Before the advent of Internet technology, information processing was just a matter of large computer equipment gathered in a few special computer rooms, which had little to do with ordinary people. Although information can be transmitted, the scope of information transmission is very limited, and it is far from reaching the end of the city. Internet technology has fundamentally changed the way human beings obtain and process information, so that any ordinary people can obtain and generate information at will. Only when the ability of wisdom is really close to the ordinary people, can a smart city be realized.

From the technical point of view, "smart city" is an urban information system based on network information. The difference of its smart engineering ability comes from the difference of information acquisition ability. A smart city not only needs more people to be able to obtain and generate information at any time, but also needs to be able to automatically collect and dynamically supervise information in various infrastructures in the city.

From a technical point of view, a variety of devices need to have the ability of independent computing and networking. The development of embedded technology makes these possible. Therefore, embedded technology is one of the technical foundations of smart city, which expands the ability of intelligent engineering from people to goods.