Smarter Markets for Smarter Life: Applications, Challenges, and Deployment Experiences

Abstract

While a number of studies reveal the performance and effectiveness of applying wireless systems to various smart city applications, surprisingly, a market environment, in which we rely on a daily or weekly basis for purchasing essential goods, is still understudied. A wireless system in a market, along with rapidly growing IoT technology, can enable interesting applications such as automated electronic price tag updates, shopping-cart-based advertisements and information display, and automated inventory/stock management. These applications can first benefit market staff by automating routine tasks or opening possibilities for additional profits. Not only that: for everyday customers, these applications provide more reliable services by eliminating many man-made errors and offer additional services that can be enabled by newly gained connectivities. In this work, we introduce application requirements and technical challenges for such smart market applications and pilot deployment experiences in an urban large-scale market. Our pilot deployment experiences of wireless systems in markets provide quantified knowledge on the impact of various in-market activities on the wireless link performance and led us to design MarketNet, a wireless networking architecture suitable for IoT-based smart market systems. We see this work as a first step in bringing the attention of many researchers to a new application area, where wireless systems have the potential to benefit the quality of life of many smart city residents.