Smart cities, which integrate multiple information and communication technologies, and IoT solutions, which create a more efficient, responsive, and sustainable city, are the answer to the urban challenges of the future.
What is a smart city?
“Smart city” is a catch-all term used to refer to a city that has made significant investments in information and communications technology to create an intelligent network capable of transmitting data throughout an urban environment using wireless technology and cloud computing. This network serves as an ecosystem that allows citizens to use devices to access information and services quickly and seamlessly and empowers municipalities to streamline operations, optimize infrastructure, and make better, faster decisions informed by real-time data.
Potential Use Cases
Smart city use cases cover several areas: from contributing to a healthier environment and improving traffic to improving public safety and optimizing street lighting. A number of popular use cases that have already been implemented in smart cities around the world include the following:
1. Smart lighting
Smart lighting contributes to improved quality of life in ways that are easy to see and appreciate. These new smart street lights come equipped with energy-efficient LED bulbs, which last longer and use less power than traditional street lights. But there’s more: these light poles can also include built-in wireless connectivity (Bluetooth and Wi-Fi), high-definition digital cameras, and sensors to monitor the weather and air quality. Most smart street lights come with a control network that can connect a citywide array of sensors and analytics packages.
2. Smart transportation
Getting around in the big city can be quite the ordeal. Sensors provide a real-time view of traffic flow for better traffic management and reduced congestion. Data from the sensors can inform public transportation routing, traffic signals, and intelligent assistants in cars. Or another example: Embedded sensors that monitor site-specific conditions, such as frozen bridge surfaces, are already being used to help reroute traffic and dispatch fleets of plows and salt trucks.
3. Smart Buildings
Building systems (lighting, climate) can intelligently adapt to worker preferences and usage patterns, saving energy. Monitoring systems can alert managers when maintenance is needed.
4. Environmental monitoring
In many places, the environment takes a back seat behind other concerns. Whether they are plagued by economic constraints or a fundamental lack of foresight, cities, and towns often struggle with problems whose origins date back generations.
Smart Cities help to better refine these urgent problems. For example, air quality monitors not only warn of dangerous conditions but also promote public accountability by revealing where the worst discharges come from. The same applies to cheap water turbidity monitors that can help stewards protect vital river basins. With the right sensors in place, regulators get more power to accurately raise fines and take effective cleaning actions.
And so there are hundreds of examples, but they all have a common denominator: a lot of data is generated, and this must be transported, stored, and processed, for which, besides fast network connections, decentralized and central locations are needed: data centers.
The Crucial Roles of Smarter Data Centers
Real-time monitoring systems generate huge volumes of data. Global forecasts indicated average daily data consumption in the range of 1.5 GB of traffic per person by 2020. Add that to the data generated by connected factories (3 PB per day for each factory), daily data traffic volumes from self-driving cars (roughly 4 TB per day for every vehicle), and smart hospitals (3 TB per day for each hospital), the amount of data being generated is mind-boggling.
The staggering amount of data generated requires intelligent data centers that will act as a single source of truth. The data centers will abstract, store, and share data from multiple sources in a structured format after enrichment with contextual knowledge.
It is highly likely that a significant number of additional data centers must be created that can handle the inflow of data from entire cities. The IoT has demonstrated that there are considerable options available for data centers today. However, those data centers that want to offer this type of service to cities should focus on smart cities, given the amount of data that is likely to be received daily. This can lead to more targeted data centers.
There are even experts who believe that smart cities are going to change the concept of data centers. When many people think of data centers, they imagine the typical large structure. However, data centers of the future will be smaller and, as stated, they can generally be more focused: Edge data centers or Microdata centers.
There is not a single data center solution
We can conclude that data centers are an essential part of intelligent cities, but they must be aligned with the reality of the market. Smaller cities will generally benefit from, for example, more advanced data centers, with which companies can better reach users with minimal latency. However, as IoT devices such as autonomous vehicles are expanding, edge computing data centers will need to be flexible enough to meet changing usage requirements, especially in smaller markets where it is simply cost-prohibitive to build a new facility when needed.
Cities will benefit from more edge data centers that allow companies to better reach users with minimal latency. Designed to complement existing public cloud or colocation deployments, the edge data centers guarantee advantages that neither possess.
The deployment of an edge data center close to the end-user or to the source of the data to be processed boosts its abilities to support applications that demand a significant amount of bandwidth, require rapid response times, or are latency-sensitive.
Launch Your Smart City with USDC Technology Solutions
Smart cities present many exciting possibilities for urban planners and city residents, several of which are still years away from becoming a reality. Whatever form the smart cities of the future take, however, data centers will undoubtedly play a vital role in their success. By adapting to the needs of these dynamic network environments, data centers can take the lead in building the cities of tomorrow.
USDC Technology is well-positioned to help contractors roll out the next generation of smart city technology through our smart data center solutions.
Read more related topics here: http://usdc.vn/blog/
