Ad Hoc Social Networking on a Smart City Builder – A Practical Approach

Abstract

Building a smart city has been placed on the essential projects list of various current governments. The project includes concepts such as smart home, smart market, smart health care, smart security system, smart sightseeing & leisure zones, smart power providing, and intelligent transportation systems (ITS). In fact, all subprojects rely on a seamless information or telematics system. Accordingly, build a complete seamless communication system plays an important role in smart city applications. This paper addresses available current communication technologies, particularly in the short-range communications field while long-range technologies are implemented for some services. With respect to short-range technologies, IEEE 802.11.x, IEEE 802.15.x, RFID and Barcode-like (QRcode) are the most popular protocols in use, and are applied in the service range of Near Field Informatics (N-Fi) for ad hoc social networking. This paper presents the concept architecture (networking topology and routing protocol) as well as the services provided by an ad hoc network. The case used to demonstrate the system is the Taichung bus rapid transit (BRT) system in Taiwan.