Towards Smart Berlin - an experimental facility for heterogeneous Smart City infrastructures

In this paper, we present the Smart Berlin Testbed as an infrastructure for experimental research on Smart City scenarios. As part of Smart Cities, applications will arise that build upon a variety of information sources and provide the user with near real-time information about the surrounding environment. An important role in this scenarios will be taken by wireless network infrastructures. They will function as interfaces to the users who connect with their smartphone or laptop to access the applications. Additionally, wireless and wired sensor networks are required to monitor the urban environment. The Smart City infrastructure needs to integrate these sensor networks and make them accessible and controllable for the applications. The set-up of the Smart Berlin Testbed is accomplished with the interconnection of two large wireless mesh and sensor networks in Berlin, namely the DES-Testbed at the Freie Universität Berlin and the HWL-Testbed at the Humboldt University Berlin. Together, both networks comprise 250 wireless multi-radio mesh routers and an amount of heterogeneous sensor nodes in the same order. We describe how we interconnect the testbeds via the Internet and the provided research possibilities resulting from the diverse network architectures. As a first experiment, we show results of a white space detection experiment that has been carried out in the Smart Berlin Testbed in order to assess the channel conditions at the testbed sites.