Key Technology Analysis of Constructing a Smart City

Based on the author's relevant research in smart cities, and taking smart city information system architecture as the research object, this paper first analyzes the concept and key capabilities of smart cities, and proposes the overall framework of smart city information systems supported by technologies such as the Internet of Things and cloud computing. Further explore the network topology of the smart city information system, and finally give advice on the development of the smart city and the policy environment.

First, the development trend of city information

The information age is changing rapidly. The mobile Internet, Internet of things, and cloud computing technologies are in the ascendant and their growth rate exceeds people's imagination. Internet applications have evolved from the Web 1.0 era where content can only be read to the Web 2.0 era where people can participate in the sharing of content, and to the now-adapted intelligent Web 3.0 era; the application of management informatization focuses on the internal affairs of the organization to the attention Organize internal work processes, and develop the demands of co-processing inside and outside the organization. People's information-based life and production activities gradually move from closed and single to open and intelligent, and they are moving toward the era of collaborative processing and information intelligence. As the carrier of people's life and production, the city will inevitably combine with the development trend of the information industry technology, which will result in an intelligent city-level information system. Smart city information system, as a product of the fusion of new technologies in the information industry, will control and coordinate the life and production activities of urban residents, making it more convenient, efficient, safe, and harmonious.

The city can be compared to an organic organism and its information system is compared to the biological system of the organism. The nerve endings of higher organisms sense the information of the in vivo and in vitro environment, and pass through the peripheral nerves to the central nervous system for integrated processing. Then they are controlled by peripheral nerves, coordinate the functions of various systems within the organism, and balance the organisms and the external environment. The perception and control terminals of the Internet of things are the nerve endings of smart cities. The basic network of broadband communications constitutes the peripheral nervous system, and the cloud computing data center serves as the brain of urban intelligence. Together, these three constitute the smart city information system to coordinate the city's huge organism. The operation of each system, and the balance between the city and the natural environment. Cities will increasingly rely on this highly interconnected, highly collaborative, intelligent information system.

Second, the concept and key capabilities of smart cities

Smart cities should have the following three key informatization capabilities.

1 The overall perception of information

There are a large number of sensory terminals in the city's cloth. Through sensor networks, various information metadata of people's lives, production, and urban environments are captured in operations and services.

2 massive data processing capabilities

It possesses massive cross-departmental and cross-industry heterogeneous data storage capabilities, capable of efficiently analyzing, calculating and processing massive heterogeneous data, and capable of building intelligent application capabilities based on data analysis and knowledge management.

3 Intelligent Management Service Capabilities

On the basis of forming industrial smart applications that support smart cities, a unified public management platform for service-oriented smart city applications will be established to provide universal and intelligent applications and services for residents' lives and production in various industries.

III. Internet of Things and Cloud Computing Technology

Smart City Information System is a system oriented to urban management, control and services. It centralizes data and information resources in various industries and establishes collaborative processing and intelligent control platforms for cross-departmental and cross-industry industries.

Analyzing the key capabilities of smart cities, we can see that the Internet of things and cloud computing can provide technical support for the construction of smart city information systems. They support the information sensing end and information processing end of the smart city information system under the support of the broadband communication infrastructure network. On the one hand, the Internet of Things penetrates into various industries and provides a comprehensive network of city perception and control. On the other hand, the cloud computing data center provides integration for various IoT industry applications, providing an integrated smart city application service platform for users and terminals. Between the two, a broadband communication network that is generally covered provides network environment support between the platform and the terminal. Cloud Computing Architecture Above the broadband communication network, the Internet of Things will rely mainly on the broadband communication network for effective extension, and the cloud computing model can support the intensive operation of the Internet of Things with business consistency.

1 Application of Internet of Things Technology in Smart Cities

The Internet of Things is an extension application and network derivative of the communication network and the Internet. It uses sensing technology and intelligent devices to sense and identify the physical world, and communicates and interconnects through the Internet to perform calculations, processing, and knowledge mining to realize people and things, things and things. Information interaction and seamless linking achieve real-time control, precise management, and scientific decision-making for the physical world.

The network architecture of the Internet of Things can be divided into three layers: the perception layer, the network layer, and the application layer. The perception layer senses, identifies, and controls the physical world. The network layer implements the transfer of information. The application layer implements applications in various industries based on the calculation and processing of information.

The key technologies of the Internet of Things include sensing and RFID integration technologies, identification and environment awareness technologies, IoT node and gateway technologies, IoT communication and frequency management technologies, IoT access and networking technologies, IoT software and algorithms, and Networking interaction and control, Internet of things computing and services. The application of the Internet of Things penetrates into all aspects of smart cities and can provide comprehensive support for the perception and control of smart city information systems. These applications are summarized as follows: (1) Industry, such as production process control, supply chain management, and energy consumption control. (2) Agriculture, such as fine irrigation of crops, monitoring of growth environment, traceability of agricultural product circulation, etc. (3) Business, such as vending machines, POS terminals, etc. (4) Financial services, such as “Gold Card Project” and second-generation ID cards. (5) Traffic, such as traffic flow monitoring, traffic signal control, electronic charging, positioning and navigation, vehicle condition diagnosis, etc. (6) Electricity, such as smart substations, smart electricity, and distribution automation. (7) Health care, such as remote diagnosis, medical waste monitoring, etc. (8) Education, such as information push, distance education, etc. (9) Home, such as access control, security, and remote control of electrical equipment. (10) Environment, such as monitoring of harmful substances, climate and environmental monitoring, etc.

2 Application of Cloud Computing Technology in Smart Cities

The socio-economic and informationization development, especially the development of mobile Internet and Internet of Things applications, has raised the demand for the processing of massive information and the application of low cost, universalization, and intelligence. Cloud computing developed rapidly due to these demands and achieved significant commercial success.

Cloud computing is a new computing method and business model, namely, through virtualization, distributed storage and parallel computing, and broadband network technologies, in a “plug-and-play” approach, self-management of resource capabilities such as computing and storage. Efficient and flexible public information processing resources. Users can obtain dynamic and extensible information processing capabilities and application services through public communication networks and on-demand service. From the perspective of computing utility, cloud computing forms a manageable and flexible resource pool through virtualization technology, fully improves the CPU and storage utilization of the cluster, and makes full use of cluster parallelism through distributed storage technology and parallel computing technology. The powerful computing power and rapid response capability of the processing are transparent to the upper layer application through the middleware layer. To build a smart city integrated intelligent control service platform, it is necessary to process data on the perception of life, production activities, and the environment in various aspects of the city, and use statistical methods, machine learning, expert systems, and automatic planning to dig related data from the original data. Information, refines the knowledge contained in the information, finds the rules, and provides intelligent city management, control, and services. The rapid processing and intelligent mining of massive information requires huge storage capacity and computing power. The massive data distributed storage and parallel processing capabilities of cloud computing provide an important way to implement artificial intelligence. The cloud computing model significantly reduces resource usage and reduces the requirements for user terminals. Often a terminal with an embedded chip can take over the functions of the user terminal. Users can obtain the server's powerful computing, storage, and application resources through a simple terminal. Therefore, cloud-based high-performance computing support can reduce the complexity of sensor terminals, reduce terminal power consumption, simplify the software structure of terminal computing systems, and enable complex collaboration, context awareness, adaptive strategies and other functions to be implemented in the cloud. The terminal's intelligence can be significantly improved.

Fourth, the overall framework of the smart city information system

The overall framework of a smart city is shown in Figure 3, including five levels of awareness and control of the Internet of Things, cloud computing data center, digital platform, management center, and applications.

(1) Universally-aware Internet of Things (IoT) sensing terminals sense and collect urban systems and environments, and transmit sensing information through broadband communication networks. (2) Converging, extracting, and processing information in the cloud computing data center. (3) Integration of application interfaces for industry integration on digital platforms. (4) Through the business management platform to achieve user, business, data, security, authentication, authorization and billing management functions. (5) Finally realize the application services of various industries. In addition, the improvement of standards and regulations and overall planning and coordination will help ensure the management and control of the entire information system, ensure the construction and operation of smart cities, and make the system truly capable of intelligent operations, delivery and service.

V. Network topology of smart city information system

The smart city information system is an intelligent and open system, with the urban data center as the core and the Internet of Things terminal as the antenna, divided into six layers from the inside out.

(1) Urban data centers include network data centers, service data centers and user data centers, which together constitute a city data system. (2) The cloud resource system composed of cloud storage, cloud computing, and cloud network devices provides cloud computing capabilities for urban information systems, enabling them to have powerful computing capabilities and shared service capabilities. (3) The capability engine system provides open use of resources and support capabilities. (4) The resource control node is based on the distributed architecture technology and shields the complex physical and logical structure within the system to achieve adaptive load balancing capabilities, bandwidth aggregation capabilities, distributed storage capabilities, and dynamic resource scheduling capabilities. (5) The smart access gateway connects the sensor terminal to the cloud, shields the differences of different sensor terminals, performs smart adaptation of different terminal access, and achieves unified access. (6) The terminal refers to the perception and control, as well as the end device acquired by the application service.

Sixth, smart city development proposal

The construction and development of smart cities require the support of modern information and communication technologies. They must adhere to the combination of open cooperation and independent innovation, and break through key technologies such as massive data processing, intelligent terminal systems, and intelligent industrial support platforms.

On the other hand, it is also necessary to rely on the government and industry authorities to formulate development plans and supporting policies to vigorously promote the construction of smart cities, so as to build a good industrial development environment and supporting measures, and build broadband and universally deployed communication infrastructure networks. At the same time, it is necessary to promote cross-industry joint research on a unified standard system and achieve synergy in communications, data, information, applications, and services. In addition, legislation and regulation are needed to achieve data sharing, improve information management, and establish data privacy protection and information security management mechanisms. With the above-mentioned four aspects of common security, it is possible to create a first-class smart city service environment, gather large-scale industrial clusters, and realize the conditions of economies of scale and modern services.

Content Source: Zhang Xixia Lin Liming Technology News