Smart cities need smart networks

Cities and towns of all sizes around the world have launched smart city initiatives. There are many goals behind this trend: more efficient, safer and greener. The aim is also to provide citizens with a broader range of services. In many places, smart cities are no longer just a concept, but have long been a reality, even if it is not always obvious. It almost seems that cities are smart in disguise. Here are a few examples:

Blue light operations: Smart and efficient
Smart technologies have long been state of the art in police and fire departments as well as in ambulances. 4G mobile technology was the key to modernizing the emergency services. For example, emergency vehicles stay in touch with headquarters via LTE. Firefighters and police officers access critical data and applications, such as building plans, cadastral data or traffic information.

In the U.S., the digital transformation of emergency services has already gone so far that police officers are documenting their deployment completely digitally, while on the move. Paper processes that used to eat up hours of working time can be made much leaner, even automated. Camera technology is helping response teams monitor and plan operations on the ground. And so-called BodycamsThe use of such systems, which will be used in the city of Zurich in the future, for example, will make operations transparent.

Traffic and parking guidance systems: minimizing congestion and parking frustration
Networking location data from mobile devices and digital traffic signs can minimize congestion and prevent accidents. Networked traffic lights can be used to respond dynamically to congestion around venues and create "green tunnels" that quickly move traffic out of the area. In many places, motorists can already pay for their parking with their cell phones. This saves motorists the hassle of searching for change and "tossing it back". For local authorities, mobile payment means fewer bouncers. Personnel resources that were previously needed for checking potential parking violators can be deployed elsewhere.

Municipal fleet management with increased safety
Local governments usually operate large fleets of cars and trucks. A major cost factor, fleet managers in municipalities have therefore long been using smart technologies, such as GPS-based vehicle logging, to track location and vehicle performance. Sensors in the vehicle provide information about the status of the engine or fuel levels. Smart technologies help municipal fleet managers manage the utilization, maintenance and safety of their vehicles.

Water management: rapid intervention in case of danger
The ability to monitor water levels and related systems remotely conserves staff resources and enables rapid intervention in the event of an emergency. Water managers can remotely record and analyze water consumption at different access points to draw conclusions about usage patterns, water quality and varying demand. In this way, municipalities ultimately also ensure more sustainable management of this scarce resource.

Public transport and WLAN
A freely accessible vehicle WLAN on public transport is becoming increasingly popular. A digital display on buses and trains shows public transport users when they have the next connection. Real-time location updates have also long been state of the art in public transport. These make it possible to adhere to timetables and inform drivers in advance of delays or route changes. Digital display boards linked to the system at stops inform passengers. What is not quite so obvious is that these digital displays would not be applicable without mobile connectivity and smart technologies in the background. The same applies to on-board security cameras.

Intelligent disposal
Wireless technologies streamline the collection, sorting and disposal of waste. The waste garbage cans compress the waste as compactly as possible. They are equipped with an LTE-enabled sensor powered by a solar panel. This notifies waste disposal teams when they need to be emptied. This simplifies the collection process and reduces fuel and vehicle repair costs. In Switzerland, too, there are already examples of municipalities optimizing waste tours in this way.

Smart cities need software-defined networking approaches
The above examples demonstrate this: Local governments and public organizations are among the early adopters of digital transformation. Wireless connectivity and IoT technologies are already making cities and municipalities quite smart. This development poses major challenges for IT managers in municipalities and public organizations. Water sensors, smart traffic lights, smart trash cans, mobile payment, fleet management, open WLAN - from an IT perspective, this sounds like quite a proliferation. Or to put it another way, all this smart technology has to be reconciled somehow on the network side. This is where modern software-defined networking approaches, or SDN or SD-WAN for short, come into play. Without SDN and SD-WAN, smart city initiatives would be unthinkable.

The Open Networking Foundation (ONF) describes software-defined networking (SDN) as the ability to "decouple network control and forwarding functions." Network control can thus be programmed directly and the underlying infrastructure for applications and network services abstracted.

SDN is fundamentally changing not only how networks are built and managed, but also how they evolve. They become more agile and efficient because new features can be delivered within a software-driven rather than a hardware-driven timeframe. Software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) goes one step further, combining scalability and agility with the benefits of the cloud, i.e., the mobility component. Using the cloud, the network can be orchestrated and managed programmatically from a central point, in a virtual overlay structure, including automation and analysis tools.

Networking approaches such as SDN and SD-WAN thus simplify the handling of smart city networks on the IT side. They become agile, even elastic. And if modern technologies such as SD-Perimeter, or SD-P for short, are used, they are also secure. In contrast to VPN, SD-P uses an invitation-based authentication procedure and is particularly interesting in the IoT area because the actually "unintelligent" small devices, such as sensors, are made invisible to the outside world by SD-P and are thus protected from many Internet dangers such as hacking.

Text: Sascha Kremer, Director of Business Development at Cradlepoint Germany