# Wireless Mesh Networking: An IoT-Oriented Perspective Survey on Relevant Technologies
## 7 Ongoing and Future Developments
### Smart City  
Another interesting scenario, in which the WMN technologies analyzed in this survey can be employed, is related to a smart city. In particular, a smart city can be modeled as the union of many \"subnetworks\", each of them dedicated to handle a particular aspect in the overall city monitoring and relying on the use of several communication systems, with heterogeneous technologies, similarly to the scenario shown in Figure 14.  
As for the smart agriculture scenario, also in the smart city one a \"smart\" gateway, equipped with multiple network interfaces, can be adopted, in order to route the traffic in a uniform way, hiding to end users the complexity and the translations needed among different communication technologies. In such a scenario, final consumers of collected data can be considered both citizens and urban service providers. In fact, the collected data are instrumental to the deployment of systems for smart parking monitoring, waste management, street lights, and traffic, air, and public transport management. The smart parking scenario may include: (i) several parking lots, each one equipped with a buried IEEE 802.15.4-based magnetic node and providing the presence/absence of a vehicle, in turn equipped with a presence sensor, a computing unit, and an IEEE 802.15.4 radio transceiver; and (ii) a \"local\" collector, equipped with an IEEE 802.15.4 network interface, which parking sensors can proactively send their presence information to, as well as being interrogated by the collector itself, in a passive mode. In turn, the local collector can be equipped with a long-range radio interface (e.g., LoRa), in order to forward the status of its monitored parking zone to the smart gateway. The mesh ability proper of IEEE 802.15.4, in this case, allows to cover a wide parking with (theoretically) only one local collector, due to the multi-hop paths that can be created among the parking lots' nodes. In the context of waste management, the proposed scenario considers that each trash can located along the streets is equipped with a weight sensor, with the aim of determining when trash emptying is required by the scavengers, as well as to provide a real-time filling percentage. To allow optimized emptying, the trash cans can be equipped with a long-range network interface (e.g., LoRa), through  
Figure 14: General view of city concerning different services, each of them handled by a particular module. which the smart gateway can monitor their status, as well as they can proactively forward an emptying request. An alternative communication solution can be adopted equipping each trash can with a short-range technology (e.g., BLE or IEEE 802.15.4) and attach them to a mesh network running on the public street light infrastructure. In general, street lights can be monitored adopting a short-range communication transceiver on each lamp, due to the fact that the street lights topology fits very well the multi-hop properties of a (linear) mesh network. In this way, it is possible to connect a large number of street lamps and monitor their operational parameters (e.g., power consumption, burned lamps, etc. ), together with the possibility to equip a few street lamps with external sensors, in order to detect what happens in their surrounding environment. Similarly to the weather stations considered for the smart agriculture scenario, even in urban air management scenarios it is possible to consider the deployment of several air quality stations in different city areas, in order to monitor the trend of several air parameters (e.g., carbon monoxide (CO), nitrogen dioxide (NO\({}_{2}\)), ozone (O\({}_{3}\)), sulfur dioxide (SO\({}_{2}\)), particulate matter (PTS, PM\({}_{2,5}\), PM\({}_{10}\)), etc.) and to detect potentially dangerous situations. To do this, each air quality station can be equipped with air quality sensors and with long-range radio transceivers, in order to transmit their hourly detected data through the mesh network proper of the adopted technology (e.g., LoRa).