Prototyping machine-to-machine applications for emerging smart cities in developing countries

Urbanisation trends in both developed and developing countries continue to grow significantly. This presents an opportunity for developing countries to increase future economic growth if they invest in the development of Smart Cities. One aspect of the realisation of Smart Cities revolves around the concept of using information and communication technologies to enhance the quality of living for citizens. This has led to the subject of Smart Cities becoming an important ongoing research topic in both academia and industry. Even as Smart Cities present lucrative and exciting opportunities for the developing world, many challenges stand in the way before they can actually be realised. This work tackles the first steps of moving towards this objective by identifying potential use cases for the Smart City context in developing countries such as South Africa. The focus is on a common problem faced by many such developing countries which is the lack of reliable and efficient management of power distribution. This paper introduces a framework that will allow for the development of Smart City energy management applications. The proposed architecture is based on a Smart City platform and an ETSI M2M/ oneM2M compliant Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communication framework.