Wireless Infrastructures for Sustainable Smart Cities: An SDG-Linked Integrative Review of Urban-Service Pipelines

Abstract

Urban services increasingly depend on interconnected sensing, communication, computing, decision-support, and response functions, yet technical performance alone does not establish service effectiveness. This structured integrative review examines WSNs, WBANs, V2X systems, 5G-enabled edge–cloud infrastructures, and prospective 6G capabilities across health, mobility, environmental monitoring, energy, water, infrastructure safety, and climate resilience. A five-database search covering January 2018–March 2025 was supplemented by citation tracing and a documented gap-directed update with a final cutoff of 1 July 2026. The analytical corpus comprised 40 peer-reviewed studies, five deployment cases, and one scope-boundary case. An outcome-mediated perception–network–edge/cloud–decision–response framework enabled categorical comparison of heterogeneous evidence without pooling non-comparable measures. Attribution was classified as T1 (comparatively evaluated downstream outcome), T2 (technical or bounded operational outcome), or T3 (conceptual linkage): three studies were T1, 34 T2, and three T3. Ten studies supported target-level SDG alignment, whereas none reached indicator-level correspondence. Evidence remained concentrated at communication, processing, decision-support, and bounded operational endpoints, with limited assessment of response availability and disruption–recovery conditions. Among the deployment cases, only SFpark supported T1 interpretation. These findings characterize the selected corpus and identify a persistent gap between technical performance and comparative, longitudinal, and distributionally assessed urban-service outcomes.