Question

You have a friend who works for a local town council. The council has responsibility for many public services in the town, for example, car parking, street lighting, bus shelters, and public spaces. Over the next few years they plan to invest money in some of these infrastructure services with the aim of improving services and potentially making long term cost savings.

Your friend has been reading about the Internet of things for smart cities and has been wondering whether they could use some of these concepts in the planned developments. Your friend has offered you a consultancy to do some research (locating and using relevant resources) and write an initial report for local council members to give them an introduction to the Internet of things and how it may be useful in this context.

The report should:

Explain and describe the Internet of things (IoT) and how it works, including just enough of the underlying technologies that are involved.

Discuss the potential benefits and problems of IoT in this scenario.

Identify, and briefly describe, two examples of current IoT solutions for smart cities (case studies) that could be of relevance to this scenario.

Provide a technical section that describes some of the wireless technologies used, proposed, or that are being developed, to support the IoT.

Provide a recommendation to the council for a way forward. Note: you do not need to advise on a how a scheme would be implemented. Instead, drawing on your previous discussions of the benefits and problems, suggest whether you think this could be a suitable approach.

Your friend warns you that most of the council staff members who will read this report are not technologists. Although they accept that some explanation of the underlying technology is necessary, such explanation should be at a low technical level. The section on wireless technologies however, is of special interest to your friend and may be at a higher technical level (a level that would be suitable for a student who has just finished studying it) than the rest of the report.

The report should not exceed 1500 words (including the technical section, which should be no more than 500 words)

The information given in the question should be sufficient to enable you to complete the report. If, however, you feel that you cannot do so without additional information then you should make an assumption wherever you believe that information is missing. Any assumptions you make should be listed on a separate Supplementary assumptions page inserted immediately before your answer to Question 1. (If you supply such a page, its contents will not be included in any word count stipulated for the report.) Your work will be marked in the light of any stated assumptions, but you may lose some marks if you have significantly simplified the set task through the assumptions you have made.

If you quote or cite another authors work, make sure your quotations are properly indicated and referenced. Do not, however, have more than 10% of quoted material in your report.

Although in practice you would supply an executive summary for a report like this, for the purposes of this assignment you should not submit an executive summary. Do not exceed the limit of 1500.