Wireless Access in Future Smart Cities and Data Driven Business Opportunities

The future of a Smart City (SC) will be shaped by the digitization and connection of everyone and everything with the goal of automating our life, maximizing the efficiency of what we do, augmenting our intelligence with knowledge that expedites and optimizes decision-making and everyday routines and processes. This chapter brings up the vision that the Access Network (AN) in SC will develop towards a flexible and cognitive Unified Wireless Access (UWA) infrastructure with intelligence spread down to the level of each single user. The UWA with all its different types of users will function as a unique large scale complex system with integrated Communication, Navigation, Sensing and Services (CONASENSE). The characteristics and performance of such a UWA are further discussed and related to the ones of a Cyber-Physical System (CPS). The motivation to compare the performance of the UWA to a CPS is for the goal of analyzing possible business opportunities and models some of which today are discussed in the context of CPSs. CPSs with advanced CONASENSE and cloud technology can enable new information and data-driven business models and services, could transform businesses and create new business. Considering the UWA from the viewpoint of a large scale type of CPS it is envisaged in this chapter that the UWA can serve as a tool for enabling new services, business models and opportunities based on data. The monitoring and storing of “big data” as a result of the inherent CONASENSE infrastructure and operation of a UWA will bring new data driven business opportunities.

• Vladimir Poulkov

Towards Future Technologies for Business Ecosystem Innovation, R. Prasad, Leo P. Ligthart, Eds. Aalborg, Denmark: River Publishers, 2018, ch. 2, pp. 21-40, ISBN: 9788793609778.