Page 334 - Shaping smarter and more sustainable cities - Striving for sustainable development goals

As demonstrated above, many of the existing urban environments are overran by thousands of
cables with little regards to safety and efficiency. Therefore, it is imperative that communication
infrastructures must exit in an affordable and accessible way. Successful strategies could then be
replicated based on the given specific measurements such as in the case of laying cable in the
suburban zones.

Currently, infrastructures in cities should overcome the following shortcomings such as; the lack of
exploit of synergies among public services and the communication restrictions; the uneven
bandwidth capacity among different providers and so on.
To remedy these defects, one should aim to create a strategic model from a holistic approach, with
particular actions that would improve the adaptation ability of the existing, infrastructure, which
would in turns supports and builds the SSC.

The existence of these limitations can be conceptualized with the idea of "Liquid network", which is
an approach to describe the citizen's communications traffic and their daily trends. There is a
behavioural pattern of the online communications traffic in a fluid form that generates "waves" of
data traffic. These waves accompany with the movement of connections (for example from the
outskirts of the cities to work centers) or a movement related to the time (concentration of masses,
i.e., in stadiums for sporting events).

Figure 82 – Liquid networks

Clearly, it is a challenge to have infrastructure adaptable to large daily changes according to the
traffic needs as described. Strategies are needed to handle a "Liquid Network" urban character, in
order to meet individual bandwidth requirements and to have the functionality of mobile usage, as
well as, strong processing capacity in different areas of the city, according to each time of day.
Nowadays, issues such as Smart Radio, Mobile Mesh Networking, Mobile Ad‐hoc Network (MANET),
Mesh Radio and others are nicknames used to designate different technological aspects of a future
scenario, where the user terminal devices have sufficient capacity to constitute networks of varying
topology and also perform the functions of both the structural nodes of network (such as routers
and servers) and customers.

The possibilities for the deployment of services in such scenario are immense and could correct
many of the defects mentioned before. For example, each device in a MANET has the freedom to
move independently in any direction. It enables dynamical changing over new conditions of link
between the devices. Each device is uncoupled from traffic and therefore, performs missions of a
router.

324 ITU‐T's Technical Reports and Specifications