Transforming urban living and citizen experiences

Town planners and administrators must utilise new technologies to build a future-ready network infrastructure that allows them to make cities smarter

Over the last few years, India has adopted several initiatives to improve its urban infrastructure and enhance the quality of life for city dwellers. The growing influx of people from rural to urban areas and the need to modernise the existing infrastructure are the key reasons for this.

As the urban population continues to grow, municipal infrastructure such as power grids, water systems, and transportation networks struggle to keep up. According to the government’s projections, 597 million people will reside in Indian cities by 2036, with the existing infrastructure inadequate to address this exponential growth in the urban population.

Realising that smart cities can help improve the quality of urban life sustainably and also better manage future growth, India launched the Smart Cities Mission in 2015. The project aims to use technology solutions to improve the quality of life of citizens in 100 towns and cities.

A smart city requires a highly reliable network that allows the city management to introduce new technologies quickly and at scale.

Creating a smart city – one that is connected and automated wherever possible via a strong, secure communication network is no easy task. It requires an extensive system of sensors, device analytics, and data centres designed to maximise the use of available resources to improve the quality of life for city dwellers. Well-planned smart cities offer significant benefits to authorities as well as residents. While they empower the administration to easily and better manage the infrastructure, city dwellers benefit from improved and sustainable government services including healthcare, education, transportation, energy and public safety, among others, and prompt response from the administration.

ADAPTIVE NETWORKS FOR SMART CITIES

Creating a smart city is no easy task. For instance, the Smart Cities Mission includes up to 7,800 projects, of which 5,700 have been completed with the remainder likely to be done by mid-2024. Initially, most smart city projects focused on specific applications, such as smart lighting or traffic management, managed by individual agencies.

However, the concept has evolved with several technologies and agencies working in tandem to maximise the benefits. Data generated from the projects needs to be shared between agencies so it can be used for better management and to ensure an improved experience for citizens. It now requires a more converged connectivity platform, enabling easy sharing of data between all the stakeholders.

In addition, a smart city also uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to gain actionable and real-time insights from the data. This allows city administration to quickly resolve a problem or proactively address a situation even before it starts to impact the citizens.

Through the Smart Cities Mission, Integrated Command and Control Centres (ICCC) were set up across India. For example, the Srinagar ICCC has been integrated with the ‘mySrinagar’ Smart City mobile application, providing a one-stop solution for citizens and tourists in Srinagar, to quickly access digital services for day-to-day civic life within the city, and for effective disaster management. Technology has been adopted to monitor water levels and rainfall collection, and the data collected to make predictions about the likelihood of a flood. Now, before any heavy rainfall or snowfall, citizens in Srinagar are alerted through the application.

Such smart city applications use data and bandwidth-intensive technologies that require network flexibility and agility. A smart city requires a highly reliable network that allows the city management to introduce new technologies quickly and at scale. This is crucial because the demands from city infrastructure are constantly evolving and the administration should be able to meet them quickly and easily.

An adaptive network that offers a combination of network intelligence, software control and automation and programmable infrastructure would help city administration to address these needs. Analytics and intent-based policies of adaptive networks allow city management to scale rapidly while self-configuring and self-optimising by regularly evaluating network pressure and demands.

MEETING HIGH-BANDWIDTH NEEDS

The growing number of smart city initiatives in India requires a programmable network that can address the requirement for fluctuations in bandwidth, traffic prioritisation and avoidance of network congestion and outages. This is a challenge for most service providers as identifying the root cause and resolving service issues across multi-layer networks in real-time using conventional service assurance tools could take significant time and effort. This negatively impacts business productivity and increases operational expenses, not to mention violation of the Service Level Agreements and customer churn.

A unified, automated approach that simplifies service assurance across multi-layer networks helps in quick identification and resolution of the problem’s root cause. This can be addressed by integrating intelligent automation platforms that can analyse alarms and alerts across network infrastructure and in case of a direct relationship, swiftly identify the problem. This approach helps in bringing down the time to resolution thus ensuring improved customer satisfaction.

Smart cities must utilise new technologies to build a future-ready network infrastructure that allows them to make a city smarter and truly enrich the lives of citizens in urban spaces.

By Amit Malik

The author is Vice President and Sales Leader of Ciena India.

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