- From Smart to Open Cities
Information is the new asset class for Cities in the XXI century. Smart Cities cannot be limited to connecting devices and automating processes: they are about data becoming tangible value for the benefit of all.
As global population is growing and increasingly moving to urban areas, Cities struggle to keep the pace with the mounting demand for energy and water, infrastructures and mobility systems, healthcare and efficient public services. City managers have to deal with complex and multi-faceted challenges, as they balance the expected urban development with limited resources, while also answering the pressing call to stand up against climate change.
Building an inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable community is a matter of intensive policy coordination and investment choices. That’s why Cities are looking at the Internet of Things to build reliable urban infrastructures and enable a data-driven management of urban services.
Smart City has been a major trend in urban planning and municipality management. Although lots of Cities around the world have implemented IoT solutions to monitor and control key urban services remotely, they have frequently relied on single-application platforms which led to siloed working and inefficiencies.
Not everyone knows that Smart City projects using proprietary technology cost 30% more than those using open technology, since they are more complex, duplicate implementation and maintenance efforts, have a higher risk of obsolescence and a poorer return on investment.
Beyond generating cost saving, interoperability allows Cities to head for truly shared growth, turning efficiency-oriented investments into opportunities for sustainable, inclusive development by engaging citizens and local stakeholders in open innovation cases.
We have a clear vision for Open Cities: active members of the uCIFI Alliance, together with our parent company MinebeaMitsumi we advocate open standards and are committed to create multi-supplier, interoperable solutions for Cities and other smart environments.
SMART URBAN NETWORK
Improve quality and efficiency of urban services
Make Cities more livable, resilient and dynamic
Enable Open Cities and shared innovation
Our Smart Urban Network provides Cities a unified, interoperable infrastructure to manage both Wireless IoT and Wireless Highspeed IoT networks, enabling any kind of sensor based or high-bandwidth applications. This allows Cities to connect and control a number of smart applications, sensors and actuators, solving major urban challenges and needs.
Our Smart Urban Network is a true future-proof investment: being completely standard-based, it imposes no limits to the integration of new or additional sensors, and the design of new services. It is the most flexible and complete Smart City solution on the market, providing the most advanced ready-to-use smart software and hardware components to build a self-configuring and self-healing mesh network, fully engineered for affordable ease of deployment and auto-commissioning processes.
Main components of our Smart Urban Network are:
- Smart CMS, the open management platform for smart, secure City services, controlling small up to large networks with hundreds of thousands of connected objects
- Smart Nodes, the IPv6/6LoWPAN hardware radio devices to interface and connect field objects such as streetlights, parking lots, waste bins, etc.
- Smart Gateways, leveraging IPv6 and IPv4 protocols, and operating as border routers, network coordinators and data concentrators
- Smart Communication Modules, the hardware radio communication devices to build interoperable, fully customized IoT solutions and applications
Key urban applications among the ones supported by our Smart Urban Network are:
Outstanding benefits for Smart Cities
- One wireless network and one central management suite to remotely control any Wireless IoT and Wireless IoT Highspeed application
- Based on standards and open data models to allow full interoperability in device, data and application management
- No constraints on future expansion and integration of additional services and third-party systems
- Embedded blockchain technology to improve security and enable innovative data monetization models
Interoperability: why 6LoWPAN matters
As a technology provider who has always been agnostic to the application, we focus on the development of smart IoT networks supporting a number of field devices and third-party systems, independently of the make: in a word, we head for interoperability.
The starting point to design an interoperable network is move away from proprietary technologies and choose standard-based solutions and open data models. At Paradox Engineering, we believe 6LoWPAN is the right standard to provide the flexibility to address today’s most pressing challenges and strategically plan for future, innovative applications.
6LoWPAN is an open source protocol stack whose various component parts make it ideal for connecting all sorts of devices to an IP network and transmitting data packets end-to-end across low power wireless networks. Based on the IEEE 802.15.4 standard, it enables all nodes to communicate in a mesh network using IPv6, the newest internet protocol.
In a 6LoWPAN network, there will be no barriers when it comes to adding new devices and applications over time, so customers are not likely to experience impossible or expensive integration with other systems, run the risk of obsolescence and ultimately a poor return-on-investment. Also, 6LoWPAN offers free unlicensed bands with no recurring fees or costs, and it is natively designed to be energy efficient.
Read more on our white paper “Creating truly open cities“
NEW! Smart CMS and Smart Gateway
are TALQ certified
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