Transportation and Power Grid in Smart Cities

4 Machine‐to‐Machine Communications in the Smart City—a Smart Grid Perspective

Ravil Bikmetov¹, M. Yasin Akhtar Raja² and Khurram Kazi³

¹ University of North Carolina at Charlotte, NC, USA

² Center for Optoelectronics and Optical Communication, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, NC, USA

³ Principal Member of Technical Staff, Draper Laboratory, Cambridge MA, USA

4.1 Introduction

“A Smart City is an urban system that uses information and communication technology (ICT) to make both its infrastructure and its public services more interactive, more accessible and more efficient” (Pellicer at al., 2013). The infrastructure of the smart city (SC) is required to be equipped with state‐of‐the‐art technological solutions to support citizens' interaction with urban elements in the most efficient and convenient way. Such requirements are one of the main factors driving recent advancements in ICT, associated sensing manifolds, and data‐handling peripherals to support the SC paradigm (Pellicer et al., 2013; Zanella et al., 2014; Dohler, Boswarthick, and Alonso‐Zárate, 2012; Giffinger et al., 2007; Sun et al., 2015).

The emergence of SCs was prompted by three main factors: a growing migration of constantly increasing world population from rural areas to urban centers (forecast to reach 70% by 2050), inevitable shortage of natural resources for the world population, and concerns about the environment and climate change. By 2020, the SC market is projected to exceed $400 ...