Smart Shires: The Revenge of Countrysides (Extended Version)

TL;DR

This paper explores cost-effective, tailored smart service strategies for rural areas, emphasizing communication technologies and simulation tools to support social impact and counter urban migration.

Contribution

It introduces priority-based broadcast schemes over ad-hoc networks as a practical communication solution for smart shire applications.

Findings

Priority-based broadcast schemes are effective for rural communication.

Simulation of smart shire scenarios is feasible and valuable.

Proposed architectures are low-cost and adaptable for countryside deployment.

Abstract

This paper discusses the need to devise novel strategies to create smart services specifically designed to non-metropolitan areas, i.e. countrysides. These solutions must be viable, cheap an should take into consideration the different nature of countrysides, that cannot afford the deployment of services designed for smart cities. These solutions would have an important social impact for people leaving in these countrysides, and might slow down the constant migration of citizens towards metropolis. In this work, we focus on communication technologies and practical technological/software distributed architectures. An important aspect for the real deployment of these smart shires is their simulation. We show that priority-based broadcast schemes over ad-hoc networks can represent an effective communication substrate to be used in a software middleware promoting the creation of applications for smart shire scenarios.