City of things: An integrated and multi-technology testbed for IoT smart city experiments

While smart cities have the potential to monitor and control the city in real-time through sensors and actuators, there is still an important road ahead to evolve from isolated smart city experiments to real large-scale deployments. Important research questions remain on how and which wireless technologies should be setup for connecting the city, how the data should be analysed and how the acceptance by users of applications can be assessed. In this paper we present the City of Things testbed, which is a smart city testbed located in the city of Antwerp, Belgium to address these questions. It allows the setup and validation of new smart city experiments both at a technology and user level. City of Things consists of a multi-wireless technology network infrastructure, the capacity to easily perform data experiments on top and a living lab approach to validate the experiments. In comparison to other smart city testbeds, City of Things consists of an integrated approach, allowing experimentation on three different layers: networks, data and living lab while supporting a wide range of wireless technologies. We give an overview of the City of Things architecture, explain how researchers can perform smart city experiments and illustrate this by a case study on air quality.