Smart City Sensing and Communication Sub-Infrastructure

Significant recent research activities and initiatives by local governments to establish resilient smart city infrastructures signal that time is right for smart cities in the near future. For example, sensors deployed within a city could monitor traffic patterns, perform environmental measurements and determine optimum traffic routing, when deployed in areas that have a power infrastructure. In this paper, we conceptualize the deployment of such nodes, which we term Smart Boxes, in a part of the city where there is no existing or currently functional energy and communication infrastructure. We envision our proposed smart boxes incorporating a multi-source energy harvester (e.g., wind/solar). Eliminating the infrastructure requirement allows our smart box to act as an emergency cell phone network in any part of the city, thereby forming an emergency sub-infrastructure. To improve scalability, we use a Software Defined Radio (SDR) within the box. The contribution of this paper is to provide an architectural map of the box and a proof-of-concept experimental demonstration of its LTE network capabilities. Our experiments show that the box is capable of serving three cellular users and can be powered from a 50-100W solar panel and a 50-100W wind turbine, thereby confirming its feasibility as a Smart City node.