Top 5 Tech Trends for Smart Cities in the 2020s

As I wrote many times, the Smart City concept is a complex system of (sub)systems that use current ICT solutions to collect data - values of relevant parameters on public services, infrastructure, people habits, and needs in real-time, that transfer these data to Data Center - Big Data node to store them, categorize, analyze and mine for deeper and hidden knowledge which helps decision-makers in city's government (or eventually, automatically) to optimize the process of maintaining, managing and planning the city life. This is not a formal definition but it is a very descriptive sentence to understand what this attribute means in the context of modern cities and urban living experience. But which features do we need to finally enable Smart Cities on a regular basis? It is a huge space for broader discussion but if we limit to the short-term vision of this decade what we expect and need, we can find a few already existing technologies in shadow. I invite everybody who read the article to start discussing the key enabler techs and share their opinions and visions. I will try to describe my vision for a few next years.

Smart Cities are the part of Digital Transformation

Smart Cities leverage the latest technology to address broad issues like public transportation, potable water delivery, sanitation, neighborhood safety, economic development, waste management, urban planning, green solutions, and the like. Smart Cities is just an urban living expression from something much bigger - the Digital Transformation of Society. Everything has started from the Internet, and the process significantly accelerated in the period of the global COVID-19 pandemic pushing us away from physical contacts and businesses. This New Normality demonstrates how our society is vulnerable and how much we have to work to improve society's resilience for possible future situations like to prevent economic and social damage. After this round, the recovery will last years, or even decades - from an economic perspective to psychological, including social aspects of our lifestyle.

Today, we learn how to use digital platform and social media for business, video call for conferences and meetings, how to keep running our education system online with the support of conventional media like TVs and modern media as websites, YouTube, even Facebook. And we succeed - this world is still running around and our businesses are learning how to move to digital. Even in these bad times, technology helped us and it is finally clear to everyone that we have to engage our full potential and use this positive wave to finalize this process of Digital Transformation once for all. This is a step forward to one of the goals: Resilliant Cities.

Top 5 Tech for Smart Cities

Technologies have helped us to maintain our activities during the pandemic, but that wasn't the main purpose. So, why do we invest so much into tech progress? The part of the answer is that technology is not the goal or purpose by itself, but it is a powerful tool to help us to achieve the vision of a better world for the 21st century described in the UN Agenda 2030 on Sustainable Development. It's a general quote and there are too many details behind the simple sentences.

Cities and urban living experience are a special interest in the Agenda 2030 expressed as the SDG 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities. The SGD11 contains a broader umbrella that enables solving all other challenges in other SDGs, to reduce inequality, inclusion, no poverty. To achieve that, we have to learn and plan to use ICT solutions to bring intelligence to our cities, automatizing processes, and decisions making based on real-time data on demands and resource allocation fitting each other in perfect ratio. But which existing technologies can we use to help us?

These specific details related to the new urban living experience in the 21st century are strongly connected with tech solutions assisting to fit the increased expectation of inhabitants: we request clear air, clean water, environmental-friendly surrounding, parks, green transportation, and all of these request we want without any negative impact to our economy, salaries, and businesses in general. Sound like a dream, scene from Sci-Fi movies? Maybe, but it is possible if we remind ourselves of all tech achievements which already exist around us and which we can engage for this goal.

1. Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence to Boost Data Analytics

The heart of Smart City is its Data Center. It is a very simple sentence and it couldn't be more true. The real "smart" lives in collected data and data processing behind the scene. As much data we collect deploying an enormous number of sensors (IoT concept), without efficient data management and processing we are not able to achieve optimal management of our resources neither predict citizens demands for public services, infrastructure, and natural resources. The hidden and valuable knowledge is between the data rows organized in data centers we called Big Data hubs, which have the ability to run advanced mathematical algorithms to find (sub)optimal solutions in specific predefined constraints fitting demands and services as much close to each other. Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence are sets of these advanced mathematical approaches which bring something that is impossible to do manually without the help of modern computers. These advantages can be seen in speed, scale, and convenience. Speed and scale mean automatization - letting computers do the work as opposed to assigning humans who are more prone to errors and slower in time.

It doesn't matter how much money we spend on sensors and how much we deploy them in almost everything, all these collected data is just a waste of our time and money if we don't have the efficient way to process them and to achieve new knowledge - so, City's Data Centers is the key for the Smart City success story. And we are just knocking on the door to Quantum Computers...

2. Robotic Process Automatization (RPA) and Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS)

RPA and CPS are not new concepts but it is not so well-known. Outside the industrial environment, RPA and CPS can rapidly increase the value of the existing workforce with a new kind of automatization. Smart companies in Smart Cities in the future are expected to leverage this winning formula. Automatize vehicles or popular buzzword self-driving cars can be understood as a kind of robot working for us automatically, but they also help to imagine how many other work future machines can replace humans. Smart Mobility, as one of the key concepts in Smart Cities, lies in self-driving electric vehicles.

3. Blockchain

The fact is that there are no too many products, applications, and services based on Blockchain. Outside of the closed community, Blockchain is still a mystery - for most people Blockchain is related to cryptocurrencies and the story ends there. But the truth is that Blockchain is set to be used for more cases beyond cryptocurrency, as food safety, real estate asset management, intellectual property, various trackings from starting to the final node (whatever "node" means, e.g., from production to customer, from sender to receiver). Smart Logistics and resource sharing in future Smart Cities can be enabled using Blockchain.

4. 5G

The telecommunications backbone of the future is the 5G - the Fifth Mobile Network Generation or New Radio (NR). As usual, each odd generation brings a revolution - in this case, the mobile system is not designed primarily to improve conventional human-centric services like voice, messaging, or Internet access, but to enable connection of massively deployed sensors, millions and billions of them if necessary. The crucial challenge for the 5G is not telecommunications performances, but energy efficiency. The massive deployment of sensors, the vision of Always-Connected-PCs (ACPC) with multi-day batteries, connected vehicles, drones, will direct future research in this direction combined with a new architecture based on decentralized Edge Computing necessary for the achievement Ultra-Reliable Low Latency Communications (URLLC) for future 6G upgrades.

5. WiFi6 (IEEE 802.11ax)

WiFi6, which supports Smart Home Mesh-based communications, is perfect with the above described 5G. If we add the low-duty cycle technologies as Narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) it brings almost everything that we need for the first step to the smart systems and opens the path to 6G future decentralized edge-computing based AI-enhanced systems (it is still not clear what 6G brings, but the most sources confirmed at least these features).

To improve spectrum efficient utilization, the new version introduces better power-control methods to avoid interference with neighboring networks, Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA), higher-order 1024-QAM modulation scheme, and up-link direction added with the down-link of MIMO and MU-MIMO to further increase throughput up to 6 Gbps, as well as dependability improvements of power consumption and new security protocols such as Target Wake Time and WPA3.