Cloud Internet of Things Framework for Enabling Services in Smart Cities

Abstract

In the future internet era, the Internet of Things (IoT) has consolidated its presence in the smart cities with a variety of innovative IoT platforms for the provisioning of relevant services. The provisioning of such services requires ubiquity, reliability, high-performance, efficiency, scalability. In order to accomplish this popular trend is to merge IoT and Cloud concepts by combining multi-Cloud IoT architectures. The introduction of cognition was the first step for the IoT success, as it brought essential self-management and awareness capabilities combined with knowledge-generation functionality. The Cloud-IoT architectural vision is paving the way to the next/vital step for the IoT success and for new business value propositions for the IoT world leveraging cloud principles. Towards this direction, in this effort, a set of challenges have been identified, with a set of different research initiatives that aim to address them. A promising architecture for enabling Cloud-IoT services in smart cities is presented together with a case study that reveals the high potential that Cloud-IoT can achieve in the context of smart cities. The work concludes with the lessons learnt through the study and the elaboration of the Cloud-IoT concepts.