The concept of smart cities emerged few years ago as a new vision for urban
development that aims to integrate multiple information and communication
technology (ICT) solutions in a secure fashion to manage a city’s assets. Modern ICT
infrastructure and e-services should fuel sustainable growth and quality of life,
enabled by a wise and participative management of natural resources to be ensured
by citizens and government. The need to build smart cities became a requirement that
relies on urban development that should take charge of the new infrastructures for
smart cities (broadband infrastructures, wireless sensor networks, Internet-based
networked applications, open data and open platforms) and provide various smart
services and enablers in various domains including healthcare, energy, education,
environmental management, transportation, mobility and public safety.
The contemporary view of the Smart City is very much static and infrastructure-
centric, focusing on installation and subsequent management of Edge devices and
analytics of data provided by these devices. While this still allows a more efficient
management of the city’s infrastructure, optimizations and savings in different do-
mains, the existing architectures are currently designed as single-purpose, vertically
siloed solutions. This hinders active involvement of a variety of stakeholders (e.g.,
citizens and businesses) who naturally form part of the city’s ecosystem and have an
inherent interest in jointly coordinating and influencing city-level activities.
The rapid growth of the Web in the past two decades has made it the larg-
est publicly accessible data source in the world. Web mining aims to dis-
cover useful information or knowledge from Web hyperlinks, page con-
tents, and usage logs. Based on the primary kinds of data used in the
mining process, Web mining tasks can be categorized into three main
types: Web structure mining, Web content mining and Web usage mining.
From the transition of analog to digital communication along with seamless mobility and
high computing power of small handheld devices, the wireless communications industry has
seen tremendous changes leading to the integration of several telecommunication networks,
devices and services over last 30 years. The rate of this progress and growth has increased
particularly in the past decade because people no longer use their devices and networks for
voice only, but demand bundle contents such as data download/streaming, HDTV, HD video ,
3D video conferencing with higher efficiency, seamless connectivity, intelligence, reliability
and better user experience. Although the challenges facing service providers and
telecommunication companies differ by product, region, market size, and their areas of
concentration but time to market, efficient utilization of their assets and revenue expansion,
have impacted significantly how to manage and conduct their business while maintaining
sufficient margin.
Wireless penetration has witnessed explosive growth over the last two decades.
Accordingly, wireless devices have become much denser per unit area, resulting
in an overcrowded usage of wireless resources. To avoid radio interferences and
packet collisions, wireless stations have to exchange control messages to coordinate
well. The existing wisdoms of conveying control messages could be classified into
three categories: explicit, implicit, or hybrid.
At present, there is a strong worldwide push toward bringing fiber closer to indi-
vidual homes and businesses. Fiber-to-the-Home/Business (FTTH/B) or close to it
networks are poised to become the next major success story for optical fiber com-
munications. In fact, FTTH connections are currently experiencing double-digit or
even higher growth rates, e.g., in the United States the annual growth rate was 112%
between September 2006 and September 2007, and their presence can add value of
U.S. $4,000–15,000 to the selling price of a home.
The past two decades have witnessed the introduction and unprecedented growth of cellular
mobile telephony and wireless communications. Numerous wireless access technologies
have been introduced in the mobile communications market. While some have flourished
and formed the basis of successful manufacturing and network operator businesses, many
have lived only for a short time and disappeared.
The capability of radio waves to provide almost instantaneous distant communications
without interconnecting wires was a major factor in the explosive growth of communica-
tions during the 20th century. With the dawn of the 21st century, the future for communi-
cations systems seems limitless. The invention of the vacuum tube made radio a practical
and affordable communications medium.
