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

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

Carles Gomez  1   2 , Josep Paradells  3   4
Affiliations

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

Carles Gomez et al. Sensors (Basel). .

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.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Example Urban Automation Networks (UAN)-enabled applications in a smart city.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Architectures for sensed data collection and actuation in a smart city. (a) Architecture of Low-Rate (LR)-WPAN and Wireless LAN (WLAN) UANs; (b) Architecture of Mobile Network Operator (MNO) and SIM-less Operator (SO) UANs; (c) Architecture of Delay Tolerant Networking (DTN) UANs.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Protocol stacks and node types for different UAN classes. (a) LR-WPAN UAN based on ZigBee; (b) LR-WPAN UAN based on IP; (c) WLAN UAN; (d) MNO UAN; (e) DTN UAN. (Note: mesh functionality in WLAN UANs may be present at the link layer, as e.g., in IEEE 802.11s.).
Figure 4
Figure 4
Sensor node average power consumption for representative enabling technologies of each UAN class, assuming periodic notifications. Note that the General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) MNO and the SIGFOX SO lowest data rate require notification periods greater than 10 s (see Figure 5).
Figure 5
Figure 5
Latency of data transmitted by sensor nodes to their next hop for representative enabling technologies of each UAN class.
Figure 6
Figure 6
Economic cost estimate of each UAN class, based on Table 3 pricing data.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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