Wireless Sensor Networks in Smart Cities: Applications of Channel Bonding to Meet Data Communication Requirements

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are an integral part of our daily life activities. The vast urbanization of population has provoked the need for smart cities. The applications of WSNs include home automation, medical assistance applications, city security services, road traffic management, and structural health monitoring. In addition to these, the Wi‐Fi connectivity for Internet‐based applications also adds up to the existing infrastructures. All these applications are deployed in over‐laid fashion and utilize the industrial, scientific, and medical (ISM) band for communication. Through cognitive radio (CR) support, WSNs can effectively identify and utilize spectrum opportunities. Channel bonding (CB) is a method that combines the idle contiguous spectrum bands to provide a wide‐band channel. Hence, all the smart applications intend to utilize multimedia features and are bandwidth hungry, so CB can be a promising approach to fulfilling the high‐bandwidth requirement for WSN‐based multimedia applications. In this chapter, we classify certain applications of WSNs in existing infrastructure of smart cities. Moreover, we envision the WSNs enriched with cognitive radio (CR) technology to utilize CB in smart cities. Finally, we discuss the issues and challenges in the implementation of CB in smart cities, which will serve as guidelines for future research in this area of wireless communication.