Transportation and Power Grid in Smart Cities

5 5G and D2D Communications at the Service of Smart Cities

Muhammad Usman¹, Muhammad Rizwan Asghar² and Fabrizio Granelli¹

¹ Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science, University of Trento, Via Sommarive 9, 38123, Trento, Italy

² Department of Computer Science, The University of Auckland, Private Bag 92019, 1142 Auckland, New Zealand

5.1 Introduction

More than half of the world population lives in cities, and the trend of moving to bigger cities is increasing with the time (Chourabi et al., 2012). This increase in population of the cities is resulting in technical, physical, and material problems. Air pollution, traffic congestion, human health concerns, aging infrastructures, and difficulty in waste management are a few to mention (Washburn et al., 2009). The smart city is a recent concept, which aims at solving the aforementioned problems and improving the quality of life of citizens (Neirotti et al. 2014). A city is considered to be smart when information and communication technologies (ICT)–based solutions are employed in order to provide a high quality of life to its citizens, thus potentially achieving economic growth (Zanella et al., 2014). According to “European Smart Cities”, an EU project (Neirotti et al., 2014), six areas of smartness are identified, including smart economy, smart people, smart governance, smart mobility, smart environment, and smart living.

ICT has become the nerve of smart cities enabling new ways of transport management, ...