Resources on the Move for Smart City: A Disruptive Perspective on the Grand Convergence of Sensing, Communications, Computing, Storage, and Intelligence

The most commonly seen things on streets in any city are vehicles. However, most of them are used to transport people or goods. What if they also carry resources and capabilities for sensing, communications, computing, storage, and intelligence (SCCSI)? We would have a web of sensors to monitor the city, a network of powerful communicators to transport data around, a grid of computing power to conduct data analytics and machine learning (ML), a network of distributed storage to buffer/cache data/job for optimization, and a set of movable AI/ML toolboxes made available for specialized smart applications. This perspective article presents information on leveraging SCCSI-empowered vehicles to design such a service network, simply called SCCSI network, to help build a smart city with a cost-effective and sustainable solution. It showcases how multi-dimensional technologies – namely, sensing, communications, computing, storage, and intelligence – converge to a unifying technology to solve grand challenges for resource demands from emerging large-scale applications. Thus, with SCCSI-empowered vehicles on the ground, over the air, and on the sea, SCCSI networks can make resources and capabilities on the move, practically pushing SCCSI services to the edge! We hope this article serves as a spark to stimulate more disruptive thinking to address grand challenges of paramount importance.