CityLab R&D infrastructure

The real-life CityLab R&D environment enables the city, researchers and companies to evaluate their technology in a realistic environment, at the scale of a major city.

The CityLab testbed in Antwerp is currently deploying more than 100 multi-technology gateways and multiple LORA base stations offering flexible wireless connectivity (DASH-7, ZigBee, WiFi at 2.4GHz and 5GHz, Bluetooth Low Energy, custom sub-GHz protocols, …) as well as virtual edge-cloud resources spread across the centre of Antwerp. Together with a network prototyping client board (Octa-connect) and a state-of-the-art data processing software stack in the cloud designed with in-house software components, generic APIs and a sandboxing environment (planned), the CityLab research infrastructure is a large scale open testbed for SOTA data and network research on IoT and Smart City services. The iLab.t team supports the technical R&D infrastructure at the network and at the data layer of the CityLab environment and dynamically adapts this infrastructure to new test cases if needed.

More information: https://www.imec-int.com/nl/what-we-offer/innovation-services/city-of-things

Projects

  • Fed4FIRE: Federation for Future Internet experimentation
  • SynchroniCity: Delivering an IoT enabled Digital Single Market for Europe and Beyond

Key publications

  • City of things: An integrated and multi-technology testbed for IoT smart city experiments S Latre, P Leroux, T Coenen, B Braem… – … (ISC2), 2016 IEEE …, 2016 – ieeexplore.ieee.org
  • Designing a smart city playground: Real-time air quality measurements and visualization in the City of Things testbed B Braem, S Latre, P Leroux… – … (ISC2), 2016 IEEE …, 2016 – ieeexplore.ieee.org
  • City of Things: A Multidisciplinary Smart Cities Testbed for IoT, Big Data and Living Labs Innovation B Braem, S Latré, P Leroux, P Demeester… – Network Design and Optimization for Smart Cities, 2017 – World Scientific

Pictures

CityLab R&D infrastructure CityLab R&D infrastructure - indoor unit CityLab R&D infrastructure - outdoor gateway antenna unit CityLab R&D infrastructure - outdoor gateway active unit The pictures show the indoor unit for secure tunnelling of data and remote management, and the outdoor (weatherproof, robust) gateway consisting of an antenna unit and an active unit.