​​It is expected that there will be an expansion of traffic volume due to increased number of connected devices, “50 billion devices in 2020”. Also, further growth of mobile broadband is needed due to additional traffic in communicating machines “1000x in ten years”. This will present another new challenge of spectrum utilization and energy awareness of the wireless networks. These major challenges will be collectively addressed by the Fifth Generation (5G) Communications tools .

 

The main goals of a wireless networks in a smart-city are to improve the sustainability of the day to day life and provide better accessibility and quality of life to the citizens. The primary role of ICT in enabling this vision is to keep the decision makers, the stake holders and the citizen constantly updated with new information collected around the city. Cities are going to become a new complicated ecosystem and will have the prospective to offer many features and support innovative ground breaking applications. Unfortunately, fully exploiting, managing and accessing this new ecosystem are still far from being fully feasible and their fulfilment surely poses an arduous challenge.

 

The workshop brings together a group of experts with interests in different emerging key technologies related to smart cities such as smart electric vehicles, mmWave Communications (above 6GHz), Massive MIMO, user centric networking, machine to machine (M2M) communication, internet of things (IOT) and related areas. The grand challenge is to devise a city-wide networking infrastructure capable of efficiently guaranteeing communication in the new envisaged ecosystem and managing the complexity of heterogeneous devices and access technologies over the urban environments. The recent advancement in communication technologies have boosted the development of a new generation of highly-efficient mobile networks. This workshop will highlight the recent developments in the evolving area of smart cities. It will provide a platform to showcase the research work and new ideas on connected smart cities. The workshop is also aiming to promote further collaboration within the researchers working in this research paradigm. Moreover, this workshop is targeted towards bringing together research and industry partners to present and discuss preliminary research results, ongoing work and experiences on the topics of emerging techniques that can act enablers for future envisioning of smart cities.

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The main objects of the workshop are as follows:

• To explore intersections and interfaces of various communication technologies under the umbrella of 5G networks as enablers for future smart cities.

• To provide a platform for researchers to explore design issues specific to the integration of these architectural components.

To invite industrial stakeholders for initiating new discussions on the challenges and opportunities in terms of interoperability of solutions, i.e., to discuss how technologies complement each other, which use cases make sense and what are specific design issues.