How 5G Networks will Accelerate the Journey from Smart Cities to Cognitive Cities

The digital evolution of cities has gained tremendous momentum in the last few years. The cities today are increasingly connected, competitive, prosperous and sustainable, and are rightly known as Smart Cities. Accelerated innovation has led to new opportunities, optimization of infrastructure and urban activities in these Smart Cities. 

5G networks are now here to further the journey of Smart Cities to Cognitive Cities, that will be empowered by advanced technologies and will be more proactive and predictive in nature. 5G networks would enable collaborative decision making and analyze multi-dimensional consequences of an event and its impact on society by the convergence of siloed systems, which would lead to faster and effective response. 5G networks will play a very important role as an enabler for cognitive computing to enhance the performance of urban services.

As we see, today’s Smart City is set to transform into a Cognitive City, thanks to 5G technology. In fact, Gartner predicts that by the end of 2024, 60 percent of communication service providers will commercialize 5G service covering Tier-1 cities. Smart Cities, an evolution of cities adopting digital transformation for monitoring, managing and reporting the overall performance of the city with citizens as a stakeholder, began a few years ago. However, the road ahead is still a long one. Evolution and adoption of digital transformation technologies like AI, machine learning (ML), 5G, Big Data and Internet of Things (IoT) serve as catalyst, equipping city management to be more dynamic and shift from a Smart City to Cognitive City. 

Cities are already adapting to technologies that enable monitoring of various city parameters like energy and water consumption, waste management, traffic analysis etc., helping urban authorities with consumption pattern and trend analysis. This helps them take appropriate steps like traffic diversions, improved water supply planning and other remedial measures. At the same time, cities are experiencing persistent operational challenges due to siloed functions, which impact faster decision making and holistic development of the city. This need to be resolved with systems interacting with the population and helping to take faster, informed and collaborative decisions by authorities aimed to improving the quality of life for the citizen. Therefore, the pace of urbanization in some of the major cities calls for disruptive technologies that allow intelligent decision-making at the source with less human interventions and fewer delays. 

5G Network plays a pivotal role as an enabler for a shift from Smart City to Cognitive City technologies. 5G enabled cities utilize technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and cognitive computing to enhance the quality and performance of urban services.    

Smart City to Cognitive City enabled by 5G Network

City management is a large-scale operation that needs communication between multiple systems with different types and volume of data moving from sensors to applications. At present cities use a mix of wired and wireless media for communication depending on the use case, which leads to complex network operations and limitations for breaking the silos. A common wireless network with multiple bandwidth slices, catering to multiple city systems would be an appropriate choice for communication infrastructure. 5G Network is better suited to meet this requirement of cognitive cities because of multiple connectivity options like the massive Machine Type of Communication (mMTC) for low bandwidth and high density requirements, especially as it supports up to one million device connections per square kilometer. This will enable high-density deployment of a massive number of IoT devices within a small geographic area. Similarly, 5G network can offer very high bandwidth for large volume of data, like video streaming, for specific use case of city surveillance and traffic monitoring. 5G networks with improved network slice management and dynamic access will play a key role in cognitive computing for the city systems.  

Cognition for a collaborative decision making

Cognition, in the context of a connected city, is the process of continuous learning by different urban systems through an enhanced automated workflow powered by suitable Internet of Things (IoT) interventions and reliable communication like 5G, which allow them to learn from the past and adapt to regular changes. Cognition enables city authorities to better manage the challenges of rapid urbanization. Cognitive IoT, and AI/ML based systems and technologies advance smart city architecture to support innovative applications. Some of these applications place high demands on bandwidth, but can have huge potential to improve critical aspects of cities like intelligent intersections for road safety, location-dependent services for better mobility, vehicle to infrastructure (V2I) for better traffic management, and in-vehicle internet to support autonomous vehicles. By combining cognitive analytics with 5G communication, Cognitive Cities can perform collaborative decision-making in various departments within city government, which helps to achieve a dynamic, ever-changing cityscape that is flexible and resilient. For example, if a hyper-localized weather monitoring system predicts heavy rain in a city area, the traffic management system can divert the traffic to avoid water-logged areas as well as trigger emergency response team and other urban authorities to be ready for evacuation of citizen in that area or handle any untoward incident, through a faster collaborative decision making, involving multiple agencies.   

A confluence of 5G, IoT and Edge AI empower Cognitive Cities 

5G, IoT, and Edge AI are transforming the world we live in. Cognitive deployment in different sectors within a city like transportation, utilities, health care and construction, among others, ease operations and management, thereby reducing the scope of manual interventions. 5G, along with Edge AI, will enhance this experience multifold, resulting in real-time monitoring and control, better resource utilization, and reduced cost. Traditional urban intelligence can be freed from silos and integrated to give a holistic view of the city. 

The infrastructure of cloud-edge combination powered by 5G communication will facilitate a seamless connection between urban systems and the various stakeholders. Think of a city with a water distribution network with zero leakage and zero waste, and no human intervention to operate valves — all driven with close loop need-based water distribution with cognitive capabilities. Similarly, this can impact city traffic with near zero wait time at junctions and near zero accidents. 

Citizens at the core of cognition initiatives

5G network can communicate within 1 milli second in comparison to 4G, which is above 40 milli second. The combination of high density — the speed to upload and download data — and low latency, which compresses the time between sending and receiving signals, will transform cities. Most of the 5G and IoT infrastructure being created in the urban space is aimed at catering to the people who live in urban areas. This transformation of a city from smart to cognitive with 5G as a catalyst, will significantly improve several quality-of-life indicators. The reimagined city will be resource conscious as the cognitive ability offers a real-time performance and utilization in terms of faster communication between different sensors to application and between siloed systems, and that will unleash other dimensions that analyze and predict consequences. It eventually will be beneficial for citizens, city governments and, eventually, economic growth in the long run. 

Raj B.R
Practice Director – 5G IoT & Smart City

Raj heads the new-age-solutions team with the charter to develop IoT solutions for the 5G era.  He is the Practice Director of Wipro’s global Smart City team and plays a key role in consulting and business initiations with global clients. He has 28 years of experience in multiple domains with proven track record for innovative technologies, customer centricity and passion for excellence. 

Ashish Khare
General Manager & Practice Head – IOT, 5G & Smart City, Wipro

Ashish has over 30 years of experience in Consulting, SI & Manage Services in IT & OT.  He is currently working on various 5G and IoT solutions for multiple industries. He heads the 5G, IoT and Smart City CIS group. He is working on IT-OT convergence & Service Management framework for IoT.  He owns multiple IP’s including Wipro Smart i-connect™, Platform for Smart Spaces & IoT, won innovation awards.