Quality Alchemist (品質煉金術師): CityU & HKIE Smart City Workshop 2016

2016年9月5日星期一

CityU & HKIE Smart City Workshop 2016

The Smart City Workshop 2016 was coorganized by HKIE Electronics Division and Wireless Sustainability Center, Department of Electronics, City University of Hong Kong held on 5 September 2016. Supporting organizations included Smart City Consortium (SCC), IET Hong Kong, IEEE CE Chapter and CIE Hong Kong. The development of smart city has become a key item for many countries around the world. This workshop had gathered experts from Portugal and Hong Kong to discuss about the development of smart city, in particular in the aspect of intelligent transportation, smart energy and smart mobility. In the beginning, Dr. KF Tsang (Chairman, HKIE-EE) gave an opening speech.

Then Dr. Winnie Tang (Co-Founder, Smart City Consortium) gave welcome speech. She said Hong Kong was behind for long time. Recently, our government wake up and proposed EKEO “Smart City @ Kowloon East”, as well as, OGCIO invited consultant to draft Smart City Blueprint 2030 for Hong Kong.

The first speaker was Dr. Susana Sargento (Associate Professor, Leader in Network Architectures and Protocols (NAP) group, University of Aveiro and the Institute of Telecommunications) and her topic entitled “Vehicular Mesh Network for Mobile Internet Access and the Internet of Things”. She said Smart City implied Connected City that turn cars, boats, bicycles, drones into mobile WiFi hotspots network in the roads, cycle lanes, river, air so as to connect everything!

Dr. Sargento introduced the vehicular networks and network mechanisms (GPS + IEEE 802.11p + WiFi + GPRS + 3G/4G) through multi-hop vehicular mesh networking. One of pilot in the City of Porto was described.

Another example was Harbor Network which connected trucks, cars, tow boats and vessels. There were 25 trucks, Tow boats, Patrol vessels, Road side units, plug & play units for vehicles and wireless coverage larger than 600m. The movie video demonstration was showed.

Then the analysis of city pilot internet and network results was discussed. It found that download data was much higher than upload data during traffic. It was knowledge of a city which included vehicles results and bus/fleet information.

Finally, vehicles as Data Mules and sensors had different functions involving environmental data analysis. In near future, all connected information included self-driving cars, emergency communication, waste management, real-time information of transportation, smart metering, remote sensing & control, smart agriculture park, large scale events, aeronautic communication, B2B & M2M communication, smart Tourism, etc.

Dr. Paulo Pedreiras (Assistant Professor at the Electronics, Telecommunications and Informatics Department of the University of Aveiro) and his presentation named “Semart Cities Enabling Technologies and Applications”. His talk included CityBrain, ICSI and Real-Time Ethernet Backbone. However, the main focus was on mobility.

Dr. Pedreiras briefed smart city as “urban area in which essential services to residents are supported by advanced Information and Communication Technology (ICT). It aims to benefit the society as a whole: individual citizens, government, economy and the environment.” Then he introduced CitiBrain which was a consortium headquartered in Aveiro, Portugal, specialized in smart solutions for today’s cities. Its main purpose was to create desirable and livable places, bringing together cities and citizens to improve metropolitan life.

Then he mentioned some example in Mobility such as Smart Parking and Smart Traffic Management. Benefits included improvement of quality of life, reduction of traffic congestion and pollution, support for urban planning, optimization of traffic routes and improving the city image.

Finally he stated the Intelligent Cooperative Sensing for Improved traffic efficiency (ICSI) which network standards employed IEEE 1609.* and ETSI ITS G5 based on IEEE 802.11-2012 Amendment 6 aka 11p. One of key focus was Security. At the end, Dr. Pedreiras remarked that smart cities considered 3 issues and they were Technology, Societal and Economic.

The third speaker was Dr. Shahid Mumtaz (Instituto de Telecomunicacoes, Portugal) and his presentation topic was “5G: Vision, Requirements & Implications for smart Hong Kong”. Firstly, he briefed the spec of 3G (348Kps), 4G (100Mps) and 5G (10Gps).

Then he discussed 5G Revolution or Evolution. He said LTE was not able to evolve far enough to meet the new requirement and 5G would not replace LTE. The following diagram showed 5G Revolution and LTE Evolution in parallel.

The 5G network revolutionary enhancement was discussed and it included data volume, number of connected devices, data rates, latency and battery life. Then he mentioned the 5G PPP phases as follows:

2012 – 2014 Ignition phase

2014 – 2016 Phase I (Basic research work / Vision building)

2016 – 2018 Phase II (System optimization / Pre-standardization)

2018 – 2020 Phase III (Large-scale trials / Early standardization)

Finally, Dr. Mumtaz briefed the 5G timeline and standardization. Lastly, he demonstrated some simulation platforms such as 5G for mobile access.

The last speaker was Mr. Ken SP Chan (Senior Engineer – Smart Grid Program Office, CLP Power) and his topic entitled “Smart Meter Connectivity in Hong Kong”. He said over 150 Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) / Smart Meter programmes were in progress globally.

Mr. Ken Chan introduced the system overview of AMI included Backhaul Segment and Last-mile Mesh Segment. Traffic engineering for field area network should be considered the following elements:

- Determine the effective link budget

- Estimate bandwidth requirement

- Calculate the Mesh performance

Then Mr. Chan mentioned the communication challenges on High Rise Building because meter room located in the vertical position within a building. However, meter rooms between two buildings were blocked by multiple reinforced concrete walls (RF propagation loss between two meter rooms in two building could be up to 110~150dB). They overcame this problem through good vertical connection.

Lastly, Mr. Chan concluded no single technology was able to fit for all in Hong Kong. RF Mesh, Direct Cellular, and Power Line Communication were also considered. Smart meter platform introduced many changes to the existing processes both operation and maintenance. Therefore, good planned change management could contribute to the success of the project.

During Q&A, I commented the smart cities technology could contribute to environmental protection and sustainable development. We could calculate carbon footprint and energy consumption of the whole city so as to assist government energy policy for Kyoto Protocol. All speakers and guests agreed that could help environment.