A Design and Application of Municipal Service Platform Based on Cloud-Edge Collaboration for Smart Cities

Abstract

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) makes cities “smart”, capable of providing advanced municipal services to citizens more efficiently. In the literature, many applications of municipal service platform based on cloud computing and edge computing have been proposed, but the reference model and application instance based on cloud-edge collaboration specially for municipal service platform is rarely studied. In this context, this paper first develops a reference model, including resource collaboration, application collaboration, service collaboration, and security collaboration, and discusses the main contents and challenges of each part. Then, aiming at the problem of computing and communication resources allocation in the cloud-edge collaboration, a game-theory-based dynamic resource allocation model is introduced. Finally, an e-government self-service system based on the cloud-edge collaboration is designed and implemented. The cloud side is a cloud computing server, and the edge side are the self-service terminals integrating various edge computing devices with Artificial Intelligence (AI) embedded. The experimental results show that the designed system combines the advantages of cloud computing and edge computing, and provides a better user experience with lower processing latency, larger bandwidth, and more concurrent tasks. Meanwhile, the findings show that the evolutionary equilibrium and the Nash equilibrium are the optimal solutions, respectively.