Abdelhak Aqqal

By Abdelfatteh Haidine, Sanae El Hassani, Abdelhak Aqqal and Asmaa El Hannani

The world population is continuously growing and reached a significant evolution of the society, where the number of people living in cities surpassed the number of people in rural areas. This puts national and local governments under pressure because the limited resources, such as water, electricity, and transports, must thus be optimized to cover the needs of the citizens. Therefore, different tools, from sensors to processes, service, and artificial intelligence, are used to coordinate the usage of infrastructures and assets of the cities to build the so called smart cities. Different definitions and theoretical models of smart cities are given in literature. However, smart city can usually be modelled by a layered architecture, where communication and networking layer plays a central role. In fact, smart city applications lay on collecting field data from different infrastructures and assets, processing these data, taking some intelligent control actions, and sharing information in a secure way. Thus, a two way reliable communications layer is the basis of smart cities. This chapter introduces the basic concepts of this field and focuses on the role of communication technologies in smart cities. Potential technologies for smart cities are discussed, especially the recent wireless technologies adapted to smart city requirements.

Part of the book: Smart Cities Technologies

By Abdelfatteh Haidine and Abdelhak Aqqal

Part of the book: Broadband Communications Networks

By Abdelfatteh Haidine, Fatima Zahra Salmam, Abdelhak Aqqal and Aziz Dahbi

The deployment of 4G/LTE (Long Term Evolution) mobile network has solved the major challenge of high capacities, to build real broadband mobile Internet. This was possible mainly through very strong physical layer and flexible network architecture. However, the bandwidth hungry services have been developed in unprecedented way, such as virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), etc. Furthermore, mobile networks are facing other new services with extremely demand of higher reliability and almost zero-latency performance, like vehicle communications or Internet-of-Vehicles (IoV). Using new radio interface based on massive MIMO, 5G has overcame some of these challenges. In addition, the adoption of software defend networks (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV) has added a higher degree of flexibility allowing the operators to support very demanding services from different vertical markets. However, network operators are forced to consider a higher level of intelligence in their networks, in order to deeply and accurately learn the operating environment and users behaviors and needs. It is also important to forecast their evolution to build a pro-actively and efficiently (self-) updatable network. In this chapter, we describe the role of artificial intelligence and machine learning in 5G and beyond, to build cost-effective and adaptable performing next generation mobile network. Some practical use cases of AI/ML in network life cycle are discussed.

Part of the book: Moving Broadband Mobile Communications Forward

By Abdelfatteh Haidine, Ayoub El Idrissi, Abdelmoula Ait-Allal, Aziz Dahbi and Abdelhak Aqqal

The maritime transport networks play a critical and major role in an increasingly globalized world economy. Within these networks, the maritime ports play the role of hubs. Any disturbances in these hubs will negatively affect the worldwide economy. Therefore, economy players are transforming the ports through an evolutionary process to become smart maritime ports. These smart ports are built through an ensemble of smart domains that adopt sensing, data transmission, and data intelligence to support intelligent decision-making processes. Examples of such smart domains include smart grid/microgrids, smart container management, and smart/automatized terminal operations. In each of these domains, optimal decisions must be met to optimize the use of resources, increase the economy efficiency of the ports, and increase the safety and security for assets, goods, and people. In smart maritime port environment, vehicular applications are adopted everywhere, such as automated guided vehicles to transport containers, unmanned aerial vehicles for different port operations, etc. In this work, we discuss some concrete examples of these vehicular applications in the smart port environment and suggest the adequate and optimal vehicular communication technologies to be deployed to support a reliable data transmission for these applications.

Part of the book: Vehicular Networks