Adoption of Smart Cities with a Practical Smart Building Implementation

Smart cities, driven by the rapid urbanization of the world, are currently a hot topic among decision makers (mayors, city councilors, economic planners, policy makers), as well as industries (communications and cloud computing providers, device manufacturers, big data analytics companies). Within this category, applications for buildings, using automation and wireless communication for efficiency purposes, are prominent examples of this trend. It is especially the case for residential buildings due to the recent trends in population growth of urban areas. This is also known as PropTech. This article discusses the position of the Internet of Things (IoT) in the context of smart cities and presents an example of a practical implementation in a smart building. The realized IoT system uses state-of-the-art technologies, namely cloud computing, virtualization, and automation, for infrastructure management. The authors focus on the monitoring and management aspects of IoT deployment, which are important when delivering solutions with a multitude of gateways and sensors for scalability reasons.