An urban sensing architecture as essential infrastructure for future cities

Climate change and migration have become one of the most challenging problems for our civilization. In this context, city councils work hard to manage essential services for citizens such as waste collection, street lamp lighting, and water supply. Increasingly, digitalization and the Internet of Things (IoT) help cities improve services, increase productivity and reduce costs. However, to understand how this may happen, we explore the urban sensing capabilities from citizen- to city-scale, how sensing at different levels is interlinked, and the challenges of managing innovations based on IoT data and devices. Local authorities collaborate with researchers and deploy testbeds as a part of demonstration and research projects to perform the above data collection, improve city services, and support innovation. The data gathered is about indoor and outdoor environmental conditions, energy usage, built environment, structural health monitoring. Such monitoring requires IT infrastructure at three different tiers: at the endpoint, edge, and cloud. Managing infrastructure at all tiers with provisioning, connectivity, security updates of devices, user data privacy controls, visualization of data, multi-tenancy of applications, and network resilience, is challenging. So, in turn, we focus on performing a systematic study of the technical and non-technical challenges faced during the implementation, management, and deployment of devices into citizens' homes and public spaces. Our third piece of work explores IoT edge applications' resiliency and reliability requirements that vary from non-critical (best delivery efforts) to safety-critical with time-bounded guarantees. We investigate how to meet IoT application mixed-criticality QoS requirements in multi-communication networks. Finally, to demonstrate the principles of our framework in the real world, we implement an open-source air quality platform Open City Air Quality Platform (OpenCAQP), that merges a wide range of data sources and air pollution parameters into a single platform. The OpenCAQP allows citizens, environmentalists, data analysts, and developers to access and visualize that data.