Smart cities - and the benefits that their emergence will bring to businesses, individuals and society - are making headlines once again. After all, a city built on linked-up ICT infrastructure will deliver better social and intellectual capital for its citizens. That is certainly the lesson that we have learned in Dubai over the last decade with the establishment of Dubai Internet City and the gradual roll-out of on-line enabled government services. We have seen the development of new skills and opportunities first hand.

His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai, launched a new strategy to transform Dubai into a smart city in March, highlighting 100 key initiatives covering society, mobility, economy, governance and environment, with all services and initiatives 'enabled' through smart phone usage. There is no doubting the vision at work here, the potential to maximize business value from these smart city projects is huge, but the move to ‘smarts’ is not straightforward. Establishing the infrastructure for smart cities, machine-to-machine (M2M) communications and the Internet of Things requires a new strategy.

Widespread availability of M2M technology has already spurred innovative use cases across different industries, such as: smart grid in energy/utilities; communication between various devices for security and industrial/building control; environmental monitoring; and many applications in the consumer domain ranging from retail to home appliance intelligence. What mustn’t be forgotten, however, is that while the principle of M2M communications, which will make smart cities a reality seem simple, a variety of sensors communicating application-relevant information to other sensors, it actually relies on a complex communications network between devices, the ability to store, process and analyze large amounts of data, and the ability to take action based on this intelligence.

Cloud computing has made this computationally feasible, but it is the network that connects these devices to each other and to the cloud. As such, the success of smart cities depends on a reliable, scalable and robust network that can accommodate bandwidth-intensive applications. However, in order to make it a reality, operators will need to innovate and find new ways of leveraging their existing infrastructure. In addition, the move towards smarts, the Internet of Things and new M2M applications - and their associated security and networking requirements - will result in massive demands on network resources. These demands are likely to sporadic, or ‘bursty’, with large spikes depending on usage patterns and time of day. The underlying network infrastructure needs to be able to accommodate these unpredictable peaks and troughs, as such it will need to be agile, able to scale and facilitate advances in software that will enable truly programmable networks that can accommodate on-demand experiences.

A scalable packet-optical infrastructure provides almost unlimited bandwidth scalability while reducing cost/bit. It also provides the ability to handle legacy networks while modernizing to deliver new, high-bandwidth services. Carrier Ethernet provides fast, easy plug and play deployment, with services that are fully managed and provide guaranteed performance and resilience, while enabling new technology, such as Software Defined Networking and Network Function Virtualization (NFV). SDN and NFV allow operators to move away from relying on physical network resources to new, software-driven networks that can automatically reallocate resources in response to end-user and M2M applications’ needs.

In short, modernizing the communications infrastructure is the first step towards smart city development. By enabling a flexible and future-proof communications network Dubai is poised for a pioneering role in smart city development.  With projects such as Dubai Smart City it is already exploring how it can incorporate smart technology to adapt to regional challenges and successfully create new urban centers unlike any the world has ever seen.

About Omar AlSaied

Omar holds dual roles at Ciena. He is the sales director of the Carrier Business for the Middle East and General Manager, Ciena, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. He is responsible for driving Ciena’s business results and long-term growth across Middle East carriers.

Omar has more than 15 years of experience in sales and business development and S/W Development in North America and the Middle East.

Omar worked in Cisco and in various Research and Development roles in Nortel and was responsible for Global Business development for the Microsoft/Nortel Alliance.

Omar holds a Bachelor’s Degree in System Engineering from Carleton University and an MBA from Ottawa University – Canada.