Smart cities require the application of human brain like intelligence systems for sensing, monitoring, decision making and action. In this paper this scenario is addressed in a two-fold manner. First, the function and requirements placed upon telecommunications systems is described and the future directions and challenges are discussed specifically in relation to sixth generation (6G) wireless systems which are both different to the wireless systems up to 5G and are expected to play a critical role in smart cities. Secondly, the paper presents a novel artificial intelligence (AI) driven smart antenna that is both computationally efficient and low on memory use, with the ability to track machine to machine, M2M, and machine to human, M2H, communications in the smart city.

The paper presents a generalized approach to electrical power, computer and communications engineering from two different directions, merging together to address the common challenges of smart cities as an integrated Internet of Things. On the one hand we present smart communications systems and networking as the key component of the smart city. The smart antenna, driven by ANN, is seen as the eye of the city, which makes it a critical component from every single aspect of the city: security and disaster management, commerce and business, industry, home and transport to make the city a pleasant and safe place for people. On the other hand, it presents the underlying science of the system, namely engineering electromagnetics, which spans all aspects of the Internet of Things from medical systems, visual virtual systems, underwater autonomous vehicles, synthetic aperture radar, mobile tracking, safety and security systems to protecting a highly sensitive microelectronic IoT system from the increasing surge power of thunderstorm electricity and lightning electrodynamics with climate change. We believe that though current research and development is still rather piece meal and highly narrow and specialized, a challenging and promising approach to advanced and future electrical and computer engineering research and development will be the integrated approach we propose, which will test and stretch the best brains extensively, but yield valuable technology in a variety of smart city issues such as medical systems to the response to the present pandemic and the container ship poisoning around Colombo city – issues that will become critical as cities grow in size and complexity. The ideas presented herein include enjoyable and productive research that crossed borders: USA, Papua New Guinea, Singapore, Malaysia, UK and Sri Lanka.

The IoT for smart cities will connect humans and millions of heterogenous devices which will require addressing and new protocols for communications. This paper will explore the AI enabled addressing and protocols issues that are required in 6G networks to enable IoT between M2H and M2M. Smart cities depend on smart IoT management to ensure that infrastructure is monitored and corrected if there is a failure as in the case of an emergency system. Central to the IoT management system is a novel artificial neural network (ANN) driven antenna that may rapidly be set for continuous rotating communications with several machines or smart phones, as well as focus in specific areas of intense or critical activity.  Furthermore, the ANN driven array smart antenna will be coded to track moving targets.

Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Language, 6G, wireless networks, Internet of Things, Smart Cities, Artificial Neural Network, Smart Antennas, Applied electromagnetics, lightning and climate change.

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