*One has to enjoy the stark, real-world engineering specificity here. Instead of artsy hoopla about urban informatics, it's all about the dead batteries.
While smart metering, smart street lighting, traffic control and pollution monitoring are all elements of the smart city, further benefits accrue when they are interconnected.
By Louise Joselyn.
Smart meters do not make a smart city. The essential aims of the smart city are to improve the quality of life of its citizens while contributing to environmental sustainability targets through efficient use of resources and energy savings. This relies on making intelligent use of data gathered from around the city and from a range of interconnected objects.
The critical challenge is the communications network needed to collate and manage the data, together with systems to analyse it intelligently. Even here, the first difficulty is not necessarily the technology; creating such a vast network requires huge investment.
Not many organisations have the long term vision and the resources for such an undertaking. Like most telecommunications operators, France Telecom Orange is looking for new business opportunities to extend its fixed and mobile telecommunications interests.
Two of Orange's 18 worldwide research labs are in France; in Sophia Antipolis and Grenoble. These labs are focused on machine to machine (M2M) communications, which includes a Smart City initiative. Since 2007, the company has been trialling a combination of technologies in pilot projects at Cagne-sur-mer, a city with 40,000 residents located near Nice, and in Grenoble city centre.
At Cagne, the pilot project has involved the deployment of sensors to monitor, measure and even control certain aspects of the city environment, including water metering in public buildings, street lighting control and the environment. Orange has partnered with a number of third party hardware and software technology suppliers as well as environmental monitoring service provider Véolia and the town council.
Orange has been instrumental in setting up the data collection network, but its primary task and interest, according to Laurent Londeix, Regional Director PACA France Telecom Orange, based at Sophia Antipolis, is to set up the back haul network. (((That interesting sentence structure probably worked better in French.)))
In addition, the company has been developing software modelling programmes to analyse the information and facilitating links to the 'urban platform', including building a central 'dashboard' for visualisation, monitoring and control. The project has drawn on the resources and skills of Orange's researchers at Sophia and Grenoble.
"The power consumption of sensors was, and still is, the biggest issue," Londeix confirmed. (((Mais oui.)))
In the first phase of the experiment, wireless networks were installed to cover street lighting on the sea front at Cagnes and a number of environmental monitoring sensors covering sea temperature, pollution detectors for CO2, NO2 and SO2, noise meters, a uv sensor and a weather station (wind speed and direction, air pressure and temperature).
The two way uhf sensors came from a variety of sources. "Some were easy to find and relatively low cost," Londeix said. "Seawater sensors were more of a problem as they have to survive severe conditions." Not all the sensors were digital, so a/d converters and dedicated interfaces had to be provided.
Some experimentation was involved to establish where best to locate the sensors, how far distant the repeaters could be and how many repeaters were required. This varied depending on the type of sensor, the location and the network topology. Trials with solar panels to power the repeaters worked surprisingly well in some cases. "We've learnt some valuable lessons on the limitations of certain sensors, repeaters, the distances between them and their power requirements," Londeix explained.
Orange's Grenoble team took the lead role in building the gateway for all the sensor data and the networking aspects. André Bottaro is the M2M Project Director. "Ultra low power, long range wireless sensor networks are essential for connecting huge numbers of objects on a city scale," he said, adding that simplicity, scalability and flexibility were just as important. Typically this requires a mesh network topology for its self configuration, secure rerouting and self healing properties. Orange is pushing for the adoption of IPv6 in this type of application. "It will provide the ideal opportunity to converge with the global [internet] network," Bottaro said....
