Ellie Gabel explains why Smart City Growth requires fast, secure, resilient, robust wireless communications to support increased urban connections.
Urban environments are increasingly interconnected. Aside from an increase in consumer devices, the Internet of Things (IoT) infrastructure is increasing as smart city initiatives accelerate.
These trends are mostly beneficial, but they also raise some questions about the future of wireless communications.
Urban areas rely more on wireless connectivity, making uptime and latency a greater concern. While lugs and dropped connections may be inconvenient today, they can cause safety issues in smart cities.
Cybercrime presents a threat as more infrastructure and sensitive data moves to wirelessly accessible endpoints.
Thankfully, technological advancements are steadily generating answers to these installation concerns.
Maximize your bandwidth
The most obvious challenge in maintaining a hyper-connected urban environment is ensuring that everyone has a reliable and fast connection. This is also the area with the most mature solutions: 5G and edge computing.
5G cellular networks already achieve real speeds of 500 megabits/sec (MBPS), and are below 20 Mbps for most consumer mobile applications.
The reliance on short-range but dense signals supports more devices per area, paving the way for wider IoT adoption.
Network slicing further reduces the benefits of 5G. This feature allows administrators to split 5G connections into multiple subnetworks to provide a variety of end uses.
Splitting traffic according to different needs will help you get the speed, latency, or security you need without overcrowding all your devices, or overcrowding or overcomplicating a single virtual network.
Edge Computing distributes computing tasks across local devices with similar advantages. The process is closer to the endpoint in an edge environment than traditional cloud setups, so the device can function more quickly.
This provides low latency of 10 milliseconds and sufficient computing power for advanced applications such as self-driving cars.
Preventing RFI
Radio frequency interference (RFI) presents another challenge when so many devices emit signals in one area.
All electronics emit electromagnetic noise, but higher concentrations can push it beyond what today’s circuits are built to withstand. Too many RFIs can disrupt the signal, pose security and safety risks.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is useful. Some military-grade network technologies use it to analyze the spectrum in real time and allow interference to be detected when it occurs.
Once detected, the model coordinates the network and deploys anti-jamming techniques to prevent destruction into normal signals.
This technology has electronic warfare roots, but also serves more mundane purposes. By finding and fighting RFIs in real time, these solutions allow busy smart city networks to maintain signal integrity despite increased electromagnetic noise.
Ensuring cyber resilience
Cybersecurity is a similar concern. Devices that are more connected in one area mean a wider attack surface, and urban environments are the bigger targets of cybercrime.
Such activities threaten more than consumer data. Cyberattacks on critical infrastructure have skyrocketed 30% between 2022 and 2023 and continue to rise.
Without proper protection, the risk of a larger urban network could outweigh the benefits. As a result, improving cybersecurity measurements for wireless networks and public IoT infrastructures is extremely important. 5G and edge computing can also be useful in this area.
High bandwidth and lower latency make your network vulnerable to disruption, stop denial of service attacks, and less room for data interception.
Network slices can also separate sensitive traffic from the rest to provide unique protection, while edge computing distributes data between endpoints, limiting the impact of a single violation.
Administrators can also take advantage of AI-driven security improvements. Automatic monitoring can detect and include suspicious activity before causing major damage.
Organizations save on data breaches costs averaged $2.2 million from such technologies, highlighting the potential of smart cities.
Public agencies can also host IoT devices on separate networks from other endpoints to minimize lateral movement and further reduce the impact of violations.
As urban connectivity increases, networks need to evolve
Increased connectivity makes cities safer, more efficient and more convenient than ever.
However, this applies only if the underlying network infrastructure is able to address the most notable concerns.
Ensuring proper bandwidth, signal integrity and cybersecurity are key to effective smart city deployments.
When wireless communications providers and urban authorities tackle these areas, they pave the way for a more interconnected future.
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