Call for Smart City Articles

The IEEE Internet of Things Magazine (IEEE IoTM) is currently soliciting articles for its vertical area on Smart City. A smart city is a framework, predominantly composed of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), to develop, deploy, and promote sustainable development practices to address growing urbanization challenges. A big part of this ICT framework is an intelligent network of connected objects and machines transmitting data using wireless technology to allow citizens to engage with smart city ecosystems in various ways using smartphones, mobile devices, drones, connected cars, and homes. Pairing devices and data with a city’s physical infrastructure and services can cut costs and improve sustainability. Communities can improve energy distribution, streamline trash collection, decrease traffic congestion, and improve air quality with help from the IoT. Key vertical markets that have been recently expressing an upsurge in need for smart city to promote a digitized business environment include but are not limited to smart meters, intelligent home, smart buildings, environmental monitoring and streets, among many others.

Articles revolving around this vertical area should discuss:

• A high-level description of the proposed IoT solution, addressing the identified need for smart city-oriented application or service:
  • What is the considered smart city-oriented application or service?
  • What motivates and justifies the need for this application or service?
  • What are the building blocks lying at the core of the designed IoT-based solution that will enable such an application or service?
  • Are there any types of partnerships that were required and have been established to build the presented solution?
• The application of information and communication technology, infrastructure, device, hardware and software that enable the deployment of such an application or service and its underlying IoT-based solution:
  • What are the technical challenges that are expected to be faced throughout the design, implementation and deployment of the IoT-based solution that will enable the provisioning of the considered service and support its efficient functionality and error-free operation?
  • What are the technical risks underlying the provisioning of the considered service as well as the implementation and deployment of its enabling IoT-based solution?
  • How to overcome the above-mentioned challenges and risks?
  • Does the proposed solution for provisioning the said application or service fit with existing infrastructure? Is it supported by the existing technology?
• An insightful discussion and elaboration of the novel findings:
  • Is the service provisioned successfully? Give an example and if not, elaborate how is the outcome differing from what was expected? To what extent is there divergence from the set expectations? Is this divergence still acceptable in the context of real-world scenarios? Did the service fail? Did the proposed solution fail to fully support the service?
  • What could have been done differently? Had this been done differently, what impacts would it have on the service, the proposed solution, their performance and outcomes?
• A summary of the business use case(s) and sample application or service operation:
  • Who were the stakeholders?
  • What role did the citizens play in the solution definition and testing?
  • What benefits were anticipated and received from the solution? How were the benefits measured?
  • How was the user experience designed and tested?
  • Were any policy or regulatory issues encountered?
• Lessons learned from planning, designing, prototyping, implementation, deployment and operation:
  • What were the key lessons learned?
  • Can this experience contribute to defining best practices?
  • What were the risks and rewards?

Articles should present real-world experiences with projects integrating services or applications within smart city  domain or preliminary testbeds for future visions thereof. Authors should keep in mind that the intended audience consists of all the members of the IoT community. Hence, articles must be understandable by the general IoT practitioner/researcher, independent of technical or business specialty and are expected to add to the knowledge base or best practices of the IoT community. Mathematical material should be avoided; instead, references to papers containing the relevant mathematics should be provided when applicable.

In addition to the above, the IEEE IoTM general author guidelines for manuscript development and submission over manuscript central must be carefully abided by.

Note: IoTM does not have a specific template and does not require manuscripts to be submitted in any specific layout. However, authors can use the template for IEEE Transactions to get a rough estimate of the page count.