Open source software of smart city protocols current status and challenges

Smart health care, smart transportation, smart buildings, smart homes, smart water networks and smart electric grids may form the main parts of future smart cities. Standard communication protocols facilitate interconnectivity between software components and assure interoperability between different stakeholders of these components. For electric grids, standards introduce an open Smart Grid for liberalized service-oriented electricity markets by smoothing the way for business interactions and trades. Many organizations such as IEC and IEEE are introducing their standard communication protocols for future smart power grids and their associated smart meters. These standards include but not limited to, IEEE 802, IEEE 1815, IEEE 1901, IEC 62056, IEC 60870-5-104, IEC 61850, etc. For smart buildings, smart homes and some wireless sensor networks (WSN), ZigBee is widely used. For smart roads, Internet of Things (IoT) is used in some cases including its messaging protocol Constraint Application Protocol (CoAP) together with WSN. In this paper, open source software (OSS) implementation of such standard protocols is discussed, including obstacles and advantages of a such implementation. Moreover, wireless telecommunication infrastructures including Wi-Fi, ZigBee, and Bluetooth are investigated for the right choice of Smart City applications' infrastructure, since the employment of a standard should be compatible with the field of application, timing requirements and data transmission rate.