The Role of Small Cell Technologies in Future Smart City Applications

Meeting citizens’ requirements economically and efficiently is the most important objective of Smart Cities. As a matter of fact, they are considered a key concept both for future Internet and information and communications technology. It is expected that a wide range of services will be made available for residential users (e.g. intelligent transportation systems, e-government, e-banking, e-commerce and smart management of energy demand), public administration entities, public safety and civil protection agencies and so on with increased quality, lower costs and reduced environmental impact. In order to achieve these ambitious objectives, new technologies should be developed such as non-invasive sensing, highly parallel processing, smart grids and mobile broadband communications. This paper considers the communication aspects of Smart City applications, specifically, the role of the latest developments of Long-Term Evolution-Advanced standard, which forecast the increase of broadband coverage by means of small cells. We shall demonstrate that the novel concept of small cell fully meets the emerging communication and networking requirements of future Smart Cities. To this aim, a feasible network architecture for future Smart Cities, based on small cells, will be discussed in the framework of a future smarter and user-centric perspective of forthcoming 4G mobile technologies.