Designing, Developing, and Facilitating Smart Cities

Abstract

The Cloud and the Internet of Things (IoT) are the main technologies enabling transformation of the living or work environment (e.g., houses, cities, factories) into one which is characterized by a new model of services for automated and smarter management of infrastructures and machines and of their interaction with people. The new environment (e.g., a house at the finer scale or building, neighborhood, smart city at a larger scale) becomes adaptable to the everyday needs of people enhancing their quality of life, work and productivity while taking into account environmental issues (e.g., low energy consumption, better management of resources, waste management, etc.). A future public cloud platform will offer services that will be available wherever the end user might be located. This approach enables easy access to information and accommodates the needs of users in different time zones and geographic locations [1]. Moreover, cloud computing will offer quick deployment and ease of integration as software integration occurs automatically and organically in cloud installations. We expect that future smart city platforms will utilize a robust cloud architecture thus providing resiliency and redundancy to its users. Existing IoT-based smart city architectures have been conceptualized and implemented to address certain challenges based on use case-oriented requirements, thus not considering issues of openness, scalability, interoperability, and use case independence. As a result, they are less principled, lacking standards, and are vendor or domain specific. Most importantly, they are hardly replicable in the sense that the same architecture cannot be used in more than one use cases, creating the IoT silos. Cloud-based smart city deployments aim to go beyond that, by consid-ering an open and dynamic configurable IoT platform. This goes beyond the current solutions' aims that are mainly vertically closed, so forming many " Intranets of Things " rather than an " Internet of Things " [2]. The lack of standardization in the IoT domain has resulted in the fragmentation of the approaches in IoT systems design and implementation. To address the fragmentation of existing IoT solutions, the IoT-A project [3] proposes an archi-tecture reference model that defines the principles and standards for generating IoT architectures and promoting the interoperation of IoT solutions. IoT-A compliant architectures assure that generated knowledge will be modular and reusable across domain or use case specific boundaries. However, IoT-A addresses the architecture design problem, and does not focus on whether existing cloud platforms can offer the tools and services to support the implementation of IoT-A compliant IoT systems. Currently, cloud computing offers a variety of services including hardware and software. FIWARE 1 moves future Internet application design a step forward by offering a large scale of cloud services to be built upon the concept of scalability and elasticity as discussed in [4]. FIWARE platform comprises a set of Generic Enablers (GEs) that are considered general purpose and common to several usage areas. We expect that cloud computing will offer flexibility so to meet variations on demand. Further, it will characterize a multi-consumer to provider model by allowing seamless interoperability between its features as discussed in [5]; this in conjunction with FIWARE services offers a new method of designing novel tools for the emerging needs of future IoT. Other benefits include, cost-effective infras-tructure for IoT use cases as cloud service, as cloud services are in general available at much cheaper rates than traditional approaches and can significantly lower the overall IT expenses. Cloud computing delivers a better cash flow by eliminating the capital expense (CAPEX) associated with developing and maintaining the server infrastructure. Leveraging on results from EU-funded research, we propose to design IoT systems deriving from IoT-A based on FIWARE, the EU initiative for cloud ser-vices provision and one the candidate reference cloud implementations that can be exploited in the Future Internet. This work extends the work of [6] by providing a comparison of the functionality of FIWARE GEs against IoT-A requirements and guidelines and point out weaknesses and missing points along with suggestions.