FOCUS ON SMART CITIES

Adoption of Smart Cities with a

Practical Smart Building Implementation
Marcin Dryjański, Mateusz Buczkowski, Youssouf Ould-Cheikh-Mouhamedou, and Adrian Kliks

Abstract
Smart cities, driven by the rapid urbanization of the world, are currently a hot topic among decision makers (mayors, city coun-
cilors, economic planners, policy makers), as well as industries (communications and cloud computing providers, device manufactur-
ers, big data analytics companies). Within this category, applications for buildings, using automation and wireless communication for
efficiency purposes, are prominent examples of this trend. It is especially the case for residential buildings due to the recent trends in
population growth of urban areas. This is also known as PropTech. This article discusses the position of the Internet of Things (IoT) in
the context of smart cities and presents an example of a practical implementation in a smart building. The realized IoT system uses
state-of-the-art technologies, namely cloud computing, virtualization, and automation, for infrastructure management. The authors
focus on the monitoring and management aspects of IoT deployment, which are important when delivering solutions with a multi-
tude of gateways and sensors for scalability reasons.

Introduction As a subset of the smart city concept, another important

trend, recently being discussed around the globe, is property
The first and foremost factor driving the demand for the devel- technologies (PropTech), involving different technologies relat-
opment of smart cities is — and will continue to be — the ed to the real estate market and property industry. According
phenomenon of rapid population growth in urban areas, par- to [4], it consists of three sectors: real estate Fintech, shared
ticularly in large cities. According to the United Nations’ “The economy, and smart real estate. The latter relates to the use of
World’s Cities in 2016” report [1]: a smart building, focusing on creating a more efficient property
• An estimated 54.5 percent of the world’s population lived market. The technologies within the smart building concept
in urban spaces in 2016. It is projected that by 2030, 60 include, but are not limited to, in-building wireless systems,
percent of people globally will live in urban areas and 1/3 in building automation, building and facility management, moni-
cities with at least half a million inhabitants. toring and data analysis, and energy management. A significant
• 512 cities with at least 1 million inhabitants existed globally in need for these kinds of applications can be observed in the
2016. By 2030, it is projected that 662 cities will have at least case of residential buildings, such as hotels, student dormitories,
1 million residents. retirement homes or senior housing, as well as offices. Within
• There were 45 cities globally between 5 and 10 million inhab- the scope of those, the three major requirements, in terms of
itants in 2016. 63 cities are projected to have between 5 and smart building systems, are management, energy efficiency and
10 million residents by 2030. energy waste control, and high-quality Internet connectivity,
• 31 megacities (cities with at least 10 million inhabitants) exist- which are of great importance to the tenants and customers
ed globally in 2016. By 2030, the number of megacities is (building owners or administrators).
projected to rise to 41. The implemented PropTech solution — Souly — an Inter-
The growing rural-to-urban migration creates opportunities net of Things (IoT) smart building system [5], addresses the
(e.g., for businesses and individuals, better educational and aforementioned challenges by integrating Wi-Fi infrastructure
employment opportunities) on one hand, and raises issues (e.g., with the building automation system and enabling integration
for the public sector and inhabitants) on the other hand. In fact, of third-party applications via an application programming
public sectors around the globe are facing various challenges interface (API) (e.g., allows integration with reservation appli-
in many of their areas of responsibilities, such as education, cation). The key aspects, from the development and mainte-
healthcare, housing, security, emergency services, electricity, nance perspective, are monitoring and management of the
water, traffic flow, parking, waste management, and environ- IoT infrastructure and environment. This can be achieved with
mental protection. the use of cloud computing, virtualization, and automation for
Recent advances in information and communications tech- self-management and monitoring. The end-to-end approach
nology (ICT) offer cities the possibility to use technologies to and a real application are presented for this case. Thanks to the
achieve sustainability and citizen well being, and reduce costs. implemented system, the customer (a private student dormitory
More precisely, the availability of broadband (fixed and mobile) owner in Poland) experienced around 30 percent lower energy
connectivity at a competitive price, a wide range of low-cost costs during the heating season compared to a similar student
real-time sensors, machine-to-machine communication stan- dormitory of similar size.
dards, cloud computing, big data analytics, and visualization The rest of the article is organized as follows. We present the
tools are helping decision makers (mayors, city councilors, eco- challenges for the adoption of smart cities, such as infrastruc-
nomic planners, policy makers) embrace the concept of smart ture, funding, fragmentation of the market, and skills required
cities in order to address urban challenges. Smart cities are no to develop the solutions. We describe the general architecture
longer a futuristic vision [2, 3]. They have become a reality, at of an IoT system in the context of a smart city. We discuss the
least from a high-level perspective. practical deployment of a smart building IoT system, focusing
on the architecture, monitoring, and management aspects, and
Digital Object Identifier: 10.1109/IOTM.0001.1900050 then conclude the article.

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 conduct its analysis of skill deficits and find out how to address
these deficits.

vertIcAls
Most smart cities use physically isolated vertical solutions to
address very specific issues, such as car parking or waste man-
agement. Furthermore, these solutions are controlled by different
administrative entities. This is an expensive approach, as each
vertical solution can have a separate platform, with separate
hardware configurations and software instances. Also, if the data
collected from each vertical are stored and processed separately,
cross-correlation between various datasets is impossible, which
prevents the city from making the best use of the collected data.
A city cannot be truly smart if each solution operates in isolation
across the city, which will likely remain the case as long as there
are separate units across different administrative entities [7].

legAl AsPects
Apart from the aforementioned challenges, there is also a
Figure 1. A simplified model of smart cities’ architecture. legal discussion on smart cities. One of the most crucial issues
regarding the law is privacy. Smart solutions are based on data
gathered from many different sensors. One must ensure that
chAllenges for the AdoPtIon of A smArt cIty collecting all the required data does not violate people’s privacy
The possibilities of adopting smart cities are still very limited due and law, taking into consideration rapid changes in this technol-
to many challenges. Most of them vary from country to coun- ogy. Since the gathered data will most likely be shared between
try, as well as within the same country. This section discusses many solutions, often from private sectors, it is crucial to ensure
examples of such challenges, preventing the global adoption of anonymization [8].
smart cities [6].
generAl smArt cIty ArchItecture
InfrAstructure Although the term smart city has been used for several years
Given the rapid development and availability of smart solutions now, by both academics and practitioners, and it becomes less
for cities, every city could (at least theoretically) become smart- of a trend as it enters the mainstream, there is still no agreement
er. A key challenge, though, is the availability of proper commu- among academics about a clear-cut definition of a smart city.
nications infrastructure, as it is an important component in the The authors agree with the one used in [7], namely that smart
development of a smart city. This is because such infrastructure city is a term for the use of ICT and other new technologies
is necessary to transfer data collected by sensors to their desti- to improve the sustainability, efficiency, and quality of public
nations, as well as to transfer commands sent to actuators. The services, as well as to improve the standard of living for citizens.
communications infrastructure is expected to offer broadband This is because ICT and new technologies, such as big data
connectivity, mobility, security, reliability, coverage, scalability, analytics and artificial intelligence (AI), are key elements for the
and quality of service (QoS) at an affordable price. Thus, munic- success of smart cities. This section discusses the main layers of
ipalities need to work closely with telecommunications service smart cities’ infrastructure, namely sensors, communication, data
providers in order to guarantee the availability of adequate platforms, applications, and security [9], as shown in Fig. 1.
communications infrastructure throughout their cities.
sensors
fundIng This layer is one of the most important pieces of the smart city
The creation of a smart city takes time and usually requires puzzle. It consists of sensors and actuators. Sensors are spread
huge funds due to the costs associated with introducing a large across an urban area in order to collect data that was previously
number of sensors, ensuring end-to-end connectivity, tools and too complex or time-consuming to collect. Actuators translate
applications, as well as further operations and maintenance. received messages into particular actions (e.g., close or open
Unfortunately, in many countries, municipalities do not have a valve). The sensors layer also allows the data to be collected
enough funds to cover the costs of becoming a smart city. Thus, and analyzed in real time, which was difficult and expensive in
there is a need to engage private investors, which is not an easy the past. There are many uses for sensors, such as monitoring
task, unless there is a clear business model that ensures adequate of energy and water usage, environmental conditions, and traf-
returns on investment for private investors. This is why most exist- fic flow patterns.
ing smart city projects focus on easily achievable, small goals that
are guaranteed to generate revenue or reduce operational costs, communIcAtIons
such as smart lighting, smart water, smart buildings, smart waste This layer, also called the connectivity layer, is responsible for
management, smart parking, and smart transportation. receiving the data from the sensors and sending it to actuators.
This category includes the communication network elements,
skIlls such as broadband equipment and infrastructure. This layer
Smart cities also require a wide range of skills. This is because makes it possible for sensors and actuators to transmit and
smart city projects can be complicated and risky, and require receive data in various formats and according to different stan-
long-term undertakings that involve many stakeholders and a dards. Due to the different characteristics and use of sensors,
wide range of new technologies. Thus, municipalities need to this layer has to include both fixed and mobile broadband net-
hire professionals with special management skills (e.g., in terms works, as well as technologies that are compatible with both
of risk assessment, dealing with a diverse set of stakeholders, the constrained and unconstrained sensors. The availability of
cross-departmental coordination and alignment), as well as mobile networks is crucial, not only because it is very costly and
technical skills (e.g., communications infrastructure, cyber-secu- practically impossible to link all sensors via fixed connection,
rity, cloud environments, data analytics and visualization, pro- but also because there are uses that require mobility, such as
gramming languages). Hence, each municipality is required to tracking of moving objects. The communication network is

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expected to provide coverage, reliability, scalability, security, important part of the real estate market. In those kinds of applica-
quality of service (QoS), and efficient use of spectrum at an tions, management, energy efficiency, energy waste control, and
affordable price. high-quality Internet connectivity are of great importance to the
tenants and owners. According to the customers (i.e., real estate
Platforms market investors and building owners), the major issues they
The role of the platforms layer is to receive, store, process and have to face are the need to maintain separate infrastructures
transfer information to the applications layer on one end, and (Internet access and building management systems), the lack of
send the action requests to the actuators on the other. It is also integration between different systems, and the lack of energy
responsible for device/sensor management. As there is a huge waste control for residential buildings. This section presents a
number of sensors and actuators in smart cities, huge amounts case study of implementation of a PropTech solution in a student
of data will be collected and pushed to the platforms layer. dormitory in Poland in order to address those challenges.
Thus, this layer must be able to accommodate and manage
large volumes of data, according to the established standards A Smart City Case Study
and regulations. Also, this layer is required to have data analytic The Souly platform was proposed to solve the mentioned
tools that are capable of processing big data in order to extract requirements, by integrating the Wi-Fi infrastructure with the
useful information from the collected raw data. Furthermore, it building automation system, an API with third party systems
must be able to expose APIs that allow various applications to (e.g., a booking application), and energy management control,
connect and interact with this layer. The platforms layer can be which allows controling a room’s configuration and monitoring
cloud-based or operated and managed by the city itself (i.e., on temperature settings globally and locally.
premises). In the case of the cloud-based platform, it is extreme- The main challenges within the deployment come with the
ly important to specify clearly in the contract who owns the scale, namely the number of rooms and tenants to serve, as
data — the city itself and/or other actors. well as gateways and sensors, the amount of data to be pro-
cessed, the dense Wi-Fi radio environment (two devices per
Applications access point, AP, and one AP per room), and the required com-
This layer consists of user interface and the associated software patibility between software and different gateways. The next
(e.g., web application or a mobile application), which connect sections describe in detail the system itself, and the technical-
to the platforms layer and provide information to customers in ities and solutions for monitoring and management that allow
well-defined formats, such as tables, graphs, and reports. This this system to work in production.
way, customers can get high-quality smart services that meet
their needs. The applications layer, together with the sensors Souly: An Integrated IoT System
layer, get the most attention. This is because, in the applications Souly is an IoT system dedicated to smart hotels and dormito-
layer context, the end user can download and install an applica- ries, composed of sensors and actuators, IoT gateways, a cloud
tion that can make their life easier. In the sensors layer context, platform, an administration panel (for general building manage-
people can see sensors that are deployed in smart cities. On the ment), and a mobile application (for tenants’ temperature con-
contrary, the communications and platforms layers are hidden trol). Figure 2a shows the general architecture of the system.
from the end users, so sometimes their significance is forgotten. The individual building blocks’ tasks are as follows:
• Sensors and actuators: send the measurements and act
Security according to the requests from the cloud or gateway (e.g.,
All layers are vulnerable if not protected properly. This is temperature sensor, door/window opening sensor, presence
because: sensor, heating valve).
• Sensors, due to cost considerations, often do not have the • IoT gateway: controls an individual room’s sensors and actu-
computing power required for sophisticated security imple- ators, reports current settings and measurements, and pro-
mentation, so they can be hacked to produce false data. vides Wi-Fi coverage (acts as a Wi-Fi AP).
• Communication can be compromised by man-in-the-mid- • Cloud platform: gathers and processes the data from the
dle attacks (e.g., traffic flow from point A to point B will go gateways and the administrator panel; gathers settings and
through a fraudster who can steal, for example, login details reports; incorporates monitoring, automation, and analytics
for future use). tools; incorporates databases; and acts as a Message Queue
• Platforms contain data that can be breached by unauthorized Telemetry Transport (MQTT) [12] broker.
parties. • Administration panel: allows for configuration of individual
Thus, the security layer is extremely crucial and lies vertically rooms, separately or globally; allows assigning tenants to
across all other layers. The security layer consists of technical rooms; presents the analytical data; and presents information
mechanisms and policies to protect the sensors, communica- from all rooms and settings;
tions, platforms, and applications layers from unauthorized use, • API module: allows integration of third-party software.
access and manipulation [10]. • Mobile application: allows controlling an individual room’s
temperature, and presents current settings and measure-
Practical Implementation of a ments.
Smart Building IoT System as an The key aspects from the development and maintenance
perspective are the monitoring and management of the IoT
Example of a Proptech Solution infrastructure and environment. The Souly IoT platform was
A segment of the smart city application is the smart building, created with the use of state-of-the-art technologies, including
a recently developing market for the real estate and property cloud computing, virtualization, and automation for self-man-
industry, operating within PropTech, which focuses on more agement and monitoring. Those technologies, used together,
efficient property management. Smart building implementations allow for efficient maintenance and development of the system,
include, among others, in-building wireless systems, building where the main challenge is operating at a large scale.
automation, building and facility management, monitoring and
data analysis, building energy management, as well as smart Souly IoT Gateway
space management [11]. The IoT gateway (called Soulbox) aggregates the smart building
The recent trends in living, namely domestic and foreign functions (e.g., heating control, electricity cutoff control, pres-
mobility of people as well as long-term rentals, make residential ence control), together with Wi-Fi AP functionality, allowing the
buildings (e.g., hotels, student housing, co-working offices) an room tenant to get Internet access.

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 a) Overall architecture

b) Cloud-platform architecture

Figure 3. Souly IoT Gateway Architecture.

device monitoring. It is further described in the next section.

Figure 2. Souly IoT Architecture: a) general architecture, b) These services are hosted on virtual machines (VMs) on a Linux
expanded view of the cloud platform. operating system.

The architecture of an IoT gateway is shown in Fig. 3. It is Monitoring

implemented in a virtualized manner using the Docker concept While discussing IoT systems, one cannot overlook the issues
[13] for easier management of the functionality and updates of related to the constant monitoring of the devices. High-level
the software. On top of a physical machine, where the operat- architectures of many systems show gateways, sensors, and
ing system is implemented, there are three docker containers. backend infrastructure. One must remember that monitoring
Each container performs certain functions, like communication/ also plays an important role. In the case of such complex sys-
API, an internal algorithm for room management, or a service tems, every misbehavior must be reported, and proper actions
application for local sensor verification. should be taken.
The communication between the cloud and the gateway is han- To provide constant monitoring of the IoT system, the
dled with the use of MQTT, a lightweight publish-subscribe messag- authors used the Elasticsearch [14] engine as a unit that can
ing transport protocol typically used for IoT applications. An MQTT store and search indexed data. Elasticsearch is a part of Elastic
client, implemented within the IoT gateway, communicates with Stack, which consists of an ingest layer, a search engine, and
the MQTT broker implemented at the edge of the cloud platform a user interface for visualizing data. Kibana allows visualizing
(Fig. 2b). Each of the gateways uses a separate topic (channel) to data, creating dashboards, and managing Elastic Stack from an
communicate with the broker. Such an approach allows easy mon- extensible user interface. Elasticsearch is a JSON-based search
itoring of the behavior of a single device and reduces broadcast and analytics engine. Within the ingest layer, there are two
traffic. Instead of sending a message to all devices with a payload available components: beats, which are lightweight services that
of recipient information, the MQTT publisher-subscriber model is can send data from different sources to Elasticsearch (e.g., File-
leveraged to specify the target device. beat, Packetbeat, Metricbeat, Auditbeat), as well as Logstash,
which is a server-side data processing pipeline that can modify
Cloud Services and Data Analytics incoming data by splitting messages into separate fields, drop-
Apart from the MQTT broker mentioned in the previous sec- ping messages if certain criteria are met or inserting additional
tion, the cloud platform consists of an API, allowing integration data based on the message source.
with web, mobile, and third-party applications, data analytics The most vulnerable components in the system are Soulbox-
and monitoring, IoT gateways, management and software es, since they are exposed to users and possible mechanical
upgrades, security mechanisms, and databases. The cloud archi- damage. They are frequently updated elements, so their state
tecture of the IoT platform is shown in Fig. 2b. should be monitored on two levels. First, each of the Soulboxes
There are two databases — short- and long-term. The latter is sends and receives data from the MQTT broker. This channel
used to store the configurations of individual rooms and tenant is used to monitor the status of the devices. Soulbox receives a
information. The former stores and processes the data for visu- message on a topic containing the room number, while an API
alization and monitoring. Due to different data characteristics requests and sends a response with its state. In the proposed
in both databases, two different approaches are used. Tenant architecture, Jenkins [15] is the source of requests. Jenkins is an
information, room settings, and global settings are stored in the open source automation server, used mostly for testing, build-
relational database. This allows easy handling separate sets of ing, and deploying software.
users, devices, and relations between them. Users can easily be One of the Elastic Stack beats subscribes to the configured
added or removed from the room. On the other hand, there MQTT topics and feeds them to the Elasticsearch index. The
is also another type of data: cyclic measurements. These are MQTT beat is subscribed to the topic containing API responses.
stored in a time-series database. Such a database is optimized Each of the Soulboxes uses its topic, but using wildcards allows
to handle large amounts of input data and allows easy sorting the whole building to be observed at once. Such an approach
and filtering of data based on timestamps. There is also a third allows avoiding the requirement for an IP connection between
storage space, namely the analytics module, which is used for the monitoring system and Soulboxes.

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 ple, decrease transmit power if high interference is detected
a) from a particular access point or change channel when the
considered one becomes congested.

Management
By always being aware of the devices’ states, one can reliably
manage them. This task is performed using the aforementioned
automation tool, Jenkins. It is used to provide a unified interface
for scripts or API calls’ execution.
b) Management can be divided into two parts: managing work-
ing software (e.g., setting parameters for all devices) and man-
aging the software itself (i.e., software updates). The first case
can be handled by either the administration panel or Jenkins.
Both tools are capable of sending a message over MQTT to the
devices, which have designed endpoints for setting, for exam-
ple, target temperature.
Software updates are also orchestrated by Jenkins, but there
are more components involved in this process. It all starts with
the developer, committing tag in Git — a version control system.
Upon receiving a new tag, Git triggers a job build on Jenkins.
This job’s objective is to build the latest version of the software.
There is a Builder Node connected to Jenkins as its slave. The
c) job consists of the following steps:
• The Builder Node fetches tagged source code.
• The Builder Node builds docker images and pushes them to
the repository.
• Jenkins orders docker pull on the development versions of
Soulboxes (Soulbox Dev).
• Jenkins performs tests on Soulbox Dev.
When all tests are successful, the software can be deployed
using the same scheme — Jenkins initiates a docker pull on
the devices. Status of the updates can be monitored using API
requests and can be visualized using Elastic Stack.

End-to-End Approach: Real Life Case Study

To ease the burden of customers and let them focus on their
Figure 4. Example monitoring aspects: a) health and uptime for
core business (e.g., drinking water, sewage, social care, emer-
gateways; b) detecting issues with the device; c) managing gency management, future strategies), it is highly recommend-
interference. ed that customers adopt end-to-end solution(s) from a single
provider. Souly takes an end-to-end approach by including sen-
sors, network, applications, analytics, API, and management in
Using Kibana, one can create a visualization showing how order to deliver smart building/cities solutions. To provide an
long gateways work without restarts. This allows for detecting example, the main aspects of the deployment are gathered in
issues in specific parts of the building. In Fig. 4a, which depicts Table 1.
uptime in days for every device, divided into room number Souly allows both building administrators and tenants to
and floor number, one can see that floors 4 and 5 were under access a web or mobile panel, where they can control the tem-
maintenance 2–3 weeks ago, and all devices were restarted. perature in rooms. The administrator panel is presented in Fig.
The darker the color, the shorter the uptime of the device in a 5. Two views are presented: the floor overview (top figure),
specific room. where, at first glance, one can see which rooms are available
Soulboxes are also monitored on a different level. The oper- for rent (gray), and which are occupied, and whether the tenant
ating system can generate various logs containing important is outside (green) or inside (blue). The second view (bottom
information about the state of the device. One can find logs figure) presents settings of an individual room, where, for exam-
about invalid login attempts, memory allocation problems, ple, the target temperature can be adjusted, a tenant can be
application failures, and so on. Those logs are forwarded to a assigned to the room, or Internet access can be disabled. This
remote Rsyslog using a built-in Linux approach. Rsyslog gathers allows for easy management of the system from the administra-
all the data and passes it to Logstash. Using such an approach tion point of view and enables observation of rooms’ statuses
allows Logstash to have only one input, which solves many in real time, thanks to the use of MQTT communication, where
queueing issues and improves scalability. each room is logically separated.
One example where logs can be useful is presented in Fig. 4b. It Thanks to the use of the system implemented within the dor-
shows a specific scenario in which a device crashed after some mitory, the energy costs decreased by about 30 percent during
error. Right before going offline, one can observe an increas- the heating season compared to a similar dormitory of similar
ing number of logs. Such a simple metric can trigger an email size due to the efficient handling of the heating process and
notification, which allows reaction before the device becomes lower cost of infrastructure maintenance (single infrastructure
unreachable. for Internet access and smart building functions).
Using these mechanisms, not only should the health and
state of the device be monitored, but also data sent using the Summary
MQTT protocol. Devices periodically send Wi-Fi measurements, This article shows different perspectives from which a smart city
which are captured by the MQTT beat. Having such data, one application can be observed, namely challenges, the architec-
can easily monitor radio parameters such as interference (Fig. ture of IoT systems, technologies and implementation details,
4c). Based on this, one can adapt Wi-Fi parameters, for exam- mechanisms for IoT system operation, as well as a realistic case

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 Aspect Details

Use case Private student dormitory

Number of buildings 1

Number of floors 13

Number of tenants 494

Number of rooms 494

Number of IoT Gateways (and Wi-Fi APs) 494

Number of sensors and actuators per room 6

Total number of sensors and actuators 2964

Number of IoT messages per hour ~ 7,000,000

Number of connected devices to the Wi-Fi Up to 1000 (~2 devices per

network tenant)
Table 1. Souly deployment example.

[10] H. Djigal, F. Jun, and J. Lu, “Secure Framework for Future Smart City,” IEEE
CSCloud 2017, June 2017.
[11] D. Minoli, K. Sohraby, and B. Occhiogrosso, “IoT Considerations Require-
ments and Architectures for Smart Buildings — Energy Optimization and
Next-Generation Building Management Systems,” IEEE Internet of Things J.,
vol. 4, Feb. 2017, pp. 269–83.
[12] http://mqtt.org/.
[13] https://www.docker.com/.
[14] https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/index.html.
[15] https://jenkins.io/doc/.

Biographies
Marcin Dryjanski [SM’18] (marcin.dryjanski@grandmetric.
com) is the co-founder and principal consultant at Grand-
metric, providing consulting services and training courses on
LTE and 5G-related topics. He is the leader of the company’s
wireless research on Grandmetric’s IoT platform. He received
his Ph.D. from Poznan University of Technology in 2019. He
Figure 5. Souly administration application. is the co-author of several research papers targeting LTE-A
Pro and 5G radio interface design and is the co-author of a
book, From LTE to LTE-Advanced Pro and 5G (Artech House).
He was a WP leader in 5GNOW, an EU-funded research project aiming at air
study. Important segments within the smart city ecosystem, interface design for 5G.
namely PropTech and smart building, are highlighted, together
with the key challenges. To address those requirements and Mateusz Buczkowski [SM] (mateusz.buczkowski@grandmet-
present an example of an end-to-end approach, an IoT system ric.com) received his M.Sc. degree from Poznan University of
Technology in 2012. Since then, he is employed at the Chair
for a residential building is presented. The discussion circles of Telecommunication Systems and Optoelectronics in the
around the explanation of system architecture details and the Faculty of Electronics and Telecommunications as a teach-
used technologies, with the main focus on monitoring and man- ing assistant. He is pursuing his Ph.D. in the field of image
agement, in order to highlight the importance of those at scale. processing. His research interests cover a wide spectrum
of image and video processing, in particular, image quality
This is concluded with a real-life case study, showing an end-to- assessment. As an R&D engineer, he took part in two FP7 EU
end approach for a specific customer of the PropTech market, projects, namely 5GNOW and SOLDER, where he worked on 5G solutions. In
where energy costs decreased by about 30 percent during the Grandmetric, he is involved in wireless systems research.
heating season.
Youssouf Ould-Cheikh-Mouhamedou (ymouhamedou@stc.
Acknowledgement com.sa) is a senior R&D expert at the Saudi Telecom Com-
pany, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Prior to joining STC, he worked
The work by A. Kliks was funded withing statutory funds for as an assistant professor at King Saud University, Riyadh,
2019 and 2020 at the Faculty of Computing and Telecommuni- Saudi Arabia; a postdoctoral fellow at TELECOM Bretagne,
Brest, France; and a research engineer at the Communications
cations at Poznan University of Technology. Research Centre Canada, Ottawa. He received a Dipl.-Ing.
degree and Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engineer-
References ing from the Technical University of Munich, Germany, and
[1] UN, “The World’s Cities in 2016,” Data Booklet, pp. ii and 2, 2016. McGill University, Canada, in 2001 and 2005, respectively. His research interests
[2] A. Zanella et al., “Internet of Things for Smart Cities,” IEEE Internet of Things J., are in error correction coding, wireless communications, Internet of Things (IoT),
vol. 1, no. 1, Feb. 2014. and software development.
[3] Y. Mehmood et al., “Internet-of-Things-Based Smart Cities: Recent Advances
and Challenges,” IEEE Commun. Mag., vol. 55, no. 9, Sept. 2017. Adrian Kliks [SM] ([email protected]) is an assistant
[4] https://www.sbs.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/2018-07/PropTech3.0.pdf. professor at Poznan University of Technology’s Department
[5] https://souly.pl/. of Wireless Communications, Poland. His research interests
[6] UN Commission on Science and Technology for Development, “Smart Cities include new waveforms for wireless systems, applying either
and Infrastructure,” Jan. 2016, pp. 33–58. non-orthogonal or noncontiguous multicarrier schemes, cog-
[7] Deloitte, “Smart Cities — The importance of a Smart ICT Infrastructure for nitive radio, advanced spectrum management, deployment
Smart Cities,” Jan. 2017. and resource management in small cells, and network virtu-
[8] E. Geffray and J.-B. Auby, “The Political and Legal Consequences of Smart alization.
Cities,” Smart Cities at the Crossroads, Fact Report 2017.
[9] S. Hsu, “IoT Security Guidelines — Device Life Cycle Overview,” TREND
MICRO, 2017.

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