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Go to Editorial ManagerIn an era shaped by rapid urbanization and digital transformation, smart cities have become a global imperative for sustainable, efficient, and citizen-centric development. This article analyzes Amman’s development into a smart city, highlighting its role as a model for emerging urban areas. Leveraging recent technologies such as AI, IoT, blockchain, and big data, Amman is actively transitioning from a traditional city to a smart one enhancing mobility, energy efficiency, education, healthcare, and citizen engagement. This study examines Amman’s smart city vision and roadmap, technological infrastructure, key application domains, implemented innovation projects, and global rankings. It also explores the challenges the city faces, future research opportunities across various domains, the role of software in urban development, and the critical factors contributing to Amman’s success as a smart city. This article serves as a vital reference for researchers, policymakers, urban planners, and practitioners aiming to shape next-generation smart cities. The case of Amman underscores how strategic governance, public-private collaboration, and the effective use of emerging technologies can accelerate sustainable urban transformation.
Smart city applications demand lightweight, efficient and dependable communication protocols to facilitate the functioning of resource-limited Internet of Things (IoT) devices. This work performs an extensive empirical study of the three most prominent IoT standards; Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT), the Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) and Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) by emulating real-world smart city use cases using a Raspberry Pi based testbed. The primary metrics based on which the protocols are analyzed are latency, message overhead, delivery rate and energy consumption. ANOVA and Tukey's HSD tests are used to determine the statistical significance of experimental data. The test results indicate that CoAP under (QoS-1 reliability) shows the least latency and energy consumption and MQTT due to its support for Quality of Service (QoS) is the most reliable. Among the others, HTTP is in general performance terms certainly at the bottom of all metrics mainly for its verbosity and synchronous nature. The paper then also suggests a decision flowchart for developers to choose the suitable protocol according to application requirements. The results are more than just numbers on a graph, and the research can be deployed for advice for protocol selection in practice, where this study helps identify issues with encryption overhead (over 75\%) while showcasing multi-hop network scalability and adaptive switch mechanisms as areas that remain to be resolved. Such findings can be used as a basis for design approaches to construct secure, efficient and scalable communication protocols in urban IoT settings.
Microwave photonic filters (MPFs) have been suggested as one solution to high-speed tunable wideband radio-frequency (RF) signal processing possessing unique characteristics relative to their all-electronic counterparts (or equivalents), both in bandwidth and tunability and insensitivity to electromagnetic interference. The article is a review of MPF design technologies and applications, and also contains relevant techniques in thermal, electrical and optical tuning as well as new methods founded on stimulated Brillouin scattering, optical frequency combs, and micro-ring resonators. The survey focuses on programmable optical processors, including liquid-crystal-on-silicon designs, arrayed waveguide gratings, and cascaded resonator designs, as arbitrary filters synthesis. Critical consideration is done on performance metrics which include bandwidth, selectivity, out-of-band rejection and tuning range, energy efficiency and other practical factors like stability in the environment and complexity of fabrication. The latest advances in reconfiguration with the help of artificial intelligence and machine learning are presented, and their significance in the optimization of adaptive and predictive filters is also highlighted. The paper also discusses the current constraints such as integration, power consumption, and environmental sensitivity and has provided directions of future achievability of compact, low-power and ultrafast and highly flexible MPFs to next-generation RF communication, radio-over-fiber, and cognitive radio systems. The survey should be used as a source of reference to the researchers and engineers who seek to improve the development, testing, and real-life application of the state of art technologies in the field of microwave photonic filtering.