October 2022

Written by Vyasa Sai, Haesik Kim, and Bernard Fong

One of the important features of a smart city is enhanced healthcare, safety and efficiency. Driven by the recent trends of smart cities development across the world, political decision makers and service providers, as well as local residents and visitors are expecting to enjoy more efficient and reliable solutions to the growing problems associated with services across smart cities. Rapid advances of telecommunication technologies provide solutions to these problems, which has initiated ICT professionals to design and implement various smart city initiatives [1].

Written by Paawan Sharma, Anurag Kandya, and Vipin Shukla

Data availability for monitoring pollution spread is gaining momentum with comprehensive and more straightforward provisioning of internet of things (IoT) network pollution sensors and satellite data. The widely used sensors include suspended particulate matter (SPM) capture in the form of PM2.5, PM10, CO₂, and CO, hazardous gases, noise pollution, and light pollution. Identifying temporal, geological, and geographical relationships between various elements of captured data plays a crucial role in establishing and understanding the behavioral model of pollution generation and spread. IoT enables data capture with geo-tagging in order to map localized pollution footprints. Modern data analytics frameworks, either cloud-based or edge-based, provide great insight into the ocean of big data. The information extracted from in-depth data analysis is used in policy formulation to check pollution spread further. This article highlights the features of various enabler tools in this regard and presents a broader view of the optimal strategy for adopting a sensor network-based data analytics framework.

Written by Leonard Mabele, Joseph Sevilla, and Oscar Onyango

The fifth generation (5G) of mobile telecommunications has ushered in a new era to leapfrog massive adoption of the Internet of Things (IoT). Under its pillar of massive Machine-Type Communications (mMTC), it is tipped to drive more consumer and Industrial IoT as well as mission-critical machine-to-machine (MC-M2M) applications. While fruits of 5G are already being reaped in the developed economies to the extent that the 6th generation (6G) studies have begun, the developing economies are still at their infant stage in identifying potential opportunities of 5G. Kenya, one of the most vibrant technology countries on the African continent is currently running pilots to determine the best use case for commercial deployments in the mid-band frequencies (sub-6 GHz band). In this paper, we highlight the roadmap of adopting 5G for a smart City using Narrowband-IoT (NB-IoT) as the bridge of transition.The roadmap is based on a pilot study of IoT-based environmental monitoring in Nairobi – the capital city of Kenya. The paper highlights different IoT use cases that can be powered by 5G to transform Nairobi to a smart city through the deployment of an iterative NB-IoT model. Further, we also share recommendations on strategic adoption of IoT and Future Networks for more smart cities in Africa.

Keywords—IoT, Low Power Wide Area Networks, NB-IoT, 5G

Written by Deborsi Basu, Raja Datta, and Uttam Ghosh

The advancements in Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) trigger the development of dynamic Network Slicing (NS) approach for optimized resource utilization. The concept of NS has been derived from network virtualization and softwarization techniques to support future technological growth. Next-generation communication networks are going to encounter a massive data explosion due to a rapid increase in service demands. From 5G to 6G network, Industry 5.0, Massive IoT as well as Healthcare-4.0 are also expanding their service boundary within a resource-restricted environment. Poor and unplanned ways of resource expansion can result in huge cost overhead, traffic overhead, and wastage of energy. So, the augmentation of heterogeneous network architectures becomes extremely necessary to handle these critical situations. NS is the most advanced and smart technology that can bridge multiple services through a common and shared resource channel. This sharable platform becomes more vulnerable to security threats as most of the network data will be accessed by multiple TNOs (Telecom Network Operators) to deploy and release their respective network services. The major security issue will arise to authenticate the dynamically produced network slice. In this work, we are going to propose a dynamic slice selection algorithm (DSSA) that can allow or restrict the NFCs (Network Function Chains) to get associated with only the authentic slice using an encrypted hash functioning technique. The results are expected to come high accuracy rate in selecting the most trustable slice for installed network services.