Smart cities and 6G are technological areas that have the potential to transform the way we live and work in the years to come. Until this transformation comes into place, there is the need, underlined by research and market studies, for a critical reassessment of the entire wireless communication sector for smart cities, which should include the IoT infrastructure, economic factors that could improve their adoption rate, and strategies that enable smart city operations. Therefore, from a technical point of view, a series of stringent issues, such as interoperability, data privacy, security, the digital divide, and implementation issues have to be addressed. Notably, to concentrate the scrutiny on smart cities and the forthcoming influence of 6G, the groundwork laid by the current 5G, with its multifaceted role and inherent limitations within the domain of smart cities, is embraced as a foundational standpoint. This examination culminates in a panoramic exposition, extending beyond the mere delineation of the 6G standard toward the unveiling of the extensive gamut of potential applications that this emergent standard promises to introduce to the smart cities arena. This paper provides an update on the SC ecosystem around the novel paradigm of 6G, aggregating a series of enabling technologies accompanied by the descriptions of their roles and specific employment schemes.

The expected growth in mobile video demand over broadband cellular networks is one of the key factors driving the wireless industry to develop the fifth generation of network technology. This scenario is fueling the need for group-oriented services (i.e., multicast and broadcast) in order to efficiently manage the radio resources, and consequently grant different groups of users simultaneous access to the same multimedia content with differentiated quality of service. The evolved multimedia broadcast multicast service (eMBMS), standardized by the Third Generation Partnership Project, is one of the technologies likely to be extended to 5G systems with the aim of addressing point-to-multipoint services. In addition, non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) techniques are also being considered as a driver to increase the efficient use of the spectrum in multi-user environments with asymmetric data delivery. The present article proposes the joint use of subgrouping multicast techniques and NOMA in an eMBMS-like scenario. Performance is evaluated in envisaged 5G environments, where different quality video services are delivered to a group of users interested in the same contents.

Cognitive radio (CR) represents the proper technological solution in case of radio resources scarcity and availability of shared channels. For the deployment of CR solutions, it is important to implement proper sensing procedures, which are aimed at continuously surveying the status of the channels. However, accurate views of the resources status can be achieved only through the cooperation of many sensing devices. For these reasons, in this paper, we propose the utilization of the Social Internet of Things (SIoT) paradigm, according to which objects are capable of establishing social relationships in an autonomous way, with respect to the rules set by their owners. The resulting social network enables faster and trustworthy information/service discovery exploiting the social network of “friend” objects. We first describe the general approach according to which members of the SIoT collaborate to exchange channel status information. Then, we discuss the main features, i.e., the possibility to implement a distributed approach for a low-complexity cooperation and the scalability feature in heterogeneous networks. Simulations have also been run to show the advantages in terms of increased capacity and decreased interference probability.

One of the goals of next generation TV broadcast services is to provide realistic media contents to the users. The user's sense of reality can be reinforced by adding to conventional media multiple sensorial effects, through five-sense stimulus (i.e., taste, sight, touch, smell, and hearing). In a smart TV broadcasting context, especially in a home environment, to deliver the additional effects, customary devices (e.g., air conditioning, lights, etc.), provided of opportune smart features, have to be preferred to ad-hoc devices, often deployed in other applications as for example in gaming systems. In this context, a key issue is the interconnection among the smart TV and the customary devices that deliver the additional sensorial effects to the user. In smart home use cases, the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm has been widely adopted to connect smart devices and this paper presents an IoT-based architecture for multi sensorial media delivery to TV users in a home entertainment scenario. In such a framework, home customary devices, act as smart objects interconnected via IoT network to the smart TV and play a role to implement additional effects to the conventional broadcast TV service. In this paper, the requirements in terms of synchronization between media and devices is analyzed and the architecture of the system is defined accordingly. Furthermore, a prototype is implemented in a real smart home scenario with real customary devices, which allowed a subjective test measurement campaign to assess the quality of experience of the users and the feasibility of the proposed multi sensorial media TV service.

In Smart Grids the flow of electricity and information is strictly interrelated with the management and control of the electricity supply system. ICT is not only an extension or a modernization of the power system equipment, but a fundamental requirement for supporting the distribution network monitoring, operation and control. To enable monitoring and control of the Smart Grid and accommodate the large realtime data flow between controlled equipment and the distribution management system it is necessary the deployment of advanced sensors and measurement systems along with the communication network infrastructure. In this paper two different strategies for power network monitoring and control are compared: an LTE-based centralized management approach and a 5G-based distributed management approach. The two types of communications systems are compared considering their performances during fault management in a Smart Grid scenario.