IoT4S: A new architecture to exploit sensing capabilities in smart cities

Smart cities offer a challenging way to design future networks, optimising services, costs and management activities. This requires ICT technologies able to interact with the environment. In particular, sensing activities become essential to support new and advanced services for the public good. The drawback is the explosion of the amount of heterogeneous information that has to be stored and processed. Thus, specific solutions for big data management become crucial. In this paper, we present a new architecture, called IoT4S, for the fine-grained storage of environmental information collected through several heterogeneous sensing devices. It provides a high abstraction layer for the description of both sensing infrastructures and sensed data, which can be exported as 'things' to the internet. Also, we propose a new two-layer system for data storage to support IoT4S in the data dissemination service, which is a hybrid solution based on both SQL-like and NoSQL technologies. The paper provides an in-depth description of the IoT4S design, implementation details and a preliminary analysis of its behaviour in real and emulated scenarios. © Copyright 2014 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.