Section: New Results

Smart Cities

Participants : Nathalie Mitton, Valeria Loscri, Riccardo Petrolo.

Smart City represents one of the most promising, prominent and challenging Internet of Things (IoT) applications, but recent ICT trends suggest more and more that cities could also benefit from Cloud computing. The convergence of IoT paradigm and Cloud computing technology, can play a fundamental role for developing of highly level and organized cities form an ICT point of view, but it is of paramount importance to deal a critical analysis to identify the issues and challenges deriving from this synergy.

A novel perspective that we have considered as key factor for the realization of Future Internet is the role of the interconnected objects as active entities in the context of the networked systems [52]. With this perspective in mind, we have proposed CACHACA [43], a ranking mechanism for Sensor Networks that facilitate the discovery of services provided by each network element. Discovery functionality has been also considered in the context of VITAL project, since effective and accurate mechanisms to discover Inter-Connected Objects (ICOs) and new services represents a sine qua non condition to have effective exploration of data-sources that are appropriate for a specific business context as defined by an end-user [42] [11].

On the other hand, a Smart City is a kind of ecosystem characterized with different IoT solutions that have to cooperate and coexist and is in continuous expansion. In order to face with the integration and interoperability challenges of this ecosystem, we have considered VITAL-OS architecture that can monitor, visualize, and control all the operations of a city [44].