An IoT enabled Smart City: Assessing the Applications, Resource Constraints, Existing Solutions and Research Directions

Abstract

With the advancement of Internet of Things (IoT), smart city application design, development and deployment have been emerging research paradigms. Various IoT enabled smart city applications are expected to be equipped with huge IoT devices and linking these devices through proper connectivity and control facilities provides a basis for a plethora of applications and their services. Such applications are heavily affecting our daily lives in various domains such as healthcare, transportation, parking, environmental and weather monitoring, waste monitoring, smart homes and offices. The complexity of these applications can be understood by considering the constrained nature of resources at the node and network levels. This paper presents the recent studies in IoT enabled smart city applications with main attention towards highlighting the resource constraints in these applications especially limited processing, limited energy, limited storage and limited bandwidth. To address such resource limitations in smart city applications, the paper discusses the various architectural and virtualization based solutions in IoT and its related computing fields such as mobile computing, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), fog computing, cloud computing, and big data analytics. Although the discussed solutions address the resource issues in such applications, there are challenges at the hardware and software level which needs to be addressed. This paper also highlights these challenges or research directions in resource-constrained IoT enabled smart city applications and these include mobility management, heterogeneity, security, scalability, fault-tolerance, Quality of Service, interoperability, connectivity and resource issues.