An IoT-based smart cities infrastructure architecture applied to a waste management scenario

Studies estimate that by 2050 two thirds of the world population will be leaving in urban areas, what leads to the necessity of intelligent services to meet the needs of the cities residents. An emerging solution to deal with this scenario is the convergence of information and communication technologies through the implementation of the concepts of smart cities and Internet of Things to provide solutions in diverse fields like infrastructure, transportation, and surveillance. Considering this challenging scenario, in this article a multilevel IoT-based smart cities infrastructure management architecture is proposed and the waste management problem is used as a case study to evaluate the performance of the proposed solution. Results proved the concept of the architecture, showing that it is able to manage up to 3902 garbage bins simultaneously. These bins are able to correctly separate organic and recyclable waste in both indoor and outdoor scenarios, presenting low response times, what leads to a good quality of experience to the users of the system. (C) 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.