MONICA in Hamburg: Towards Large-Scale IoT Deployments in a Smart City

TL;DR

This paper discusses the role of IoT in smart cities, introduces the EU MONICA project for large-scale IoT deployment demonstrations, and presents a case study of Hamburg's smart city activities and field tests.

Contribution

It introduces the MONICA project for large-scale IoT deployment in smart cities and provides a detailed case study of Hamburg's ongoing IoT initiatives.

Findings

Overview of IoT platforms and standards for smart cities

Description of the MONICA project's architecture and deployment

Insights from Hamburg's field tests of IoT sensor applications

Abstract

Modern cities and metropolitan areas all over the world face new management challenges in the 21st century primarily due to increasing demands on living standards by the urban population. These challenges range from climate change, pollution, transportation, and citizen engagement, to urban planning, and security threats. The primary goal of a Smart City is to counteract these problems and mitigate their effects by means of modern ICT to improve urban administration and infrastructure. Key ideas are to utilise network communication to inter-connect public authorities; but also to deploy and integrate numerous sensors and actuators throughout the city infrastructure - which is also widely known as the Internet of Things (IoT). Thus, IoT technologies will be an integral part and key enabler to achieve many objectives of the Smart City vision. The contributions of this paper are as follows. We first examine a number of IoT platforms, technologies and network standards that can help to foster a Smart City environment. Second, we introduce the EU project MONICA which aims for demonstration of large-scale IoT deployments at public, inner-city events and give an overview on its IoT platform architecture. And third, we provide a case-study report on SmartCity activities by the City of Hamburg and provide insights on recent (on-going) field tests of a vertically integrated, end-to-end IoT sensor application.