Smart cities offer the potential to improve the public health, safety and welfare by integrating intelligent technology into the built environment. For example, Internet-of-things (IoT) devices deployed throughout a city can be used for real-time crime detection and monitoring, or to collect data on the movement of people in a way that enables more intelligent decisions about how to design the built environment itself. However, smart city projects can be extremely expensive to deploy and manage. Cities such as San Diego, New Orleans, London, and Songdo have either proposed or invested in smart city projects that cost between $30 Million and $40 Billion. In addition to the cost of deploying and maintaining the IoT devices themselves, a significant portion of the expense is a result of providing Internet connectivity via 5G or WiFi to those devices. These costs are a major barrier to the widespread deployment of smart city technology and the social benefits that may ensue from that technology.

To alleviate the costs, this project proposes use of delay tolerant networks (DTNs) as a backbone for smart city communication. DTNs provide opportunistic networking connections in areas with little to no infrastructure. Messages are delivered with some delay which is directly correlated with the layout, density, and mobility of nodes in the network. Recognizing that some data are needed in real-time, this project seeks to investigate advancements in edge-computing, while optimizing the placement and use of internet-connected nodes in the network. For data that can tolerate delays, this project proposes to use the natural movement of people and vehicles through a city to transfer data between nodes. In this way, the citizens become an integral part of the smart city network itself.

The goal is to enable developing communities to become smart cities at a fraction of the cost along with enabling developed cities to minimize cost and maximize efficiency. The City of Louisville, Kentucky, is the partnered city for this research. To ensure that Louisville as a smart city serves its citizens, the project takes a “human centered design,” combined with “activity centered design” approach. The goal is to ensure that the design of the smart city system takes into account the needs and concerns of community members and is useful to them. For example, a successful design must be sensitive to concerns about data privacy, and to how the data will be used to improve quality of life within the city.