Smart Street Lights and Mobile Citizen Apps for Resilient Communication in a Digital City
Lars Baumgartner, Jonas Hochst, Patrick Lampe, Ragnar Mogk, Artur Sterz, Pascal Weisenburger, Mira Mezini, Bernd Freisleben · 2019
While information and communication technology is crucial for the operation of urban infrastructures and the wellbeing of its inhabitants, current technology is quite vulnerable to disruptions of various kinds. In future smart cities, a more resilient urban infrastructure is imperative to handle the increasing number of hazardous situations. We present a novel resilient communication approach based on smart street lights as part of the public infrastructure. It supports people in their everyday life and adapts its functionality to the challenges of emergency situations. Our approach relies on various environmental sensors and in-situ processing for automatic situation assessment, and a range of communication mechanisms for maintaining a communication network. Furthermore, resilience is not only achieved based on infrastructure deployed by a digital city's municipality, but also based on integrating citizens through software that runs on their mobile devices. Web-based zero-installation and platform-agnostic apps can switch to device-to-device communication to continue benefiting people even during a disaster situation. Our approach, featuring a covert channel for professional responders and a zero-installation app, is evaluated through a prototypical implementation based on a commercially available street light.