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IEEE INTERNET OF THINGS JOURNAL, VOL. 1, NO. 1, FEBRUARY 2014

Internet of Things for Smart Cities

Andrea Zanella, Senior Member, IEEE, Nicola Bui, Angelo Castellani,
Lorenzo Vangelista, Senior Member, IEEE, and Michele Zorzi, Fellow, IEEE

AbstractThe Internet of Things (IoT) shall be able to incorporate transparently and seamlessly a large number of different and
heterogeneous end systems, while providing open access to selected
subsets of data for the development of a plethora of digital services.
Building a general architecture for the IoT is hence a very complex
task, mainly because of the extremely large variety of devices, link
layer technologies, and services that may be involved in such a
system. In this paper, we focus specically to an urban IoT system
that, while still being quite a broad category, are characterized by
their specic application domain. Urban IoTs, in fact, are designed
to support the Smart City vision, which aims at exploiting the most
advanced communication technologies to support added-value
services for the administration of the city and for the citizens. This
paper hence provides a comprehensive survey of the enabling
technologies, protocols, and architecture for an urban IoT. Furthermore, the paper will present and discuss the technical solutions
and best-practice guidelines adopted in the Padova Smart City
project, a proof-of-concept deployment of an IoT island in the
city of Padova, Italy, performed in collaboration with the city
municipality.
Index TermsConstrained Application Protocol (CoAP),
Efcient XML Interchange (EXI), network architecture, sensor
system integration, service functions and management, Smart
Cities, testbed and trials, 6lowPAN.

I. INTRODUCTION
HE Internet of Things (IoT) is a recent communication
paradigm that envisions a near future, in which the objects
of everyday life will be equipped with microcontrollers, transceivers for digital communication, and suitable protocol stacks
that will make them able to communicate with one another and
with the users, becoming an integral part of the Internet [1]. The
IoT concept, hence, aims at making the Internet even more
immersive and pervasive. Furthermore, by enabling easy access
and interaction with a wide variety of devices such as, for
instance, home appliances, surveillance cameras, monitoring

Manuscript received November 10, 2013; revised February 06, 2014; accepted
February 11, 2014. Date of publication February 14, 2014; date of current version
May 05, 2014. This work has been supported in part by the European Commission
through the FP7 EU project Symbiotic Wireless Autonomous Powered system
(SWAP, Grant 251557, http://www.fp7-swap.eu/). Michele Zorzi and Lorenzo
Vangelista are founding members of Patavina Technologies s.r.l., 35131 Padova,
Italy.
A. Zanella, L. Vangelista, and M. Zorzi are with the Department of
Information Engineering, University of Padova, 35131 Padova, Italy, and also
with Consorzio Ferrara Ricerche (CFR), 44122 Ferrara, Italy (e-mail:
zanella@dei.unipd.it).
A. Castellani was with Department of Information Engineering, University of
Padova, Padova, Italy. He is now with TeSAN, 36100 Vicenza, Italy.
N. Bui was with Patavina Technologies s.r.l., Vicenza, Italy, and with
Consorzio Ferrara Ricerche, Ferrara, Italy. He is now with Institute IMDEA
Networks, 28918 Madrid, Spain.
Color versions of one or more of the gures in this paper are available online at
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identier 10.1109/JIOT.2014.2306328

sensors, actuators, displays, vehicles, and so on, the IoT will

foster the development of a number of applications that make use
of the potentially enormous amount and variety of data generated
by such objects to provide new services to citizens, companies,
and public administrations. This paradigm indeed nds application in many different domains, such as home automation,
industrial automation, medical aids, mobile healthcare, elderly
assistance, intelligent energy management and smart grids,
automotive, trafc management, and many others [2].
However, such a heterogeneous eld of application makes the
identication of solutions capable of satisfying the requirements
of all possible application scenarios a formidable challenge. This
difculty has led to the proliferation of different and, sometimes,
incompatible proposals for the practical realization of IoT systems. Therefore, from a system perspective, the realization of an
IoT network, together with the required backend network services and devices, still lacks an established best practice because
of its novelty and complexity. In addition to the technical
difculties, the adoption of the IoT paradigm is also hindered
by the lack of a clear and widely accepted business model that
can attract investments to promote the deployment of these
technologies [3].
In this complex scenario, the application of the IoT paradigm
to an urban context is of particular interest, as it responds to the
strong push of many national governments to adopt ICT solutions in the management of public affairs, thus realizing the
so-called Smart City concept [4]. Although there is not yet a
formal and widely accepted denition of Smart City, the nal
aim is to make a better use of the public resources, increasing the
quality of the services offered to the citizens, while reducing the
operational costs of the public administrations. This objective
can be pursued by the deployment of an urban IoT, i.e., a
communication infrastructure that provides unied, simple, and
economical access to a plethora of public services, thus unleashing potential synergies and increasing transparency to the citizens. An urban IoT, indeed, may bring a number of benets in the
management and optimization of traditional public services,
such as transport and parking, lighting, surveillance and maintenance of public areas, preservation of cultural heritage, garbage
collection, salubrity of hospitals, and school.1 Furthermore, the
availability of different types of data, collected by a pervasive
urban IoT, may also be exploited to increase the transparency and
promote the actions of the local government toward the citizens,
enhance the awareness of people about the status of their city,
stimulate the active participation of the citizens in the management of public administration, and also stimulate the creation of
new services upon those provided by the IoT [5]. Therefore, the
1

SmartSantander [Online]. Available: http://www.smartsantander.eu/.

2327-4662 2014 IEEE. Translations and content mining are permitted for academic research only. Personal use is also permitted, but republication/redistribution
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ZANELLA et al.: INTERNET OF THINGS FOR SMART CITIES

SERVICES SPECIFICATION

23

TABLE I
PADOVA SMART CITY PROJECT

FOR THE

application of the IoT paradigm to the Smart City is particularly

attractive to local and regional administrations that may become
the early adopters of such technologies, thus acting as catalyzers
for the adoption of the IoT paradigm on a wider scale.
The objective of this paper is to discuss a general reference
framework for the design of an urban IoT. We describe the
specic characteristics of an urban IoT, and the services that may
drive the adoption of urban IoT by local governments. We then
overview the web-based approach for the design of IoT services,
and the related protocols and technologies, discussing their
suitability for the Smart City environment. Finally, we substantiate the discussion by reporting our experience in the Padova
Smart City project, which is a proof-of-concept deployment of
an IoT island in the city of Padova (Italy) and interconnected with
the data network of the city municipality. In this regard, we
describe the technical solutions adopted for the realization of the
IoT island and report some of the measurements that have been
collected by the system in its rst operational days.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section II
overviews the services that are commonly associated to the
Smart City vision and that can be enabled by the deployment
of an urban IoT. Section III provides a general overview of the
system architecture for an urban IoT. More in detail, this section
describes the web service approach for the realization of IoT
services, with the related data formats and communication
protocols, and the link layer technologies. Finally, Section IV
presents the Padova Smart City project, which exemplies a
possible implementation of an urban IoT and provides examples
of the type of data that can be collected with such a structure.
II. SMART CITY CONCEPT AND SERVICES
According to Pike Research on Smart Cities,2 the Smart City
market is estimated at hundreds of billion dollars by 2020, with
an annual spending reaching nearly 16 billions. This market
springs from the synergic interconnection of key industry and
2

Pike research on Smart Cities [Online]. Available: http://www.pikeresearch.

com/research/smart-cities.

service sectors, such as Smart Governance, Smart Mobility,

Smart Utilities, Smart Buildings, and Smart Environment. These
sectors have also been considered in the European Smart Cities
project (http://www.smart-cities.eu) to dene a ranking criterion
that can be used to assess the level of smartness of European
cities. Nonetheless, the Smart City market has not really taken off
yet, for a number of political, technical, and nancial barriers [6].
Under the political dimension, the primary obstacle is the
attribution of decision-making power to the different stakeholders. A possible way to remove this roadblock is to institutionalize the entire decision and execution process, concentrating
the strategic planning and management of the smart city aspects
into a single, dedicated department in the city [7].
On the technical side, the most relevant issue consists in the
noninteroperability of the heterogeneous technologies currently
used in city and urban developments. In this respect, the IoT
vision can become the building block to realize a unied urbanscale ICT platform, thus unleashing the potential of the Smart
City vision [8], [9].
Finally, concerning the nancial dimension, a clear business
model is still lacking, although some initiative to ll this gap has
been recently undertaken [10]. The situation is worsened by the
adverse global economic situation, which has determined a
general shrinking of investments on public services. This situation prevents the potentially huge Smart City market from
becoming reality. A possible way out of this impasse is to rst
develop those services that conjugate social utility with very
clear return on investment, such as smart parking and smart
buildings, and will hence act as catalyzers for the other addedvalue services [10].
In the rest of this section, we overview some of the services
that might be enabled by an urban IoT paradigm and that are of
potential interest in the Smart City context because they can
realize the winwin situation of increasing the quality and
enhancing the services offered to the citizens while bringing an
economical advantage for the city administration in terms of
reduction of the operational costs [6]. To better appreciate the
level of maturity of the enabling technologies for these services,
we report in Table I a synoptic view of the services in terms of

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suggested type(s) of network to be deployed, expected trafc

generated by the service, maximum tolerable delay, device
powering, and an estimate of the feasibility of each service
with currently available technologies. From the table, it clearly
emerges that, in general, the practical realization of most
of such services is not hindered by technical issues, but rather
by the lack of a widely accepted communication and service
architecture that can abstract from the specic features of the
single technologies and provide harmonized access to the
services.
Structural Health of Buildings: Proper maintenance of the
historical buildings of a city requires the continuous monitoring
of the actual conditions of each building and identication of
the areas that are most subject to the impact of external agents.
The urban IoT may provide a distributed database of building
structural integrity measurements, collected by suitable sensors
located in the buildings, such as vibration and deformation
sensors to monitor the building stress, atmospheric agent sensors
in the surrounding areas to monitor pollution levels, and temperature and humidity sensors to have a complete characterization of the environmental conditions [11]. This database should
reduce the need for expensive periodic structural testing by
human operators and will allow targeted and proactive maintenance and restoration actions. Finally, it will be possible to
combine vibration and seismic readings in order to better study
and understand the impact of light earthquakes on city buildings.
This database can be made publicly accessible in order to make
the citizens aware of the care taken in preserving the city
historical heritage. The practical realization of this service,
however, requires the installation of sensors in the buildings
and surrounding areas and their interconnection to a control
system, which may require an initial investment in order to create
the needed infrastructure.
Waste Management: Waste management is a primary issue in
many modern cities, due to both the cost of the service and the
problem of the storage of garbage in landlls. A deeper penetration of ICT solutions in this domain, however, may result in
signicant savings and economical and ecological advantages.
For instance, the use of intelligent waste containers, which detect
the level of load and allow for an optimization of the collector
trucks route, can reduce the cost of waste collection and improve
the quality of recycling [12].3 To realize such a smart waste
management service, the IoT shall connect the end devices, i.e.,
intelligent waste containers, to a control center where an optimization software processes the data and determines the optimal
management of the collector truck eet.
Air Quality: The European Union ofcially adopted a 20-2020 Renewable Energy Directive setting climate change reduction
goals for the next decade.4 The targets call for a 20% reduction in
greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 compared with 1990 levels, a
3
FP7-ENVIRONMENT Program, EcoWeb a dynamic e-disseminationplatform
for EU eco-innovation research results [Online]. Available: http://ecoweb-project.
info/.
4
Decision No. 406/2009/Ec of the European Parliament and of the Council of
23 April 2009 on the effort of Member States to reduce their greenhouse gas
emissions to meet the Communitys greenhouse gas emission reduction commitments up to 2020 [Online]. Available: http://ec.europa.eu/clima/policies/package/
documentation_en.htm.

IEEE INTERNET OF THINGS JOURNAL, VOL. 1, NO. 1, FEBRUARY 2014

20% cut in energy consumption through improved energy

efciency by 2020, and a 20% increase in the use of renewable
energy by 2020. To such an extent, an urban IoT can provide
means to monitor the quality of the air in crowded areas, parks, or
tness trails [13]. In addition, communication facilities can be
provided to let health applications running on joggers devices be
connected to the infrastructure. In such a way, people can always
nd the healthiest path for outdoor activities and can be continuously connected to their preferred personal training application.
The realization of such a service requires that air quality and
pollution sensors be deployed across the city and that the sensor
data be made publicly available to citizens.
Noise Monitoring: Noise can be seen as a form of acoustic
pollution as much as carbon oxide (CO) is for air. In that sense,
the city authorities have already issued specic laws to reduce the
amount of noise in the city centre at specic hours. An urban IoT
can offer a noise monitoring service to measure the amount of
noise produced at any given hour in the places that adopt the
service [14]. Besides building a space-time map of the noise
pollution in the area, such a service can also be used to enforce
public security, by means of sound detection algorithms that can
recognize, for instance, the noise of glass crashes or brawls. This
service can hence improve both the quiet of the nights in the city
and the condence of public establishment owners, although the
installation of sound detectors or environmental microphones is
quite controversial, because of the obvious privacy concerns for
this type of monitoring.
Trafc Congestion: On the same line of air quality and noise
monitoring, a possible Smart City service that can be enabled by
urban IoT consists in monitoring the trafc congestion in the city.
Even though camera-based trafc monitoring systems are already
available and deployed in many cities, low-power widespread
communication can provide a denser source of information.
Trafc monitoring may be realized by using the sensing capabilities and GPS installed on modern vehicles [15], and also adopting
a combination of air quality and acoustic sensors along a
given road. This information is of great importance for city
authorities and citizens: for the former to discipline trafc and
to send ofcers where needed and for the latter to plan in advance
the route to reach the ofce or to better schedule a shopping trip to
the city centre.
City Energy Consumption: Together with the air quality
monitoring service, an urban IoT may provide a service to
monitor the energy consumption of the whole city, thus enabling
authorities and citizens to get a clear and detailed view of the
amount of energy required by the different services (public
lighting, transportation, trafc lights, control cameras, heating/
cooling of public buildings, and so on). In turn, this will make it
possible to identify the main energy consumption sources and to
set priorities in order to optimize their behavior. This goes in the
direction indicated by the European directive for energy efciency improvement in the next years. In order to obtain such a
service, power draw monitoring devices must be integrated with
the power grid in the city. In addition, it will also be possible to
enhance these service with active functionalities to control local
power production structures (e.g., photovoltaic panels).
Smart Parking: The smart parking service is based on road
sensors and intelligent displays that direct motorists along the

ZANELLA et al.: INTERNET OF THINGS FOR SMART CITIES

best path for parking in the city [16]. The benets deriving from
this service are manifold: faster time to locate a parking slot
means fewer CO emission from the car, lesser trafc congestion,
and happier citizens. The smart parking service can be directly
integrated in the urban IoT infrastructure, because many
companies in Europe are providing market products for this
application. Furthermore, by using short-range communication
technologies, such as Radio Frequency Identiers (RFID) or
Near Field Communication (NFC), it is possible to realize an
electronic verication system of parking permits in slots reserved
for residents or disabled, thus offering a better service to citizens
that can legitimately use those slots and an efcient tool to
quickly spot violations.
Smart Lighting: In order to support the 20-20-20 directive, the
optimization of the street lighting efciency is an important
feature. In particular, this service can optimize the street lamp
intensity according to the time of the day, the weather condition,
and the presence of people. In order to properly work, such a
service needs to include the street lights into the Smart City
infrastructure. It is also possible to exploit the increased number
of connected spots to provide WiFi connection to citizens. In
addition, a fault detection system will be easily realized on top of
the street light controllers.
Automation and Salubrity of Public Buildings: Another
important application of IoT technologies is the monitoring of
the energy consumption and the salubrity of the environment in
public buildings (schools, administration ofces, and museums)
by means of different types of sensors and actuators that control
lights, temperature, and humidity. By controlling these parameters, indeed, it is possible to enhance the level of comfort of the
persons that live in these environments, which may also have a
positive return in terms of productivity, while reducing the costs
for heating/cooling [17].
III. URBAN IOT ARCHITECTURE
From the analysis of the services described in Section II, it
clearly emerges that most Smart City services are based on a
centralized architecture, where a dense and heterogeneous set of
peripheral devices deployed over the urban area generate different types of data that are then delivered through suitable communication technologies to a control center, where data storage
and processing are performed.
A primary characteristic of an urban IoT infrastructure, hence,
is its capability of integrating different technologies with the
existing communication infrastructures in order to support a
progressive evolution of the IoT, with the interconnection of
other devices and the realization of novel functionalities and
services. Another fundamental aspect is the necessity to make
(part of) the data collected by the urban IoT easily accessible
by authorities and citizens, to increase the responsiveness of
authorities to city problems, and to promote the awareness and
the participation of citizens in public matters [9].
In the rest of this section, we describe the different components
of an urban IoT system, as sketched in Fig. 1. We start describing
the web service approach for the design of IoT services, which
requires the deployment of suitable protocol layers in the different elements of the network, as shown in the protocol stacks

25

Fig. 1. Conceptual representation of an urban IoT network based on the web

service approach.

depicted in Fig. 1, besides the key elements of the architecture.

Then, we briey overview the link layer technologies that can be
used to interconnect the different parts of the IoT. Finally, we
describe the heterogeneous set of devices that concur to the
realization of an urban IoT.
A. Web Service Approach for IoT Service Architecture
Although in the IoT domain many different standards are still
struggling to be the reference one and the most adopted, in this
section we focus specically on IETF standards because they are
open and royalty-free, are based on Internet best practices, and
can count on a wide community.
The IETF standards for IoT embrace a web service architecture for IoT services, which has been widely documented in the
literature as a very promising and exible approach. In fact, web
services permit to realize a exible and interoperable system that
can be extended to IoT nodes, through the adoption of the webbased paradigm known as Representational State Transfer
(ReST) [18]. IoT services designed in accordance with the ReST
paradigm exhibit very strong similarity with traditional web
services, thus greatly facilitating the adoption and use of IoT
by both end users and service developers, which will be able to
easily reuse much of the knowledge gained from traditional web
technologies in the development of services for networks containing smart objects. The web service approach is also promoted
by international standardization bodies such as IETF, ETSI, and
W3C, among others, as well as European research projects on the
IoT such as SENSEI,5 IoT-A,6 and SmartSantander.1
Fig. 2 shows a reference protocol architecture for the urban IoT
system that entails both an unconstrained and a constrained
protocol stack. The rst consists of the protocols that are
currently the de-facto standards for Internet communications,
and are commonly used by regular Internet hosts, such as XML,
5
FP7 European project, SENSEI - Integrating the Physical with the Digital
World of the Network of the Future [Online]. Available: http://www.senseiproject.eu/.
6

FP7 European project, Internet of Things Architecture (IoT-A) [Online].

Available: http://www.iot-a.eu/public.

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IEEE INTERNET OF THINGS JOURNAL, VOL. 1, NO. 1, FEBRUARY 2014

Fig. 2. Protocol stacks for unconstrained (left) and constrained (right) IoT nodes.

HTTP, and IPv4. These protocols are mirrored in the constrained

protocol stack by their low-complexity counterparts, i.e., the
Efcient XML Interchange (EXI), the Constrained Application
Protocol (CoAP), and 6LoWPAN, which are suitable even for
very constrained devices. The transcoding operations between
the protocols in the left and right stacks in Fig. 2 can be performed
in a standard and low complexity manner, thus guaranteeing easy
access and interoperability of the IoT nodes with the Internet.
It may be worth remarking that systems that do not adopt the
EXI/CoAP/6LoWPAN protocol stack can still be seamlessly
included in the urban IoT system, provided that they are capable
of interfacing with all the layers of the left-hand side of the
protocol architecture in Fig. 2.
In the protocol architecture shown in Fig. 2, we can distinguish
three distinct functional layers, namely (i) Data, (ii) Application/
Transport, and (iii) Network, that may require dedicated entities
to operate the transcoding between constrained and unconstrained formats and protocols. In the rest of this section, we
specify in greater detail the requirements at each of the three
functional layers in order to guarantee interoperability among the
different parts of the system.
1) Data Format: As mentioned, the urban IoT paradigm sets
specic requirements in terms of data accessibility. In architectures based on web services, data exchange is typically
accompanied by a description of the transferred content by
means of semantic representation languages, of which the
eXtensible Markup Language (XML) is probably the most
common. Nevertheless, the size of XML messages is often
too large for the limited capacity of typical devices for the
IoT. Furthermore, the text nature of XML representation
makes the parsing of messages by CPU-limited devices more
complex compared to the binary formats. For these reasons, the
working group of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)7 has
proposed the EXI format [19], which makes it possible even for
very constrained devices to natively support and generate
messages using an open data format compatible with XML.
EXI denes two types of encoding, namely schema-less and
schema-informed. While the schema-less encoding is generated
directly from the XML data and can be decoded by any EXI
entity without any prior knowledge about the data, the schemainformed encoding assumes that the two EXI processors share an
7

World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Efcient XML Interchange Working

Group [Online]. Available: http://www.w3.org/XML/EXI/.

XML Schema before actual encoding and decoding can take

place. This shared schema makes it possible to assign numeric
identiers to the XML tags in the schema and build the EXI
grammars upon such coding. As discussed in [20], a general
purpose schema-informed EXI processor can be easily integrated
even in very constrained devices, enabling them to interpret EXI
formats and, hence, making it possible to build multipurpose IoT
nodes even out of very constrained devices. Using the schemainformed approach, however, requires additional care in the
development of higher layer application, since developers need
to dene an XML Schema for the messages involved in the
application and use EXI processors that support this operating
mode. Further details about EXI and schema-informed processing can be found in [20].
Integration of multiple XML/EXI data sources into an IoT
system can be obtained by using the databases typically created
and maintained by high-level applications. In fact, IoT applications generally build a database of the nodes controlled by the
application and, often, of the data generated by such nodes. The
database makes it possible to integrate the data received by any
IoT device to provide the specic service the application is built
for. A generic framework for building IoT web applications
according to the guidelines described in this section has been
proposed in [21], where the authors also suggest exploiting the
Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) capabilities of
modern web browsers that allow for a direct communication
between the browser and the nal IoT node, demonstrating the
full internetworking of the protocol stack and the open data
nature of the proposed approach.
2) Application and Transport Layers: Most of the trafc that
crosses the Internet nowadays is carried at the application layer
by HTTP over TCP. However, the verbosity and complexity of
native HTTP make it unsuitable for a straight deployment on
constrained IoT devices. For such an environment, in fact, the
human-readable format of HTTP, which has been one of the
reasons of its success in traditional networks, turns out to be a
limiting factor due to the large amount of heavily correlated (and,
hence, redundant) data. Moreover, HTTP typically relies upon
the TCP transport protocol that, however, does not scale well on
constrained devices, yielding poor performance for small data
ows in lossy environments.
The CoAP protocol [22] overcomes these difculties by
proposing a binary format transported over UDP, handling only
the retransmissions strictly required to provide a reliable service.
Moreover, CoAP can easily interoperate with HTTP because:
(i) it supports the ReST methods of HTTP (GET, PUT, POST,
and DELETE), (ii) there is a one-to-one correspondence between
the response codes of the two protocols, and (iii) the CoAP
options can support a wide range of HTTP usage scenarios.
Even though regular Internet hosts can natively support
CoAP to directly talk to IoT devices, the most general and
easily interoperable solution requires the deployment of an
HTTP-CoAP intermediary, also known as cross proxy that can
straightforwardly translate requests/responses between the two
protocols, thus enabling transparent interoperation with native
HTTP devices and applications [23].
3) Network Layer: IPv4 is the leading addressing technology
supported by Internet hosts. However, IANA, the international

ZANELLA et al.: INTERNET OF THINGS FOR SMART CITIES

organization that assigns IP addresses at a global level, has

recently announced the exhaustion of IPv4 address blocks. IoT
networks, in turn, are expected to include billions of nodes, each of
which shall be (in principle) uniquely addressable. A solution to
this problem is offered by the IPv6 standard [24], which provides
a 128-bit address eld, thus making it possible to assign a unique
IPv6 address to any possible node in the IoT network.
While, on the one hand, the huge address space of IPv6 makes
it possible to solve the addressing issues in IoT; on the other
hand, it introduces overheads that are not compatible with the
scarce capabilities of constrained nodes. This problem can be
overcome by adopting 6LoWPAN [25], [26], which is an
established compression format for IPv6 and UDP headers over
low-power constrained networks. A border router, which is a
device directly attached to the 6LoWPAN network, transparently
performs the conversion between IPv6 and 6LoWPAN, translating any IPv6 packet intended for a node in the 6LoWPAN
network into a packet with 6LoWPAN header compression
format, and operating the inverse translation in the opposite
direction.
While the deployment of a 6LoWPAN border router enables
transparent interaction between IoT nodes and any IPv6 host in
the Internet, the interaction with IPv4-only hosts remains an
issue. More specically, the problem consists in nding a way to
address a specic IPv6 host using an IPv4 address and other
meta-data available in the packet. In the following, we present
different approaches to achieve this goal.
v4/v6 Port Address Translation (v4/v6 PAT). This method
maps arbitrary pairs of IPv4 addresses and TCP/UDP ports into
IPv6 addresses and TCP/UDP ports. It resembles the classical
Network Address and Port Translation (NAPT) service currently
supported in many LANs to provide Internet access to a number
of hosts in a private network by sharing a common public IPv4
address, which is used to address the packets over the public
Internet. When a packet is returned to the IPv4 common address,
the edge router that supports the NATP service will intercept the
packet and replace the common IPv4 destination address with the
(private) address of the intended receiver, which is determined by
looking up in the NATP table the address of the host associated to
the specic destination port carried by the packet. The same
technique can be used to map multiple IPv6 addresses into a
single IPv4 public address, which allows the forwarding of the
datagrams in the IPv4 network and its correct management at
IPv4-only hosts. The application of this technique requires low
complexity and, indeed, port mapping is an established technique for v4/v6 transition. On the other hand, this approach raises
a scalability problem, since the number of IPv6 hosts that can be
multiplexed into a single IPv4 address is limited by the number of
available TCP/UDP ports (65535). Furthermore, this approach
requires that the connection be initiated by the IPv6 nodes in
order to create the correct entries in the NATP look-up table.
Connections starting from the IPv4 cloud can also be realized,
but this requires a more complex architecture, with the local DNS
placed within the IPv6 network and statically associated to a
public IPv4 address in the NATP translation table.
v4/v6 Domain Name Conversion. This method, originally
proposed in [23], is similar to the technique used to provide
virtual hosting service in HTTP 1.1, which makes it possible to

27

support multiple websites on the same web server, sharing the

same IPv4 address, by exploiting the information contained in
the HTTP Host header to identify the specic web site requested
by the user. Similarly, it is possible to program the DNS servers in
such a way that, upon a DNS request for the domain name of an
IoT web service, the DNS returns the IPv4 address of an HTTPCoAP cross proxy to be contacted to access the IoT node. Once
addressed by an HTTP request, the proxy requires the resolution
of the domain name contained in the HTTP Host header to the
IPv6 DNS server, which replies with the IPv6 address that
identies the nal IoT node involved in the request. The proxy
can then forward the HTTP message to the intended IoT via
CoAP.
URI mapping. The Universal Resource Identier (URI) mapping technique is also described in [23]. This technique involves
a particular type of HTTP-CoAP cross proxy, the reverse cross
proxy. This proxy behaves as being the nal web server to the
HTTP/IPv4 client and as the original client to the CoAP/IPv6
web server. Since this machine needs to be placed in a part of the
network where IPv6 connectivity is present to allow direct access
to the nal IoT nodes, IPv4/IPv6 conversion is internally
resolved by the applied URI mapping function.
B. Link Layer Technologies
An urban IoT system, due to its inherently large deployment
area, requires a set of link layer technologies that can easily cover
a wide geographical area and, at the same time, support a possibly
large amount of trafc resulting from the aggregation of an
extremely high number of smaller data ows. For these reasons,
link layer technologies enabling the realization of an urban IoT
system are classied into unconstrained and constrained technologies. The rst group includes all the traditional LAN, MAN,
and WAN communication technologies, such as Ethernet, WiFi,
ber optic, broadband Power Line Communication (PLC), and
cellular technologies such as UMTS and LTE. They are generally
characterized by high reliability, low latency, and high transfer
rates (order of Mbit/s or higher), and due to their inherent
complexity and energy consumption are generally not suitable
for peripheral IoT nodes.
The constrained physical and link layer technologies are,
instead, generally characterized by low energy consumption and
relatively low transfer rates, typically smaller than 1 Mbit/s. The
more prominent solutions in this category are IEEE 802.15.4
[27], [28] Bluetooth and Bluetooth Low Energy,8 IEEE 802.11
Low Power, PLC [29], NFC and RFID [30]. These links usually
exhibit long latencies, mainly due to two factors: 1) the intrinsically low transmission rate at the physical layer and 2) the powersaving policies implemented by the nodes to save energy, which
usually involve duty cycling with short active periods.
C. Devices
We nally describe the devices that are essential to realize an
urban IoT, classied based on the position they occupy in the
communication ow.
8

Bluetooth SIG, Adopted Bluetooth Core Specications [Online]. Available:

https://www.bluetooth.org/Technical/Specications/adopted.htm.

28

1) Backend Servers: At the root of the system, we nd the

backend servers, located in the control center, where data are
collected, stored, and processed to produce added-value services.
In principle, backend servers are not mandatory for an IoT system to properly operate, though they become a fundamental
component of an urban IoT where they can facilitate the access to
the smart city services and open data through the legacy network
infrastructure. Backend systems commonly considered for
interfacing with the IoT data feeders include the following.
Database management systems: These systems are in
charge of storing the large amount of information produced by
IoT peripheral nodes, such as sensors. Depending on the particular usage scenario, the load on these systems can be quite large,
so that proper dimensioning of the backend system is required.
Web sites: The widespread acquaintance of people with web
interfaces makes them the rst option to enable interoperation
between the IoT system and the data consumers, e.g., public
authorities, service operators, utility providers, and common
citizens.
Enterprise resource planning systems (ERP): ERP components support a variety of business functions and are precious
tools to manage the ow of information across a complex
organization, such as a city administration. Interfacing ERP
components with database management systems that collect the
data generated by the IoT allows for a simpler management of
the potentially massive amount of data gathered by the IoT,
making it possible to separate the information ows based on
their nature and relevance and easing the creation of new
services.
2) Gateways: Moving toward the edge of the IoT, we nd
the gateways, whose role is to interconnect the end devices
to the main communication infrastructure of the system. With
reference to the conceptual protocol architecture depicted in
Fig. 2, the gateway is hence required to provide protocol
translation and functional mapping between the unconstrained
protocols and their constrained counterparts, that is to say XMLEXI, HTTP-CoAP, IPv4/v6-6LoWPAN.
Note that while all these translations may be required in order
to enable interoperability with IoT peripheral devices and control
stations, it is not necessary to concentrate all of them in a single
gateway. Rather, it is possible, and sometimes convenient, to
distribute the translation tasks over different devices in the
network. For example, a single HTTP-CoAP proxy can be
deployed to support multiple 6LoWPAN border routers.
Gateway devices shall also provide the interconnection between unconstrained link layer technologies, mainly used in the
core of the IoT network, and constrained technologies that,
instead, provide connectivity among the IoT peripheral nodes.
3) IoT Peripheral Nodes: Finally, at the periphery of the IoT
system, we nd the devices in charge of producing the data
to be delivered to the control center, which are usually called
IoT peripheral nodes or, more simply, IoT nodes. Generally
speaking, the cost of these devices is very low, starting from
10 USD or even less, depending on the kind and number of
sensors/actuators mounted on the board. IoT nodes may be
classied based on a wide number of characteristics, such as
powering mode, networking role (relay or leaf), sensor/actuator
equipment, and supported link layer technologies. The most

IEEE INTERNET OF THINGS JOURNAL, VOL. 1, NO. 1, FEBRUARY 2014

constrained IoT nodes are likely the Radio Frequency tags

(RFtags) that, despite their very limited capabilities, can still
play an important role in IoT systems, mainly because of the
extremely low cost and the passive nature of their communication hardware, which does not require any internal energy
source. The typical application of RFtags is object identication
by proximity reading, which can be used for logistics,
maintenance, monitoring, and other services.
Mobile devices, such as smart phones, tablet PCs, or laptops,
may also be an important part of an urban IoT, providing other
ways to interact with it. For instance, the NFC transceiver
integrated in last-generation smartphones may be used to identify
tagged objects, while the geolocation service provided by most
common operating systems for mobile devices can enrich the
context information associated to that object. Furthermore,
mobile devices can provide access to the IoT in different ways,
e.g., 1) through an IP connection provided by the cellular datalink service or 2) setting up a direct connection with some objects
by using short-range wireless technologies, such as Bluetooth
Low Energy, low-power WiFi, or IEEE 802.15.4. Furthermore, it
is possible to develop specic applications for mobile devices
that can ease the interaction with the IoT objects, and with the
system as a whole.
IV. AN

EXPERIMENTAL

STUDY: PADOVA SMART CITY

The framework discussed in this paper has already been

successfully applied to a number of different use cases in the
context of IoT systems. For instance, the experimental wireless
sensor network testbed, with more than 300 nodes, deployed at
the University of Padova [31], [32] has been designed according
to these guidelines, and successfully used to realize proof-ofconcept demonstrations of smart grid [33] and health care [34]
services.
In this section, we describe a practical implementation of an
urban IoT, named Padova Smart City, that has been realized in
the city of Padova; thanks to the collaboration between public
and private parties, such as the municipality of Padova, which
has sponsored the project, the Department of Information Engineering of the University of Padova, which has provided the
theoretical background and the feasibility analysis of the project,
and Patavina Technologies s.r.l.,9 a spin-off of the University of
Padova specialized in the development of innovative IoT solutions, which has developed the IoT nodes and the control
software.
The primary goal of Padova Smart City is to promote the early
adoption of open data and ICT solutions in the public administration. The target application consists of a system for collecting
environmental data and monitoring the public street lighting
by means of wireless nodes, equipped with different kinds of
sensors, placed on street light poles and connected to the Internet
through a gateway unit. This system shall make it possible to
collect interesting environmental parameters, such as CO level,
air temperature and humidity, vibrations, noise, and so on, while
providing a simple but accurate mechanism to check the correct
operation of the public lighting system by measuring the light
9

http://patavinatech.com/.

ZANELLA et al.: INTERNET OF THINGS FOR SMART CITIES

29

Fig. 3. System architecture of Padova Smart City.

intensity at each post. Even if this system is a simple application

of the IoT concept, it still involves a number of different devices
and link layer technologies, thus being representative of most of
the critical issues that need to be taken care of when designing an
urban IoT. A high-level overview of the types and roles of the
devices involved in the system is given hereafter.
Padova smart city components: A conceptual sketch of the
Padova Smart City system architecture is given in Fig. 3. In the
following, we describe in more details the different hardware and
software components of the system.
Street light: It is the leaf part of the system where IoT nodes
are placed. Each streetlight is geographically localized on the city
map and uniquely associated to the IoT node attached to it, so that
IoT data can be enhanced with context information. The monitoring of the correct operation of the bulbs is performed through
photometer sensors that directly measure the intensity of the light
emitted by the lamps (or, actually, by any source whose light
reaches the sensor) at regular time intervals or upon request. The
wireless IoT nodes are also equipped with temperature and
humidity sensors, which provide data concerning weather conditions, and one node is also equipped with a benzene (
)
sensor, which monitors air quality. IoT nodes are generally
powered by small batteries, though connection to a low-power
grid is required by the benzene sensor. The packaging of the
sensor nodes has been designed by considering the specic
requirements of this use case. Indeed, sensor nodes have been
hosted in a transparent plastic shield that protects the electronic
parts from atmospheric phenomena (such as rain or snow), while
permitting the circulation of air and light for the correct measurement of humidity, temperature, and light intensity.
Constrained link layer technologies: The IoT nodes mounted
on the streetlight poles form a 6LoWPAN multihop cloud, using
IEEE 802.15.4 constrained link layer technology. Routing functionalities are provided by the IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low
power and Lossy Networks (RPL) [35]. IoT nodes are assigned
unique IPv6 addresses, suitably compressed according to the
6LoWPAN standard. Each node can be individually accessible

from anywhere in the Internet by means of IPv6/6LoWPAN.

Nodes collectively deliver their data to a sink node, which
represents the single point of contact for the external nodes.
Alternatively, each node might publish its own features and
data by running a CoAP server, though this feature is not yet
implemented in the testbed. In either case, a gateway is required to
bridge the 6LoWPAN cloud to the Internet and perform all the
transcoding described in the previous section.
WSN gateway: The gateway has the role of interfacing the
constrained link layer technology used in the sensors cloud with
traditional WAN technologies used to provide connectivity to the
central backend servers. The gateway hence plays the role of
6LoWPAN border router and RPL root node. Furthermore, since
sensor nodes do not support CoAP services, the gateway also
operates as the sink node for the sensor cloud, collecting all the
data that need to be exported to the backend services. The
connection to the backend services is provided by common
unconstrained communication technologies, optical ber in this
specic example.
HTTP-CoAP proxy: The HTTP-CoAP proxy enables transparent communication with CoAP devices. The proxy logic can
be extended to better support monitoring applications and limit
the amount of trafc injected into the IoT peripheral network. For
instance, it is possible to specify a list of resources that need to be
monitored, so that the server can autonomously update the
entries in a cache related to those devices. This mechanism can
be supported by two different approaches: 1) by polling the
selected resource proactively, thus enabling the implementation of trafc shaping techniques at the proxy or at the gateway
and 2) by subscribing to the selected resource using the
observe functionality of CoAP, thus enabling the server on
the node to send the updates only when the value measured
by the sensor falls outside a certain range. This service is colocated on the switchboard gateway in the Padova Smart City
system, though it could also be placed in the backend servers,
thus making it possible to control multiple gateways by using a
single proxy instance.

30

IEEE INTERNET OF THINGS JOURNAL, VOL. 1, NO. 1, FEBRUARY 2014

Fig. 4. Example of data collected by Padova Smart City: (a) temperature and (b) humidity.

Fig. 5. Example of data collected by Padova Smart City: (a) light and (b) benzene.

Database server: The database server collects the state of the

resources that need to be monitored in time by communicating
with the HTTP-CoAP proxy server, which in turn takes care of
retrieving the required data from the proper source. The data
stored in the database are accessible through traditional web
programming technologies. The information can either be visualized in the form of a web site, or exported in any open data
format using dynamic web programming languages. In the
Padova Smart City network, the database server is realized
within the WSN Gateway, which hence represents a plugand-play module that provides a transparent interface with the
peripheral nodes.
Operator mobile device: Public lighting operators will be
equipped with mobile devices that can locate the streetlight that
requires intervention, issue actuation commands directly to the
IoT node connected to the lamp, and signal the result of the
intervention to the central system that can track every single
lamppost and, hence, optimize the maintenance plan.
Such a system can be successively extended to include other
types of IoT nodes or clouds of IoT nodes, provided that each IoT

peripheral system supports an HTTP-based interface, which

makes it possible to interact with it in an open-, standard-, and
technology-independent manner.
A. Example of Data Collected by Padova Smart City
Figs. 4 and 5 report an example of the type of data that can be
collected with the Padova Smart City system. The four plots
show the temperature, humidity, light, and benzene readings
over a period of 7 days. Thin lines show the actual readings, while
thick lines are obtained by applying a moving average lter over
a time window of 1 h (approximately, 10 readings of temperature,
humidity, and light, and 120 readings of the benzene sensor,
whose sampling rate is larger since the node is powered by the
grid). It is possible to observe the regular pattern of the light
measurements, corresponding to day and night periods. In
particular, at daytime, the measure reaches the saturation value,
while during nighttime, the values are more irregular, due to the
reections produced by vehicle lights. A similar pattern is
exhibited by the humidity and temperature measurements that,

ZANELLA et al.: INTERNET OF THINGS FOR SMART CITIES

however, are much more noisy than those for light. The benzene
measurements also reveal a decrease of the benzene levels at
nighttime, as expected due to the lighter night trafc, but quite
surprisingly there is no evident variations in the daytime benzene
levels during the weekend (October 2627). It is also interesting
to note the peak of benzene measured in the early afternoon of
October 29. Examining the readings of the other sensors in the
same time interval, we can note a sharp decrease of light intensity
and temperature, and an increase in humidity. These readings
suggest that a quick rainstorm has temporarily obscured the
sunlight, while producing congestion in the road trafc and, in
turn, a peak of benzene in the air.

V. CONCLUSION
In this paper, we analyzed the solutions currently available for
the implementation of urban IoTs. The discussed technologies
are close to being standardized, and industry players are already
active in the production of devices that take advantage of these
technologies to enable the applications of interest, such as those
described in Section II. In fact, while the range of design options
for IoT systems is rather wide, the set of open and standardized
protocols is signicantly smaller. The enabling technologies,
furthermore, have reached a level of maturity that allows for the
practical realization of IoT solutions and services, starting from
eld trials that will hopefully help clear the uncertainty that still
prevents a massive adoption of the IoT paradigm. A concrete
proof-of-concept implementation, deployed in collaboration
with the city of Padova, Italy, has also been described as a
relevant example of application of the IoT paradigm to smart
cities.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors would like to thank the Municipality of Padova
(Italy), and Eng. Alberto Cor, in particular, for the support in the
realization of the Padova Smart City project. The authors are
also grateful to the engineers of Patavina Technologies s.r.l.
(http://patavinatech.com/) for their invaluable support in deploying the system and in providing experimental data and technical
documentation concerning the Padova Smart City project.

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Andrea Zanella (S98M01SM13) recieved the
Laurea degree in computer engineering and Ph.D.
degree in electronic and telecommunications engineering from the University of Padova, Padova, Italy,
in 1998 and 2000, respectively.
He was a Visiting Scholar with the Department
of Computer Science, University of California,
Los Angeles (UCLA), Los Angeles, CA, USA, in
2000. He is an Assistant Professor with the Department of Information Engineering (DEI), University
of Padova. He is one of the coordinators of the
SIGnals and NETworking (SIGNET) research lab. His long-established research
activities are in the elds of protocol design, optimization, and performance
evaluation of wired and wireless networks.

Nicola Bui received the B.E. and M.E. degrees in

telecommunication engineering from the University
of Ferrara, Ferrara, Italy, in 2003 and 2005, respectively, and is currently working toward the Ph.D.
degree from the University Carlos III de Madrid,
Madrid, Spain.
Currently, he is a Research Engineer with IMDEA
Networks, Madrid, Spain. Until May 2013, he served
as General Manager of Patavina Technologies,
Venezia, Italy, operating in ICT eld design and
systems development for the Internet of Things (IoT).
Also, he had been a Research Fellow with the Consorzio Ferrara Ricerche,
Ferrara, Italy and with the Department of Information Engineering, University of
Padova, Padova, Italy for 5 years. During this period, he was involved in many
European- and Italian-funded projects, including: Ambient Networks, IoT-Architecture, SWAP, dealing with sensor networks, and the Internet of Things.
Currently, he is working in the eCOUSIN project, focused on content distribution
network optimization.

Angelo P. Castellani recieved the B.E. and M.E.

degrees and summa cum laude from the University
of Rome Sapienza, Rome, Italy in 2004 and 2006,
respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in information
engineering from the University of Padova, Paduva,
Italy, in 2012.
He is currently working in the R&D department of
TeSAN, Vicenza, Italy, an e-Health Italian company.
His research interests are in the elds of sensor networks and the Internet of Things (IoT), including
protocol design, and experimentation. He has been
active in standardization work within the IETF and involved in the EU-funded
IoT-Architecture project, both activities were centered around IoT networking
research.

IEEE INTERNET OF THINGS JOURNAL, VOL. 1, NO. 1, FEBRUARY 2014

Lorenzo Vangelista (S93M97SM02) received

the Laurea and Ph.D. degrees in electrical and telecommunication engineering from the University of
Padova, Padova, Italy, in 1992 and 1995, respectively.
He subsequently joined the Transmission and
Optical Technology Department, CSELT, Torino,
Italy. From December 1996 to January 2002, he
was with Telit Mobile Terminals, Trieste, Italy, and
then, until May 2003, was with Microcell A/S,
Copenaghen, Denmark. In July 2006, he joined the
Worldwide Organization Of Inneon Technologies as
Program Manager. Since October 2006, he has been an Associate Professor of
Telecommunication with the Department of Information Engineering, Padova
University. His research interests include signal theory, multicarrier modulation
techniques, cellular networks, wireless sensors and actuators networks, and
smartgrid.

Michele Zorzi (S89M95SM98F07) received

the Laurea and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering
from the University of Padova, Padova, Italy, in 1990
and 1994, respectively.
During academic year 19921993, he was on leave
at the University of California at San Diego (UCSD).
In 1993, he joined the Faculty of the Dipartimento di
Elettronica e Informazione, Politecnico di Milano,
Milano, Italy. After spending 3 years with the Center
for Wireless Communications at University of
California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA, in 1998,
he joined the School of Engineering of the University of Ferrara, Ferrara, Italy,
where he became a Professor in 2000. Since November 2003, he has been
on the faculty of the Information Engineering Department at the University of
Padova. His present research interests include performance evaluation in mobile
communications systems, WSN and Internet of Things, and underwater
communications.
Dr. Zorzi was an Editor-In-Chief of IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS from 2003 to 2005 and of IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON COMMUNICATIONS
from 2008 to 2011. He served as a Member-at-Large of the Board of Governors of
the IEEE Communications Society from 2009 to 2011, and is currently its
Director of Education.