How do smart places come to life? Smart place design can be made more accessible through the simple analogy of a layered cake.

If you’re aiming to create a smart town, or city, or any place really, you may just be wondering how it’s done.

Wherever you are in the world, you can apply the analogy of the ‘four-layered cake’. It’s the approach they use in Sunderland, England, to simplify the concept of the various component layers that are almost always involved.

The use of layers suggests you do things in a progressive order, with each one being the foundation for the next. Just like you wouldn't bake a cake by starting with the frosting, building a smart place requires a step-by-step approach. This analogy makes the process easier to grasp for anyone, especially those without a technical background.

The four layers are connectivity, sensors, the smart place platform, and outcomes.

1.        The connectivity layer

This is about making sure the physical infrastructure required is in place. This physical structure usually involves two things: fibre-optic cable in the ground, and a wireless access layer comprising of antennas at street level or higher. Radio antennas can send and receive signals wirelessly – typically, using 4G, 5G or Wi-Fi, in order to communicate with mobile devices (either people’s phones, customer premise equipment or sensor units). Signals received by radio and Wi-Fi transmitters typically continue their journey on wired links, being carried via underground optical fibre, where they connect to data centres to be processed.

If you’re based in a city or town, it’s likely this connectivity layer already exists. But it may not be fully resilient. Excessive user-density in busy locations can make wireless connectivity unreliable. Similarly, less frequented suburban areas of a town may not have adequate signal strength, because transmitters are too few or far apart. These are aspects that we can help you assess and fix.  Planning the connectivity layer in the right way, at the start of the project is essential.    The connectivity layer comprise of more than one technology – for example, fixed broadband, 4G and Wi-Fi – we think of it as a network of networks. Without it properly designed and built, you can’t connect anything.

2.       The sensor layer

Great: your network of networks is in place. Now what? To be smart, your city or place needs to start sensing. And that’s what the sensor layer is for.

There are so many kinds of sensors available. Some might be useful to all cities: for instance, refuse-level sensors in bins. Others might be more specific. Sunderland is a city on a river: there are lifebuoys on hand by the water, just in case somebody slips in. But what if the lifebuoys are subject to vandalism? Built-in sensors monitor whether or not the lifebuoy is present. If one isn’t, emergency services can be called to the rescue and if need be, the lifebuoy replaced.

One thing sensors have in common is they use little energy. It wouldn’t be feasible to put sensors in bins if they relied on physical connections to the electricity grid, or batteries that need regular changing or charging. So ‘Internet of Things’ (IoT) sensors are built to be energy efficient, often going for many months or years between battery replacement, or even harnessing light, heat or motion to power and recharge themselves.

There’s almost no end to the potential uses of sensors. At its simplest, a sensor might just be reporting the temperature: sending a tiny packet of data every hour or so to keep an ongoing report of temperature or air quality in real time.  For low bandwidth use cases like this, a wireless LongRange Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN) may be the most appropriate.
At its most complex, high definition numberplate recognition cameras might be tracking traffic, monitoring vehicles as they move through a city. The volume of data being recorded, and the need for low-latency, would mean sensors like these might rely on high performance 5G. Maybe you’re also collecting pedestrian movement, and breaking road traffic data down into vehicle type. This calls for the speediest processing, which is possible using 5G.

But even simple sensors can make a big impact. Let’s think back to that rubbish bin sensor again. What good does it do knowing when each bin is full? Well, it removes the need for refuse collectors to waste time and fuel making unnecessary visits. There are obvious financial as well as environmental benefits to this. And if the data is gathered and refined by machine learning, it’s possible to optimise waste collection routes, predicting when bins are likely to fill, allowing councils to behave in a proactive way. But that doesn’t mean little used bins are rarely emptied. Tie in data from temperature sensors, and you can make sure even those bins are emptied regularly enough to make sure there contents are not allowed to rot. So it’s not only about saving fuel and money. It’s also about making sure a smart place just feels nicer to be in.

3.       The smart place platform layer

Layer three is the smart place platform. This is what receives all the data. So whether it’s the occasional ‘blip’ from a sensor in a bin – to a ‘bit torrent’ of live traffic motion reporting – the platform ingests and decodes it.

Your smart place platform will exist in the cloud. It does a lot more than simply store data. It interprets it. For instance: let’s say that among all the various data feeds, there’s information on particulate levels in the atmosphere, and they’re looking high. The platform can cross-reference those with realtime or recent traffic information. Together, they might signal a need to re-route the traffic or change the timings on signal lights, to allow pollution levels to return to a healthier level. And they might send a message to your out-of-town digital road signs, advising drivers to take other routes. It’s all possible, when the third layer is in place.

4.       The outcomes layer

Now it’s time to work with the outcomes. This is where your smart place comes to life. It’s the ‘frosting’ in our ‘layered cake’ analogy: the tangible impact for people. The experiences they feel, and the benefits they see. This is where you deliver the positive results you hoped for at the outset.

It’s about using the insights and data from the smart place platform layer and turning those into actionable wisdom. Whether that’s closing the digital divide by allowing free Wi-Fi for all. Or it’s being able to care for vulnerable people in the community, by knowing whether they’re up and about in their homes. Or driving commerce – by helping entrepreneurs understand the way pedestrians move through a city, and where the best location for a new shop might be.

All of these are desirable outcomes. And just a flavour of what a smart place can be.

Interested in finding out more? Read our whitepaper Building smart places: A blueprint to thriving connected communities.