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The role of cell technology in future Smart City

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 TRANSACTIONS ON EMERGING TELECOMMUNICATIONS TECHNOLOGIES
Trans. Emerging Tel. Tech. 2014; 25:1120
Published online 20 November 2013 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com). DOI: 10.1002/ett.2766

SPECIAL ISSUE - SMART CITIES

The role of small cell technology in future Smart City

applications
Antonio Cimmino1 , Tommaso Pecorella2 , Romano Fantacci2 , Fabrizio Granelli3 , Talha Faizur
Rahman3 , Claudio Sacchi3*, Camillo Carlini4 and Piyush Harsh1
1 InIT Cloud Computing Lab, ZHAW Zurich University of Applied Sciences, Technikumstrasse 9, WInterthur, Switzerland
2 Department of Information Engineering (DINFO),University of Firenze, Via di S.Marta 3, I-50139, Firenze, Italy
3 Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science (DISI), University of Trento, Via Sommarive 5, I-38123, Trento,
Italy
4 TILab, Telecom Italia, Via di Val Cannuta 250, I-00166, Rome, Italy

ABSTRACT
Meeting citizens requirements economically and efficiently is the most important objective of Smart Cities. As a matter
of fact, they are considered a key concept both for future Internet and information and communications technology. It is
expected that a wide range of services will be made available for residential users (e.g. intelligent transportation systems,
e-government, e-banking, e-commerce and smart management of energy demand), public administration entities, public
safety and civil protection agencies and so on with increased quality, lower costs and reduced environmental impact. In
order to achieve these ambitious objectives, new technologies should be developed such as non-invasive sensing, highly
parallel processing, smart grids and mobile broadband communications. This paper considers the communication aspects
of Smart City applications, specifically, the role of the latest developments of Long-Term Evolution-Advanced standard,
which forecast the increase of broadband coverage by means of small cells. We shall demonstrate that the novel concept
of small cell fully meets the emerging communication and networking requirements of future Smart Cities. To this aim, a
feasible network architecture for future Smart Cities, based on small cells, will be discussed in the framework of a future
smarter and user-centric perspective of forthcoming 4G mobile technologies. Copyright 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

*Correspondence
C. Sacchi, University of Trento, Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science (DISI), Via Sommarive 5, I-38123,
Trento, Italy.
E-mail: [email protected]

Received 3 June 2013; Revised 7 October 2013; Accepted 18 October 2013

1. INTRODUCTION interesting cooperative model, targeted at supporting the

creation of innovative services and applications with real
Following the operational definition of Smart City, value to economy and citizens, has been proposed by the
reported at page 6 of [1], a city is said to be smart consortium of the European Union (EU) OUTSMART
when investments in human and social capital and tradi- project [4]. The model is based on a stakeholders trian-
tional (transport) and modern [information and commu- gle (Figure 1), whose vertices are represented by citizens,
nications technology(ICT)] communication infrastructure utilities and cities:
fuel sustainable economic growth and a high quality of life,
with a wise management of natural resources and through  Citizens are one of the main beneficiaries of smart
participatory governance. cities. They will benefit from various smart ser-
It is clear that the fulfilment of such ambitious goals vices provided by utility companies and city author-
requires synergic efforts in terms of research and inno- ities, with the aim of enhancing their lives in terms
vation that should be strongly coordinated with social of security (e.g. better street lighting, prevention of
requirements of citizens and municipalities. To this aim, muck corners), health, well-being (e.g. reduced CO2
various business models are proposed with the objec- emission) and economics (e.g. resource optimisation
tive of defining an effective service planning in ecosys- or employment as developers). Moreover, citizens
tems that are becoming smarter and smarter [2, 3]. An shall be empowered with more control for resource

Copyright 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. 11

 A. Cimmino et al.

sustainability but also to offer new services targeted at

improving quality of life, promoting commercial business
and tourism, assisting elderly people, providing educa-
tional services, leisure and so on. In such a model, the
beneficial effects of the developed technology are exploited
in closed loop by cities, citizens and utilities together.
In the model described earlier, ICT technologies and,
specifically, wireless networking technologies play a key
role. Recently, some examples of ICT-based experimental
facilities for Smart Cities have been presented in literature.
In [5], a Smart City testbed, namely SmartSantander
(located in the city of Santander in Spain), is presented.
The application considered is related to distributed envi-
ronmental monitoring using wide-area wireless sensor net-
works (WSNs) based on IEEE 802.15.4.
Another testbed, explicitly targeted at ubiquitous com-
Figure 1. Smart City ecosystem [4]. puting, is shown in [6] and is operational in the city
of Oulu (Finland). A middleware layer has been created
management by collaborating in economical and on top of the Oulu metropolitan WiFi access network in
environmental issues. order to allow ubiquitous computing with sensing and
 Utilities are the infrastructure to be developed for communication resources embedded in urban elements.
Smart Cities. More specifically, we can identify under A Cloud architecture for Smart Cities based on Near
such category mainly the two following entities: ser- Field Communication technology is proposed in [7].
vice providers and network providers. The first ones All the solutions proposed in [57] are based on local
are responsible for offering a service useful to the area networking infrastructures, providing hot spot rather
citizens or the smart city at large, while the second than ubiquitous broadband connectivity. Broadband con-
ones have the responsibility to operate the network nectivity available anytime and anywhere will be one of the
infrastructure that will enable the services. Their aim key requirements of future intelligent cities, where people
is to allow utility companies to improve the man- will be totally connected. As stated in [8], people living
agement of their resources: optimisation of resource in cities that are really smart must no longer be worried
distribution, prevention of resource outages, easy and about incompatible networks or applications that break
rapid maintenance actions and so on. Besides this, when used on the go.
utility providers will benefit from the new environ- In such a perspective, Long-Term Evolution-Advanced
ment, becoming able to develop and deploy added- (LTE-A) technology [9] will configure itself as one of
value network-facilitated services for users. This will the main pillars of the future Smart Cities in order to
simplify and accelerate service delivery, reducing the guarantee broadband access and efficient service mobili-
operational costs and enhancing a faster return of sation. Innovative LTE-A PHY and MAC layer solutions,
investment. The collaborative ecosystem and inter- that is, carrier aggregation, enhanced multiple-input and
actions will make services tailored for customers multiple-output support, coordinated multi-point transmis-
specific needs and preferences. sion, relaying and so on, should effectively support system
 Cities are where around 80% of the EU citizens live: bandwidth up to 100 MHz, with potential throughput of
urban areas at a very high density. Cities are expe- 1 Gb/s for downlink and 500 Mb/s for uplink. We believe
riencing many problems (security, pollution, traffic that the concept of small-range cells forecasted in LTE-
congestion, infrastructure maintenance, asset man- A [10] will represent a technological breakthrough in the
agement etc.) related to this unprecedented citizens wireless networking design for Smart Cities.
number growth. This has led to an increased strain Small cells are already considered as an enabler because
on utilities providers and services necessary to facil- of their lower energy consumption and broadband cover-
itate daily life. Using smart services with networked age capacity (see [11]). Some recent works (e.g. [12]) have
sensors and actuators deployed in the city, authorities already considered the integration of macro, micro and
will be able to monitor the environment in real-time, small cells with the aim of building service platforms for
enabling a prompt response, and to establish auto- Smart Cities.
mated control processes with less or even without Another technology that is clearly emerging in the
human intervention. At the same time, the municipal- framework of LTE-A is the Cloud radio access network
ity will be able to provide enhanced services to the (Cloud RAN) [13, 14]. The virtualisation of radio access
citizens (e.g. assisted living). obtained by means of real-time Cloud infrastructures
would allow network providers to increase spectrum
The deployment in urban areas of smart infrastruc- efficiency and to reduce power consumption. From the
tures would allow not only to improve environmental point of view of service providers, Cloud RAN should

12 Trans. Emerging Tel. Tech. 25:1120 (2014) 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
DOI: 10.1002/ett
 A. Cimmino et al.

enable easier delivery of new rich wireless services mainly focused on simple services for either the commu-
cost-effectively. nity (e.g. public transportation and street lights) or citizens
The aim of this paper is to analyse and critically dis- (e.g. parking services and smart metering). However, the
cuss the role of small-range cells in the service provi- most advanced examples of Smart Cities (Singapore, Rio
sion for citizens and business companies in future Smart de Janeiro etc.) are currently focused on services based on
Cities. Potential breakthroughs and open challenges related the concept of big data, that is, integration and process-
to such technology will be investigated. A viable archi- ing of big amounts of data generated by heterogeneous
tectural view for a fully networked wireless Smart City sources (e.g. weather, traffic conditions, crimes and best
based on the small-cell concept will be presented in the routes across the city). Nonetheless, the offered services
framework of the ecosystem described earlier. In such are rather traditional.
a framework, the communication tasks to be fulfilled As a consequence, the prediction of traffic patterns
should not only address personal, commercial and admin- at network level remain extremely speculative. Thus,
istrative data exchange among citizens, administrators, the design and dimensioning of a proper communication
business managers and so on but also transparent com- infrastructure should take into consideration the capacity of
munication among heterogeneous sensors and actuators easily adapting to the needs of this multi-faceted and ever-
together with efficient data transmission from these devices changing scenario. Therefore, it is possible to define the
to control units spread along the monitored areas. As following communication and networking requirements:
clearly stated in [15], utilities need to evolve their existing
system architectures to enable the flexible creation of this (1) Interoperability: a clear trend is to interconnect all
kind of advanced services integrated with the existing com- the possible data sources through a global infras-
mercial services. Thanks to the potentialities offered by tructure (e.g. a Cloud-based service or the Internet
small cells and Cloud RAN, we believe that the proposed at large) to support new services.
architecture should provide the flexibility, reconfigurabil- (2) Scalability: the communication and networking
ity, throughput enhancement, delay and latency reduction infrastructure of a Smart City should provide band-
needed to achieve the aforementioned ambitious goals. width and performance using architectures able to
scale and be upgraded easily as users grow and
services reach maturity.
(3) Fast deployment: deployment of new solutions
2. EMERGING COMMUNICATION or upgrades of the existing infrastructure should
AND NETWORKING be as fast as possible, favouring small and easy-
REQUIREMENTS IN FUTURE SMART to-instal devices. Some sections of the communi-
CITIES cation infrastructure can be mobile or installed ad
hoc in case of specific requests (e.g. big events and
The Smart City paradigm is a vision for future cities cen- emergencies).
tred around the concept of connectivity. Indeed, connec- (4) Robustness: living in a Smart City will require a
tivity is the core requirement for Smart Cities to exist, number of services. As a consequence, communica-
enabling tight integration among citizens, devices and ser- tions should be robust enough to provide guarantees
vice providers. However, it is also a means for interopera- in availability even in extreme conditions.
ble access and interconnection among different services. (5) Limited power consumption: smart resources man-
Looking back at the history of Internet, it took 22 years agement and limited environmental impact are
(i.e. from the first Advanced Research Projects Agency another important aspect to look at in Smart Cities.
Network to the WWW development) to have a consumer Following the recent activities in the field of green
application allowing the commercial exploitation of the communications, the infrastructure should have lim-
technology. Hopefully, the services for Smart Cities will ited environmental impact and low power consump-
need less time to be finalised, because several communi- tion to minimise operating and management costs.
cation infrastructures already exist and operate in many (6) Multi-modal access: users should be empowered by
cities. As an example, in a typical city, we can find opti- the services of a Smart City regardless of the devices
cal or copper cables used by Internet service providers they are using. Access to Smart City services should
to deliver Internet access to the citizen as well as 3G/4G follow the AAA principle: Any-time, Any-where,
cellular infrastructure for mobile users. However, the pres- Any-device.
ence of existing communication infrastructures represents
on one side an advantage (in terms of faster deployment) 3. SMALL CELLS AND LTE-A:
but also a constraint (as the integration of some communi- BASIC CONCEPTS AND POTENTIAL
cation facilities could be hindered by local regulations or BREAKTHROUGHS
ownership or by architectural issues).
Moreover, it is still unclear which will be the killer Considering the communication requirements listed in
application that will drive the explosion and growth of the Section 2, Smart Cities will heavily depend on the net-
Smart City concept. Several existing testbeds and pilots are work infrastructure. The broadband mobile connectivity

Trans. Emerging Tel. Tech. 25:1120 (2014) 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. 13
DOI: 10.1002/ett
 A. Cimmino et al.

will have to support increased coverage and superior

quality-of-service. In this framework, small cells will rep-
resent a suitable technology to address such unprecedented
requests.
For some time, the concept of small-cell was somewhat
confused with that one of femto-cell. A femto-cell is a
specific typology of small cell targeted at improving short-
range indoor coverage [16]. Recent developments of LTE-
A standardisation radically updated the concept of small
cell. In LTE-As perspective, a small cell is a low-power
and low-cost radio base station, whose primary design tar-
get is to provide superior cellular coverage in residential,
enterprise and hot spot outdoor environments. Four main
typologies of small cells have been identified in [17]:

 Pico-cells, smaller, lighter base stations, which plug

directly into an operator core network;
Figure 2. Large cell coverage.
 Femto-cells, mentioned earlier;
 Trusted WLAN cells, integrated into the LTE-A sys-
tem;
 Relay nodes that have been primarily defined in LTE
Release 10/11 in order to extend the macro-cell cov-
erage or fill a coverage hole.

Early feasibility studies about LTE-A systems and

beyond [18] are assigned to small cells, a key role in
enabling future broadband coverage up to 25 Gb/s/km2
(urban environment). In such a perspective, the intensive
use of dynamic time-division duplexing, carrier aggrega-
tion, interference coordination and massive multiple-input
and multiple-output systems should increase the available
capacity of some orders of magnitude. Moreover, users
exchanging data in each small cell will experiment an
increased quality-of-experience because the transmission
resources are shared by a minor number of mobile users in
comparison with the macro-cells case. Additionally, if we
consider that each small cell site can host also machine-to- Figure 3. Greener small cell coverage.
machine (M2M) gateways, richer applications can be con-
ceived targeting both communication and city governance
services. Small cells are also considered as a valuable solution to
Recently, LTE Release 12 focused on small-cell the problem of ecological sustainability for future broad-
enhancement to accommodate the expected huge traffic band wireless access [11]. The idea of a very dense deploy-
growth, especially for hot spot areas [10]. Multiple sce- ment of self-organised, low-cost, low-power base stations
narios have been conceived for small-cell enhancement by has been shown to have the potential of significantly
the 3GPP group in December 2012: deep indoor scenarios, increasing the capacity of cellular networks while reducing
mobile outdoor scenarios, wireless and wired backhaul and their energy consumption. In fact, the radio coverage using
synchronised and unsynchronised scenarios. Some of the small cells deployment shall allow a better control of the
objectives expected from small-cell improvements are [10] territory and a reduction of the electromagnetic emission in
as follows: urban areas. The resulting dense grid of cellular coverage
shall enable greener services (i.e. cell broadcasting alerts
 Supporting increased throughput both in uplink and and news) to select specific urban districts of the Smart
in downlink; City (for comparison, see Figures 2 and 3). As a matter
 Keeping a fair distribution of throughput among of fact, because the path loss increases exponentially with
users; coverage radius (i.e. the size of the cell), small cells enable
 Reducing backhaul delays; relevant energy saving: halving the coverage decreases the
 Improving integration among macro-cellular and transmitted power by a factor of four.
micro-cellular nodes in order to provide ubiquitous Considering the additional push given by LTE-A stan-
real-time services. dardisation process, the potential of small cells appears

14 Trans. Emerging Tel. Tech. 25:1120 (2014) 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
DOI: 10.1002/ett
 A. Cimmino et al.

Figure 4. Applications of small cells in a Smart City scenario.

largely extended to Cloud-based architectures. The stor-

age resources may be initially deployed within the LTE
evolved Node B (eNB) infrastructures, and, afterwards,
moved towards servers in the Cloud (rack).
This architecture type (mini data centres in eNB) is
now possible because of the broadband capability of both
the radio interfaces and backhauling lines. The result is
an enhanced user experience and an increased flexibility
offered by Cloud architecture.
In fact, virtualisation can lead to further improvements
as shown in the Cloud RAN scheme for small cells. In
this scheme, the radio access functionalities are deployed
into the Cloud, providing virtualisation of these function-
alities for deployed eNBs. The ultimate objective of the
Mobile Cloud projects is to move from current mobile
Figure 5. Service-driven architectures. networks to a fully Cloud-based mobile communication
system. This will extend Cloud computing, in this way,
enabling the support for on-demand and elastic provision-
very important but not yet fully exploited. There is still the ing of novel mobile services. This will have implications
need for a step ahead in the design of small cell technology. on new business models and sharing of the infrastructures.
Small cells should be thought as the last-mile broadband Small cells are also a very promising candidate for
access infrastructure of Smart Cities and not just an ancil- the backhauling of WSNs, because terminals can use
lary and stand alone network segment. This novel view less power in comparison with other wireless systems.
of small cells fully responds to the emerging requirements WSNs have been, so far, based on proprietary communi-
of Smart Cities in terms of a wide plethora of ubiquitous cation stacks. However, recent developments are moving
and pervasive services (from health to education and from the WSN communication towards Internet protocol (IP)-
safety and emergency management to social networking) based systems, according to the Internet of things (IoT)
readily available anytime and everywhere. The commu- paradigm. Wireless LTE-based backhauling at the WSN
nication infrastructure should provide very high capacity gateways is the most promising solution to further enhance
and reliability as well as the capability of configuring itself WSN capabilities.
around the real users needs. Additionally, eNB functions can be extended in order
As network nodes, small cells may, in addition, provide to become standardised communication gateways and to
smart caching services. This feature is extremely inter- enable interoperable operation and information gathering
esting. It enables to provide local caching services in order from a wider plethora of sensors (e.g. vehicle counting
to reduce the load on the network backhaul (e.g. in the systems embedded in the streets, sensors and actuators
case of video traffic). Smart caching capabilities can be connected to lights).

Trans. Emerging Tel. Tech. 25:1120 (2014) 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. 15
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 A. Cimmino et al.

Figure 6. Overall architecture (source European Telecommuni-

cations Standards Institute). Figure 7. Heterogeneous radio networks.

4.1. Small cell networks

From the point of view of architecture and deployment,
small cells represent a modular solution easily upgradable. Smart City wireless networking requirements cannot be
As they need low maintenance, they represent a sustainable met with traditional macro-only networks. This is due to
solution for quick deployment of high capacity. Moreover, a number of reasons ranging from spectrum efficiency and
they can act as gateways for enabling seamless integra- regulatory issues to indoor coverage. As outlined in Sec-
tion of different sensor technologies within the Smart City tion 3, the small cell and, more generally, the heteroge-
infrastructure. neous network concepts are gaining wide acceptance. An
A graphical representation of the possible usage of small example of heterogeneous network is shown in Figure 7)
cells in Smart Cities is provided by Figure 4, where many [19]. Because of the peculiarities mentioned in Section 3,
types of services for mobile customers, IoT, personal area small cells are able to fulfill Smart City requirements in
networks are presented. terms of interoperability, robustness, limited power con-
sumption and multi-modal access with improved quality
of experience.

4. A SERVICE-DRIVEN NETWORK 4.2. Application enhancers

ARCHITECTURE FOR SMART CITIES
BASED ON SMALL CELLS Small cell architectures enable mobile service providers
to leverage network capabilities [e.g. location, presence,
As outlined in the previous sections, future Smart Cities quality of service (QoS) and trusted security] for appli-
will be mainly based on offered services (Figure 5). In cations development, either by the operator or third par-
order to enable these services, the network will need to ties. By providing application programming interfaces that
embrace the concepts of broadband wireless, green com- can be integrated with applications and service frame-
munications, reconfigurability, replication, M2M commu- works, small cells enhance the potential for innovative
nications and quality of experience. service creation. As an example, they have presence infor-
A key role in this kind of network is played by the mation application programming interfaces, making it pos-
wireless access, specifically by LTE-A, even if other tech- sible to build services such as One Family Number, Home
nologies could and will be used (Figure 6). Main LTE-A Notes, Child Tracking, Emergency support, location-based
capabilities driving towards this technology are different advertisement, product search and augmented reality.
cell sizes (macro, pico, femto), M2M and device-to-device Other features allow users to redirect data sessions from
(D2D) communications, efficient spectrum utilisation and the core network to their local home network, providing
so on. higher throughput for media sharing applications and gam-
It should be stressed that the Smart City scenario cannot ing. They may also enable secure payment transactions by
be based just on one technology. As an example, sensor using secure access over licensed spectrum.
and actuator networks might use completely different tech- From the point of view of operation and maintenance,
nologies, that is, radio frequency identification and IEEE site visits are avoided and, beside physical installation,
802.15.4. However, these networks should be integrated many of these radio equipments, after installation, auto-
in the Smart City. The integration is made possible by the matically come into service without any further interven-
IoT paradigm, and LTE-A can play a crucial role as access tion. At registration, location is determined and constantly
technology for the sensor and actuator network gateway. kept up-to-date, allowing the mobile service provider to

16 Trans. Emerging Tel. Tech. 25:1120 (2014) 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
DOI: 10.1002/ett
 A. Cimmino et al.

Figure 8. Dynamic cellular service provisioning over datacentres (source [20]).

Figure 9. Architecture for providing Smart City services over Cloud (source [20]).

control it. This is critical for emergency calling and other at removing the entry barrier for new smart services by
location-associated services. Auto-configuration reduces incorporating Cloud principles into the traditional telecom-
the cost of small cells deployment and decreases the need munication stack. Because almost 80% of the telecommu-
for large customer support teams. It also lessens the need nication stack (including LTE-A) is software, it simply
for massive re-provisioning following macro-network re- makes sense to cloudify it, thereby making the overall
planning. In this way, fast deployment and scalability architecture more compliant to Cloud principles. This will
requirements can be fully satisfied. help in achieving better energy efficiency because of bet-
ter resource sharing and will bring ease of provisioning
4.3. A possible Smart City service and deployment and, additionally, reduction/remotion of
architecture service entry barrier.
Services that are offered by Smart Cities can easily be vir- Figure 8 shows the prerequisite for enabling Smart City
tualised. Most of the services will use telecommunication services and applications. It assumes the existence of RAN,
network infrastructures to access data and services hosted micro and macro datacentres, together with mobile core
in the Cloud. One of the requirements of service provision- networks. Micro datacentres may be spread at various
ing in such a scenario will be an easy provisioning pro- strategic locations in any Smart City, and macro datacen-
cess. The architecture that we propose in this section aims tres could be located at key geographic locations to provide

Trans. Emerging Tel. Tech. 25:1120 (2014) 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. 17
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 A. Cimmino et al.

additional resource boost to individual cells in case of flash voice communications with time-constrained data flows.
crowd such as scenarios. The technological advancements have been centred on
Figure 9 presents the overall architecture that would higher data rates, neglecting the support for the M2M sys-
support easy provisioning of Smart City applications and tems. As seen previously, these devices have typically long
services. It shows how the Cloud principles should be duty cycles and low data rate, but they require permanent
applied to the traditional telecommunication stack by reachability and (in some cases) guaranteed QoS.
virtualising RAN in order to allow better available spec- In order to allow the M2M communications, it is imper-
trum sharing. It also shows how major software compo- ative to enable in the mobile network (LTE-A and beyond)
nents of evolved packet core and IP-multimedia subsytem a strong support for the M2M paradigm, with the following
can be put into virtual machines and can be provided points being the most urgent ones:
as a service to any potential Smart City application/service.
The proposed architecture supports inclusion of actors  D2D. Most services will be based on proximity com-
such as light-mobile virtual network operators. These munications and D2D can greatly increase the net-
actors in reality could be entities such as a company work utilisation while reducing energy waste.
providing smart metre reading service and hospitals pro-  Data offload. Local IP access and selected IP traf-
viding wearable devices to patients to enhance real-time fic offload are promising technologies. However, they
health monitoring. Because the proposed architecture is may break service reachability or, at least, make it
guided by Cloud principles, it allows on-demand, self- hard to keep devices in reachable state.
service, elasticity management and pay-as-you-go billing  Direct small cells communications. This point is con-
models. It removes the entry barrier to service creation as ceptually similar to local IP access and selected IP
a new Smart City service provider does not need to worry traffic offload, but it involves the multi-cell scenario.
about setting the telecommunication support infrastructure  Protocol harmonisation. IoT should enable all-IPv6
or even worrying about entering into complicated long- communication, however, the application-level proto-
term contracts with traditional mobile network operators. cols are jeopardised. It is of paramount importance to
The shown architecture, as it supports virtualisation, will minimise the need for application-level gateways.
support easy service migration and provide mechanisms
through the Cloud-controller layer to better meet the tar- Moreover, managing the devices and their status is an
get consumers expectations. It also provides systems to important aspect in Smart Cities. Data should be verifi-
monitor service usage and react to overload and underload able, and the devices should be classified according to
situations in almost real time. their sensing reliability. From a management perspective,
By combining elements from telecommunication and smart environments will be made by a plethora of sensors,
traditional datacentres and harmonising the overall archi- actuators and so on. Furthermore, devices may belong to
tecture, thanks to Cloud computing principles, this archi- different management entities, ranging from citizens (e.g.
tecture should support application scenarios such as M2M smartphones) to service providers (e.g. smart grids) and
communication along with the Qos requirements in a more municipalities (e.g. traffic monitors). All these data can
cohesive manner. contribute to the Smart City system. However, the device
The virtualisation and Cloud RAN potentialities men- management should be able to tackle devices differences
tioned earlier should greatly increase scalability, robust- and provide flexible and personalised access to data, while
ness and interoperability of the Smart City network. maintaining users privacy and system reliability.
The M2M communication issue is being addressed by
the latest LTE-A development, and, specifically, by the
5. TECHNOLOGY CHALLENGES D2D paradigm [21], particularly efficient in small cells.

As described in the previous sections, there are a lot of

5.2. Security
open issues belonging to technical, management and secu-
rity areas. In this section, we will roughly divide them in
The security area is also very important for future Smart
macro-areas.
Cities. Any system should increase citizens Safety by
allowing a greater consciousness of the environment and a
5.1. Machine-to-machine communications faster response to emergencies. In order to accomplish this
goal, the systems Security should allow a prompt isolation
At present, communication standards are mainly oriented of misbehaving elements (e.g. a malicious device).
towards user-based communications, with little support for Moreover, citizens privacy should not be forgotten. Col-
M2M communications. These short-lived, low data rate lecting more data could easily lead to a privacy loss (either
flows might pose serious problems to core network and real or perceived), potentially blocking citizens willing-
service providers. The IPv6 and IoT paradigms are not ness to be part of a smart environment. These problems
helping either, and they could even exacerbate the current stimulate more interesting research activities, ranging from
issues. The whole evolved packet core architecture derives automatic behaviour detection to distributed firewalling
from the previous mobile systems, where the focus was on and social interaction willingness.

18 Trans. Emerging Tel. Tech. 25:1120 (2014) 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
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 A. Cimmino et al.

The current LTE-A security framework is very interest- Additionally, increasing the number of cells may intro-
ing. However, the same principles should be extended to duce more frequent handovers in case of terminal mobility.
IoT systems and the users devices. This is currently an This issue can be addressed by employing macro-cells (or
open issue and an active research topic [22]. micro-cells) for maintaining the connectivity while resort-
ing to small cells for improved performance. The Cloud
5.3. Spectrum utilisation approach can effectively enable new and enhanced solu-
tions also in this case. However, this matter is an ongoing
Efficient utilisation of the resources of the wireless spec- research topic and will be debated in the future among
trum for Smart Cities applications involves the usage of academic and standisation bodies.
two emerging communication paradigms:
6. CONCLUSIONS
 Cognitive radio networking. Efficient utilisation of
the spectrum is vital to support an incremental deploy-
As introduced in this paper, the urban environment repre-
ment of additional communication capacity. In this
sents a perfect ecosystem to start a new common approach
framework, a cognitive spectrum access represents
in the design and deployment of ICT infrastructures and
the enabling technology for the development of
services. If specific agreements based on innovative regu-
opportunistic access techniques and the exploitation
lations are made among main public and private players, it
of the unused resources in an efficient manner.
will be possible to deploy a new generation of platforms
 Green wireless. Communications and networking
where environment, citizens and business will benefit.
should be efficient also from the energetic point of
The path towards fully integrated and automated Smart
view. This involves using energy-efficient commu-
Cities is long and challenging. However, following the
nication protocols and devices as well as renewable
guidelines of a specific research and innovation agenda
sources (i.e. solar and wind) to power communication
(see e.g. EU Horizon 2020 digital agenda), these goals can
nodes.
be met.
We believe that the two paradigms mentioned earlier can The Cloud infrastructure will need to evolve and
coexist and cooperate. Indeed, cognitive and opportunistic improve in order to empower future networks and next gen-
features of small cell networking can be exploited to opti- eration radio interconnecting the future Internet made by
mise radio resource utilisation and coverage, and, at the people, content and things.
same time, minimise energy consumption and electromag- In this paper, we highlighted the role of small cell
netic pollution. Moreover, the Cloud approach can enable technology in future Smart Cities. Small cells will pro-
further optimisations, particularly concerning the dynamic vide Smart Cities with increased broadband capabili-
system spectrum management. ties, improved flexibility and easy deployment of scalable
multi-service network architectures. Moreover, small cells
can reduce the environmental impact of the communication
5.4. Backhauling
infrastructure.
However, some challenges need to be addressed.
A potential bottleneck of small cell networking is related
We think that the forthcoming LTE-A standardisation
to the backhauling, as stated in [10]. Connecting each
process should update the concept of small cells. This
small cell to the wired backbone is not an efficient solu-
should become the true broadband last mile segment of
tion, in particular when the number of small cells is sig-
the wireless network and not be limited to an ancil-
nificant. In order to obtain an acceptable performance,
lary network segment. In order to make this technologi-
complex mechanisms of dynamic distribution of the back-
cal shift, novel paradigms targeted at improving security,
haul capacity among the existing heterogeneous networks
flexibility and cognitivity of the radio segment should
should be forecasted, considering both radio and backhaul
be considered.
bottlenecks [23]. The concept of relaying is most impor-
In our opinion, the integration of broadband personal
tant standardised technology for efficient backhauling, as
communications with M2M and D2D communications will
formalised by the LTE-A [9]. 3GPP standardisation com-
represent a key challenge to be addressed by future 4G
mittee has decided to study different alternative solutions
standards.
for small cell backhauling [24]: dedicated point-to-point
fibre connections, line of sight (LOS) microwave con-
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DOI: 10.1002/ett

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