Service Innovations and 5G connectivity for future Smart Cities

Today cities around the world face great challenges to improve safety, energy efficiency, air quality, people mobility and quality of living. Digitization and Internet of Things have been said to be the most promising opportunities for solving the challenges that cities are facing nowadays. With the digitization, cities are becoming smart cities. Actually, the smart city initiatives are today led by public investments, which have been secured either directly from the municipal budget or by national resources. There is a gap in the future commercial implementation of digitization in smart cities, rather than being project oriented public funded initiatives. This paper indicates, that there is a need for a next generation service infrastructure, which enables new digital ecosystem in smart cities. In the future digitized smart cities, the amount of users and new digital services planned in the future of smart cities could not be served with the existing capacity of mobile networks. The development of new communication systems, such as 5G, will be thus acting as enablers for new kind of services and applications with advanced requirements especially in terms of latency, resilience, coverage and bandwidth. The ongoing project LuxTurrim5G will solve critical smart city challenges by developing and demonstrating a smart light pole 5G infrastructure, which will be new kind of service platform and digitization enabler for future smart cities. 5G small cell will be integrated to light pole mechanics, and these small cells will enable over 10Gbit/s traffic and below 1ms latency. This enables to use a single 5G network for all different services made by different providers and makes relevant smart city applications as well as 5G mobile network applications economically feasible. This paper looks the ongoing project from the service innovations perspective. Paper defines the services related to platform itself, such as smart lighting, city surveillance and security, navigation, weather monitoring, information sharing and advertising. The platform with embedded services will be then enabler for new 5G connectivity based service innovations, provided by mobile network operators, micro-operators and vertical industries. Research is based on the multiple case study method, where experts from the project consortium have given their experiences and insights for service innovations and new digital ecosystem.