Skip to main content

Bristol: A Programmable City Based on OpenDaylight

The Bristol is Open project collects information about many aspects of city life–such as energy, air quality and traffic flows, from a large number of sensors–including smartphones and sensors mounted on lamp posts.

Bristol’s SDN solution, built with the ODL framework, manages M2M communications from/to the IoT devices, offering greater flexibility and agility than a hard-wired network infrastructure. Using ODL, devices attached to the network can be programmed “on the fly” by network managers as new requirements and services emerge.

Data is then accessed through a portal and presented in human-friendly form, such as maps and diagrams showing real-time pollution, journey times, energy efficiency, or the results of ad hoc polling for civic or entertainment matters. There is also a bandwidth-on-demand component to the ODL solution wherein capacity can be guaranteed to selected users–the BBC is currently taking advantage of this, donating research fees for high bandwidth access.