TRANSACTIONS ON EMERGING TELECOMMUNICATIONS TECHNOLOGIES Trans. EmergingTel. Tech. 2013; 00:1–10 DOI: 10.1002/ett SPECIAL ISSUE ARTICLE (TECHNOLOGY SURVEY) The Role of Small Cell Technology in Future Smart City Applications Antonio Cimmino 1 , Tommaso Pecorella 2 , Romano Fantacci 2 , Fabrizio Granelli 3 , Talha Faizur Rahman 3 , Claudio Sacchi 3⇤ , Camillo Carlini 4 , Piyush Harsh 1 1 InIT Cloud Computing Lab, ZHAW Zurich University of Applied Sciences, Technikumstrasse 9, WInterthur (Switzerland) 2 University of Firenze, Dept. of Information Engineering (DINFO), Via di S.Marta 3, I-50139, Firenze (Italy) 3 University of Trento, Dept. of Information Engineering and Computer Science (DISI), Via Sommarive 5, I-38123, Trento (Italy) 4 Telecom Italia, TILab, Via di Val Cannuta 250, I-00166, Rome (Italy) ABSTRACT Meeting citizens’ requirements economically and efficiently is the most important objective of Smart Cities. As a matter of fact, they are considered a key concept both for future Internet and ICT. It is expected that a wide range of services will be made available for residential users (e.g.: intelligent transportation systems, e-government, e-banking, e-commerce, smart management of energy demand, etc.), public administration entities, public safety and civil protection agencies, etc. with increased quality, lower costs and reduced environmental impact. In order to achieve these ambitious objectives, new technologies should be developed such as non-invasive sensing, highly parallel processing, smart grids and mobile broadband communications. This paper considers the communication aspects of Smart City applications, specifically, the role of the latest developments of LTE-A standard, which forecast the increase of broadband coverage by means of small cells. We shall demonstrate that the novel concept of small cell fully meets the emerging communication and networking requirements of future Smart Cities. To this aim, a feasible network architecture for future Smart Cities, based on small cells, will be discussed in the framework of a future smarter and user-centric perspective of forthcoming 4G mobile technologies. Copyright c  2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. ⇤ Correspondence University of Trento, Dept. of Information Engineering and Computer Science (DISI), Via Sommarive 5, I-38123, Trento (Italy), phone: +39-0461-283907, fax: +39-0461-282093, e-mail: sacchi@disi.unitn.it 1. INTRODUCTION Following the operational definition of “Smart City”, reported at page 6 of [1], a city is said to be “smart” when investments in human and social capital and traditional (transport) and modern (ICT) communication infrastructure fuel sustainable economic growth and a high quality of life, with a wise management of natural resources and through participatory governance. It is clear that the fulfilment of such ambitious goals requires synergic efforts in terms of research and innovation that should be strongly coordinated with social requirements of citizens and municipalities. To this aim, various business models are proposed with the objective of defining an effective service planning in ecosystems that are becoming smarter and smarter [2][3]. An interesting cooperative model, targeted at supporting the creation of innovative services and applications with real value to economy and citizens, has been proposed by the consortium of the EU OUTSMART project [4]. The model is based on a stakeholders’ triangle (see Fig. 1), whose vertices are represented by citizens, utilities and cities: • Citizens are one of the main beneficiaries of smart cities. They will benefit of various smart services provided by utility companies and city authorities, with the aim of enhancing their life in terms of security (e.g. better street lighting, prevention of muck corners), health, wellbeing (e.g. reduced CO2 emission) and economically (e.g. resource optimization or employment as developers). Moreover, citizens shall be empowered with more control for resource management by collaborating in economical and environmental issues. • Utilities are the infrastructure to be developed for Smart Cities. More specifically, we can identify under such category mainly the two following entities: service providers and network providers. The first ones are responsible for offering a service useful to the citizens or the smart city at large, Copyright c  2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. 1 Prepared using ettauth.cls [Version: 2012/06/19 v2.10]