Smart city

Smart city is a phrase used to imply connecting intelligence to what had been an unconnected world. Smart cities are one of the fastest growing segments, and show substantial cost/benefit ratios especially when we consider tax revenues. Smart cities also touch citizens' lives through safety, security, and ease of use. For example, several cities such as Barcelona are fully connected and monitor trash containers and bins for pickup based on the current capacity, but also the time since the last pickup. This improves the trash collection efficiency allowing the city to use fewer resources and tax revenue in transporting waste, but also eliminates potential smells and odors of rotting organic material. Smart cities are also impacted by government mandates and regulations (as we will explore later), therefore there are ties to the government segment. 

One of the characteristics of smart city deployment may be the number of sensors used. For example, a smart camera installation on each street corner in New York would require over 3,000 cameras. In other cases, a city such as Barcelona will deploy nearly one million environmental sensors to monitor electric usage, temperature, ambient conditions, air quality, noise levels, and parking spaces. These all have low bandwidth needs versus a streaming video camera, but the aggregate amount of data transmitted will be nearly the same as the surveillance cameras in New York. These characteristics of quantity and bandwidth need to be considered in building the correct IoT architecture.