Combining Cloud and sensors in a smart city environment

Abstract

In the current worldwide ICT scenario, a constantly growing number of ever more powerful devices (smartphones, sensors, household appliances, RFID devices, etc.) join the Internet, significantly impacting the global traffic volume (data sharing, voice, multimedia, etc.) and foreshadowing a world of (more or less) smart devices, or "things" in the Internet of Things (IoT) perspective. Heterogeneous resources can be aggregated and abstracted according to tailored thing-like semantics, thus enabling Things as a Service paradigm, or better a "Cloud of Things". In the Future Internet initiatives, sensor networks will assume even more of a crucial role, especially for making smarter cities. Smarter sensors will be the peripheral elements of a complex future ICT world. However, due to differences in the "appliances" being sensed, smart sensors are very heterogeneous in terms of communication technologies, sensing features and elaboration capabilities. This article intends to contribute to the design of a pervasive infrastructure where new generation services interact with the surrounding environment, thus creating new opportunities for contextualization and geo-awareness. The architecture proposal is based on Sensor Web Enablement standard specifications and makes use of the Contiki Operating System for accomplishing the IoT. Smart cities are assumed as the reference scenario.

Smart Cities via Data Aggregation

“…Moreover, by means of Big Data tools, it is natural to think about individuals capable of aggregating open data with their own private ones, or defining their own services, composing existing ones, or even defining from scratch new ones. Finally, and as observed in [28], we believe it is a limitation to consider the Cloud as a mere endpoint of a smart city infrastructure. Rather, it should be handled in the same way as computing and storage resources usually are, in the more traditional Cloud stack e.g., abstracted, virtualized, and grouped into Clouds.…”

Opening up Smart Cities: Citizen-Centric Challenges and Opportunities from GIScience

“…In this way, most types of sensors can be discovered, accessed and reused for creating web-accessible sensor applications and services (see examples in [114,115]). For example, Mitton et al [116] combined cloud-based services to process SWE-encoded sensing data in smart cities.…”

Processing and Adding Vibrancy to Sensor Data

“…This cloud-based integration is able to accommodate dynamic loads and sharing of sensor resources by different users and applications, in flexible usage scenarios. Smart Cities is an application domain for which the use of sensor clouds has been proposed (Mitton et al, 2012). For example, a citywide environmental monitoring system would require significant computational and storage resources during an exceptional weather event, but would return to standard requirements at the end of that event.…”