Eco-Efficient Mobility in Smart City Scenarios

(From the article abstract)

Cooperative-Intelligent Transportation Systems (C-ITS) have brought a technological
revolution, especially for ground vehicles, in terms of road safety, traffic efficiency, as well
as in the experience of drivers and passengers. So far, these advances have been focused on
traditional transportation means, leaving aside the new generation of personal vehicles that are
nowadays flooding our streets. Together with bicycles and motorcycles, personal mobility devices
such as segways or electric scooters are firm sustainable alternatives that represent the future to
achieve eco-friendly personal mobility in urban settings. In a near future, smart cities will become
hyper-connected spaces where these vehicles should be integrated within the underlying C-ITS
ecosystem. In this paper, we provide a wide overview of the opportunities and challenges related to
this necessary integration as well as the communication solutions that are already in the market to
provide these moving devices with low-cost and efficient connectivity. We also present an On-Board
Unit (OBU) prototype with different communication options based on the Low Power Wide Area
Network (LPWAN) paradigm and several sensors to gather environmental information to facilitate
eco-efficiency services. As the attained results suggest, this module allows personal vehicles to be
fully integrated in smart city environments, presenting the possibilities of LoRaWAN and Narrow
Band-Internet of Things (NB-IoT) communication technologies to provide vehicle connectivity and
enable mobile urban sensing.