and businesses.

Customers get more personalized service or item offers placed on as to what they actually do or where they must be present. They travel in a very efficient way by avoiding traffic jam when connected cars suggest the alternative routes. This is based on trafficking which is reported by various vehicles. It saves cash by reducing energy usages or by payment of premium lower car insurance to form on safe driving verified practices. They could be safe, healthy with more independency because of wearable devices providing health feedback or monitoring elderly in home.

Business gives better assistance and commodities by researching on as how buyers behave. They do discover needs for new provisions or products. They protect buildings by means of security being remote, secured assets such as machinery, cars with Global Positioning System (GPS) to track location and distant devices of locking. It ensures that the product which is sensitive (pharmaceuticals) is stored consistently in accurate conditions. This is in the case of utility utilizing smart meters for eliminating wastes or losses. It can be also in case of seller of equipment which provides preventive just in time maintenance. Farmers are more productive together with smart irrigation which gives water just when and where needed.

Public authorities and governments also get advantage from Internet of Things. For example long term care and health costs are reduced with excellent far-off