Page 43 - Shaping smarter and more sustainable cities - Striving for sustainable development goals

experience, often for free or at a low price. Voice and video are already transforming the next
generation of mobile broadband with the integration of these technologies into applications such
as WhatsApp, Viber, FaceTime and You‐Tube all on mobile broadband.
One example of such an application is “Waze”, (recently acquired by Google) using crowd sourcing.
Waze uses data gathered from global positioning system (GPS) and location data from smart phones
to inform users about traffic patterns including how fast or slow the traffic was moving. It is not
difficult to imagine a series of "smart sustainable city applications" such as smart energy, smart
pollution, smart water, smart noise – all of which enable the general public not only to be able be
better informed, but also to interact in real time with their environment

This unprecedented uptake of smartphones, coupled with the “app revolution” and the robust
mobile broadband backbone, have begun to foster widespread innovations that are expected to
help make the urban landscape more inclusive, safe and sustainable.

Ubiquitous sensor networks
A related topic to the IoT is that of ubiquitous sensor networks (USN). USNs utilize wire line and/or
wireless sensor networks. These networks consist of interconnected autonomous devices
distributed across the location, and use sensors to collectively monitor physical/environmental
conditions (e.g. temperature, sound, vibration, pressure, motion or pollutants). USNs are
conceptual networks built over existing physical networks; they make use of sensed data and
provide knowledge services to anyone, anywhere at any time. Context awareness contributes to the
generation of information for decision‐making.

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Recommendation ITU‐T Y.2221 has prepared a description on general features of USN and its
applications and services publicly available. It also analyses the service necessities of USN
applications and services and highlights the new capabilities and requirements based on the
services.

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Data security
Population growth, economic crisis, resource crisis, growing energy demands, compliance to the
urgency to carbon emission targets, increasing importance to public safety and security and
exposure to online data transmission are driving the cities to become smarter.

Cities access a lot of information through the ICT system. More information means more knowledge
and more vulnerability to data security. The more complex a system is the higher the need is for
cities to protect the data. Some examples of verticals where the data security is important include
energy, transportation and health care services:

 Energy data security – Attacks on the energy systems can lead to interruptions and also hinder
data exchange between energy distribution centres and end users, and severely compromise
the delivery of energy services.

 Transportation data security – A small hindrance caused to the flow of data or the traffic control
systems will affect the overall aim of transportation optimization. For example, traffic
management could be weakened when the navigation system is hacked leading to confusion
and directing to wrong routes.

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60 http://www.itu.int/rec/T‐REC‐Y.2221‐201001‐I/en
61 Transformational 'smart cities': cyber security and resilience, Executive Report, Giampiero Nanni, Symantec (2013).

ITU‐T's Technical Reports and Specifications 33