Nokia IMPACT Aims to Mitigate Silos in Smart City Space

Nokia expanded the coverage of the Intelligent Management Platform (IMPACT), an open-standard cloud platform launched in June 2016, to support smart city applications such as video analytics, smart lighting, smart parking, and telematics. The IMPACT platform offers holistic solutions from device management, connectivity management, data collection and analytics, application enablement, to end-to-end security solutions with over-the-air (OTA) security updates. Other vendors that also offer horizontal cloud platforms include Huawei, Cisco, IBM, Bosch, etc.

Nokia offers a single, horizontal cloud platform enabling city governments, enterprises, and communication service providers to remotely monitor various smart city applications in a single and secured cloud-based platform on a real-time basis. IMPACT is robust and scalable, and it offers multi-layered security to safeguard data from cyberattacks. IMPACT includes Nokia NetGuard Endpoint Security (NES), a network-based anti-malware solution that is superior to traditional antivirus software since NES cannot be disabled. In addition, legacy smart city applications can be integrated into the IMPACT Internet of things (IoT) platform, a technology enabler for scalability of existing smart city applications.

• NB-IoT and LoRa Connectivity - Interoperability across IoT connectivity protocols, including Lightweight M2M (LWM2M), CAT-M1 device, and low-power wide area networks (LPWAN), such as licensed NB-IoT and unlicensed LoRa networks.
• Video Analytics - Remotely and intelligently detect anomalies from videos captured by CCTVs on a real-time basis, such as traffic accidents, speeding vehicles, and unauthorized entry into secure locations, and alert authorities.
• Smart Lighting - Technology enabling local government to optimize electricity usage, to perform remote diagnostics of smart lights and provide an alert for any repairs needed, and to optimize uptime of smart lights.
• Smart Parking - Enables drivers and parking operators to remotely locate an available parking space on a real-time basis via smartphone app, optimizes usage of parking spaces, promotes cashless payment of parking fees, reduces traffic and pollution, and boosts revenues of parking space operators. This solution utilizes sensors and cloud computing.
• Vehicle Apps - Enables predictive maintenance, fuel efficiency, supply chain optimization and geo-fencing solutions triggered by vehicle data, including fuel levels, speed, and GPS location. This data can be collected from a connected head unit or an aftermarket (ODB2-based) device.

IoT applications are gaining traction in smart cities in the Asia-Pacific region due to government initiatives. However, the ecosystem is highly fragmented with many players and vendor-specific cloud-based solutions, which in turn, create silos. With silos, smart devices do not communicate with each other. The lack of synergy is costly because it creates frustration for all stakeholders, including operational inefficiencies, lack of scalability, and it causes delays in the decision-making process among executives and managers. To fully realize the benefits of a connected city, deployment of smart city solutions should be cost-effective, scalable, open-based, and interoperable.

Smart city vendors shared that one of the barriers to smart city deployment is the silos. Government agencies focus more on vertical-based smart city solutions instead of holistic, integrated smart city solutions. The challenge is bringing multiple smart city applications (e.g., smart parking, video analytics, smart lighting, smart grid, etc.) to a single platform. With a vertical cloud platform, stakeholders need to manage multiple cloud solutions (e.g., telematics, smart meters, smart lighting, etc.) to access information on a real-time basis (e.g., situational awareness such as current road condition, etc.), generate reports (based on predictive analytics), and identify actionable recommendations to address the city problems. All these steps would take longer to execute compared to a horizontal cloud platform, wherein multiple smart city applications can be accessed on a single cloud platform only. Ideally, data analytics would help city governments make sound city decisions. The challenge now is how do city governments use this data in forming their policy decisions? How fast can city government officials receive the integrated analysis of multiple smart city applications? Which government agency would have access right to this data?

ABI Research’s Internet of Everything Market Tracker (MD-IOE-106) forecasts the number of IoT/M2M devices to grow exponentially, reaching 42 billion by 2020. Horizontal cloud platform enables stakeholders to manage and analyze data across multiple IoT/M2M applications with ease, and generate reports in an efficient manner. This would help city governments to allocate the resources with efficiency (e.g., reduce response time to dispatch resources during rescue operations, reduce traffic congestion, reduce energy consumption, etc.). Moreover, an open-based standard promotes the reuse of existing city assets (e.g., utilizes the same sensor to capture information on traffic monitoring, smart parking, environment monitoring, etc.) that would help accelerate the deployment of smart city solutions.

To illustrate this, Nokia completed a market trial in Auckland, New Zealand for connected bus shelters, enabling commuters and IoT/M2M devices to connect to the Internet while waiting for the bus.

For more information regarding smart cities, see ABI Research’s report Smart Cities in Asia (PT-1859).