Gijon, Spain

With about 280 thousand inhabitants, Gijón is the largest municipality in the autonomous community of Asturias in Spain. The City is playing a major part in trying to accelerate the shift towards more open and interoperable smart communities.

The smart city journey started in 2016 to deploy a public and interoperable Internet of Things infrastructure based on our Smart Urban Network and the open standard 6LoWPAN. The implementation plan has steadily progressed and, once completed, the network will connect 44,000 streetlights, 135 municipal buildings, 100 homes, 200 shops and 16 air quality control stations. Further applications and devices will be added to the network in the coming months and years.

The City’s smart vision goes beyond its own operations though. Central to the Gijón-IN (Innovative, Intelligent and Integrated City) program is the ability to connect IoT devices for a range of applications that could not only provide valuable information to the city authorities, but also to the wider community of developers, innovators, academia and other third parties through an open data platform.

Gijón City Council recognized the importance of working collaboratively to achieve this and brought together relevant players from the public and private sectors, universities and research centers to share knowledge and expertise and contribute to the program. It also created a Smart Cities Chair together with the University of Oviedo, a laboratory that has replicated the city’s IoT infrastructure, and established the DemoLAB, a space for the design, development and implementation of private initiatives for new products and services.

A major challenge to creating a completely open and flexible smart city network is that IoT standards do not currently specify a data model for smart city and utility use cases, which can prevent Cities taking a multi-supplier approach when it comes to adding new applications and devices to the network. Hence, Gijon joined the uCIFI Alliance to help define a common Smart City data model that can be used by IoT device makers.

The uCIFI Alliance and the Gijón City Council are working jointly to assist IoT device manufacturers with uCIFI interoperability checks on their devices in the Gijon DemoLAB space. Each manufacturer is invited to join the alliance, implement the uCIFI LwM2M-based data model (already available to uCIFI members) and contribute to the uCIFI 6LoWPAN-compatible wireless network mesh stack, before proposing their uCIFI-compliant products to further Gijón’s tender process.

“The benefit of a data model for us will be the ability to launch new services quickly and create new application functionalities without expensive API integration or the need to move data from third-party platforms,” says Jose Antonio Rodríguez Cortés, IoT project manager. “It’s important to enable us to scale and keep pace with new ideas and requirements for visitor services. It’s fundamental to help us realize the new concept of the model of Gijón.”