A Hyperconnected Smart City Framework

Abstract

Recent technological advancements have given rise to the concept of hyper-connected smart cities being adopted around the world. These cities aspire to achieve better outcomes for citizens by improving the quality of service delivery, information sharing, and creating a sustainable environment. A smart city comprises of a network of interconnected devices also known as IoT (Internet of Things), which captures data and transmits it to a platform for analysis. This data covers a variety of information produced in large volumes also known as Big Data. From data capture to processing and storage, there are several stages where a breach in security and privacy could result in catastrophic impacts. Presently there is a gap in the centralization of knowledge to implement smart city services with a secure architecture. To bridge this gap, we present a framework that highlights challenges within the smart city applications and synthesizes the techniques feasible to solve them. Additionally, we analyze the impact of a potential breach on smart city applications and state-of-the-art architectures available. Furthermore, we identify the stakeholders who may have an interest in learning about the relationships between the significant aspects of a smart city. We demonstrate these relationships through force-directed network diagrams. They will help raise the awareness amongst the stakeholders for planning the development of a smart city. To complement our framework, we designed web-based interactive resources that are available from http://ausdigitech.com/smartcity/.