A sustainable marriage of telcos and transp in the era of big data: Are we ready?

The emerging smart city paradigm e.g., intelligent transport, smart grid and participatory sensing etc. is to advance the quality, performance and experience of urban citizten services through greater connectivity. This paradigm needs to collect data from citizens, various devices and assets that could be monitored, processed and analysed for the city governers to make better decision and also more efficiently manage those assests and resources. While the telecommunication and Internet are progressively being over-burdened and congested by the growing data transmission demands. To keep expanding the telecommunications and Internet infrastructures to accomodate these intensive data demands is costly and also the associated energy consumptions and carbon emissions could at long last wind up genuinely hurting the environment. To face this issue in the coming era of big data, we envision it will be best to utilize the established urban transport and road infrastructure and existing daily massive vehicular trips, to complement traditional option for data transmission. After detailing the current state-of-the-art, we consider the main challenges that need to be faced. Moreover, we define the main pillars to integrate the telecommunications and transport infrastructures, and also a proposal for the future urban network architecture.