Smart shires: The revenge of countrysides

This paper discusses the need to devise novel strategies to create smart services specifically designed to non-metropolitan areas, i.e. countrysides. These solutions must be viable, cheap an should take into consideration the different nature of countrysides, that cannot afford the deployment of services designed for smart cities. These solutions would have an important social impact for people leaving in these countrysides, and might slow down the constant migration of citizens towards metropolis. In this work, we focus on communication technologies and practical technological/software distributed architectures. An important aspect for the real deployment of these “smart shires” is their simulation. We show that “priority-based broadcast” schemes over ad-hoc networks can represent an effective communication substrate to be used in a software middleware promoting the creation of applications for smart shire scenarios.

I. Introduction

In last years, recent advances in the ICT domain were focused mainly on smart cities, i.e. a set of (in certain cases technological) strategies aiming at improving and optimizing services offered to citizens. In most cases, all these services are devoted to dense metropolitan areas. Pervasive computing and mobile services represent important technologies that may help and guide the citizens in their daily activities. These projects have a big impact and may add several benefits to the society. In the long-term, all these efforts might have two important social effects: on one hand they would improve the life of the citizen; but on the other hand, they might even further push other citizens to leave the countrysides and rural areas towards metropolitan areas. As a confirmation of this claim, some seminal papers on smart cities assert that “over the next three decades, seventy percent of the global population will live in cities”, e.g., [13].