Combining Cloud and sensors in a smart city environment

TLDR

The growing proliferation of powerful devices and heterogeneous sensors is reshaping global traffic and enabling a Cloud‑of‑Things paradigm that underpins future smart city infrastructures. This article aims to design a pervasive infrastructure that lets new generation services interact with the environment, creating contextualized and geo‑aware opportunities. The authors propose a Sensor Web Enablement‑based architecture running on Contiki OS to support IoT services in smart city contexts.

Abstract

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.