Full Lifecycle Infrastructure Management System for Smart Cities: A Narrow Band IoT-Based Platform

The mobile telecom carriers have deployed massive infrastructures that support or carry the data signal transmission. Most of them are passive devices lacking the ability to actively monitor and automatically report information, which are called “dumb devices.” At present, the dumb device management has problems, such as information incomplete or inaccurate, and lack of dynamic update mechanism. For catering to the construction of smart cities, we design an information management system considering the full lifecycle management for dumb devices to realize real-time or periodical context awareness and information transmission based on narrow band Internet of Things (NB-IoT). Compared to the existing radio frequency identification (RFID)-based solutions, which require RFID readers and electronic tags and have a limited sensing distance, the NB-IoT-based solution for dumb device management has advantages in transmission distance and communication stability. The NB-IoT terminal is attached to the dumb device, and a global positioning system module is installed on it to obtain the positioning information. The NB-IoT terminal is controlled by an real-time clock (RTC) alarm to periodically enter the low power mode and then wake up to automatically collect the location and battery information and upload it to the server. The application objects of this information management system can be extended to dumb devices in other industries.