Urban Automation Networks: Current and Emerging Solutions for Sensed Data Collection and Actuation in Smart Cities

Carles Gomez; Josep Paradells

doi:10.3390/s150922874

Urban Automation Networks: Current and Emerging Solutions for Sensed Data Collection and Actuation in Smart Cities

Sensors (Basel). 2015 Sep 10;15(9):22874-98. doi: 10.3390/s150922874.

Authors

Carles Gomez^{1

2}, Josep Paradells^{3

4}

Affiliations

¹ Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya/Fundació i2Cat, C/Esteve Terradas, 7, Castelldefels 08860, Spain. carlesgo@entel.upc.edu.
² Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya/Fundació i2Cat, C/Jordi Girona, 1-3, Barcelona 08034, Spain. carlesgo@entel.upc.edu.
³ Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya/Fundació i2Cat, C/Esteve Terradas, 7, Castelldefels 08860, Spain. josep.paradells@entel.upc.edu.
⁴ Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya/Fundació i2Cat, C/Jordi Girona, 1-3, Barcelona 08034, Spain. josep.paradells@entel.upc.edu.

Abstract

Urban Automation Networks (UANs) are being deployed worldwide in order to enable Smart City applications. Given the crucial role of UANs, as well as their diversity, it is critically important to assess their properties and trade-offs. This article introduces the requirements and challenges for UANs, characterizes the main current and emerging UAN paradigms, provides guidelines for their design and/or choice, and comparatively examines their performance in terms of a variety of parameters including coverage, power consumption, latency, standardization status and economic cost.

Keywords: DTN; IEEE 802.11; IEEE 802.15.4; Internet of Things; SIGFOX; cellular networks; low-power wireless networks; sensor and actuator networks; smart cities; urban automation networks.