Smart shires: The revenge of countrysides

This paper discusses the need to devise novel strategies to create smart services specifically designed to non-metropolitan areas, i.e. countrysides. These solutions must be viable, cheap an should take into consideration the different nature of countrysides, that cannot afford the deployment of services designed for smart cities. These solutions would have an important social impact for people leaving in these countrysides, and might slow down the constant migration of citizens towards metropolis. In this work, we focus on communication technologies and practical technological/software distributed architectures. An important aspect for the real deployment of these "smart shires" is their simulation. We show that "priority-based broadcast" schemes over ad-hoc networks can represent an effective communication substrate to be used in a software middleware promoting the creation of applications for smart shire scenarios.