How Real-Time Processing Can Help Envision Smart Cities In India
As more and more Indians move from villages to towns and then to cities, India must embrace emerging innovations.
The National Smart Cities Mission (SCM) was launched by the Government of India on June 25, 2015, with a vision to improve quality of life and accelerate growth in the urban sector. Through a two-stage competition, 100 cities were selected to participate in this unique programme. These cities would change for the better with improved infrastructure, application of technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and real-time monitoring within governmental systems.
As population and urbanisation continue to expand, many cities will look to modern technologies and cutting-edge networks to assist them in managing resource shortages. Governance in cities will increasingly leverage the Internet of Things (IoT) with the use of "smart city solutions."
IoT: Smart, scalable, and strategic solution
The use of technology in upscaling a city requires connected and intelligent networks that can seamlessly process data. Internet of Things (IoT) is a "smart" solution that supports these technological developments. IoT use and development have increased over the past few years, and a study by IoT Analytics predicts that there will be about 27 billion linked IoT devices by 2025.
ALSO READ: What Is IoT? How Does It Work? How Does It Make Our Daily Lives Better?
IoT applicability is for a range of applications including smart homes, parking, water monitoring, healthcare, traffic lighting, smart waste management, etc. Any comprehensive IoT strategy for creating smart cities must start with a database. Modern databases automate the delivery of insights from massive amounts of rapidly changing data points to achieve intelligent real-time decision-making.
Making cities smart in real-time
Real-time data processing is crucial to solving the ‘smart cities’ puzzle. Real-time data platforms analyse large volumes of city-wide data collected through a network of IoT systems. All the data is ingested and processed in real-time, from gigabyte to petabyte scale.
It is critical that enormous amounts of data be processed in submillisecond time and without errors. To improve infrastructure, e.g., street lighting, roads, and public spaces for citizens, it is critical to power fast, intelligent data flow for optimal city services in the following areas:
Smart energy: IoT sensors will spur the adoption of smart power distribution, dynamic-reading electrical metres, self-healing energy grids, networked buildings and industrial plants, automated water use and leak detection, and just-in-time waste collection.
Environmental controls and sustainability: IoT sensors would help maximize energy efficiency, pollution monitoring, traffic control, and sustainable resources. IoT sensors provide data on how to reduce emissions and eliminate waste. They enable long-term sustainability solutions when coupled with deep and accurate real-time data analysis.
Smart buildings- IoT-enabled facility management solutions connect building-wide sensors to improve energy efficiency and space utilization at lower costs.
Mobility and connected transit: Monitored transit systems are safer and cleaner with coordinated mass transportation systems, traffic control, parking, and many other transit-related services that rely on real-time data insights on moving traffic, parking spaces, and predictive insights for road management.
Public safety and security: The essential feature of a smart city is providing the inhabitants with safer and better living conditions. Cameras and real-time video monitoring systems help reduce crime with motion sensing and real-time crowdsourcing of data about crime, including identifying security gaps, active crime tracking, and empowering faster response times by authorities.
5G drives IoT
What does 5G mean for IoT? How exactly does 5G achieve greater data speeds? The advancement of everything from self-driving cars to smart grids for renewable energy to AI-enabled robots on manufacturing floors is made possible by 5G's quicker, more reliable, and more secure connectivity. With proper speed, latency, and cost trade-offs, networks can support billions of connected devices in the vast IoT ecosystem.
5G and IoT, are set to generate an estimated 1 billion terabytes of data by 2025. Current statistics predict that the volume of data generated will amount to 181 zettabytes by 2025, more than six times the amount processed in 2018.
With 5G, we will have faster connections, more reliability, and greater capacity at a lower cost, enabling high bandwidth and low latency necessary for smart city applications such as real-time connected vehicle and traffic data and infrastructure safety.
It also allows for enormous advances in critical areas of technology, from artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to video surveillance, along with IoT and self-driving cars.
The introduction of emerging technologies such as IoT, AI, and automation will catalyze smart city development, but this growth will only succeed with 5G data processing and analysis on modern real-time data platforms.
These platforms can move large amounts of data through the network and create an affordable way to store the data to be easily accessed and analysed.
How 'smart' is India getting?
The knowledge gained through real-time data analysis is crucial for creating livable cities that are resource efficient.
We need instant, accurate data analytics to make sense of the huge volumes of data flowing from many sources, such as geospatial data, traffic data, foot traffic data, vehicle count data, crime statistics, etc.
As data must be ingested, stored, and computed in real-time, managing this vast volume of data and coping with the ongoing data increase, are significant issues impacting the development of smart cities.
A surge in the quantity of data forms, such as social media, audio, video, and smart device data, has coincided with the growth of unstructured data. Organizations must be aware of and prepared with the required tools, capabilities, and insights to use complex real-time data.
The capacity of entities to share and analyze data determines the success of a smart city. For all enterprises and organizations to create software solutions and apps that support automation and create "smart" infrastructure, they need to exchange critical information instantly.
Currently, many cities compete to be smart cities in hopes of reaping some of their benefits economically, environmentally, and socially. As a result, they may be eyeing opportunities made possible by using data analytics in smart city applications.
Real-time data management and processing capabilities can enable a new ecosystem of services, with data-driven governments and insight-driven policies and improve government operating efficiency.
As more and more Indians move from villages to towns and then to cities, India must embrace emerging innovations such as sensors, earth observation, cloud analytics, data visualization, data science, citizen science, IoT, etc., to create better and more efficient smart cities for the future.
(The author is Vice President — Asia Pacific and Japan at Aerospike, which is a real-time Data Platform that enables organisations to act instantly across billions of transactions while reducing server footprint by up to 80 percent.)
Disclaimer: The opinions, beliefs, and views expressed by the various authors and forum participants on this website are personal.
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