Role of Internet of Things (IoT) and Crowdsourcing in Smart City Projects

This paper presents and discusses the role of the Internet of Things (IoT) and crowdsourcing in constructing smart cities. The literature review shows an important and increasing concern of the scientific community for these three issues and their association as support for urban development. Based on an extensive literature review, the paper first presents the smart city concept, emphasizing smart city architecture and the role of data in smart city solutions. The second part presents the Internet of Things, focusing on IoT technology, the use of IoT in smart city applications, and security. Finally, the paper presents crowdsourcing with particular attention to mobile crowdsourcing and its role in smart cities. The paper shows that IoT and crowdsourcing have a crucial role in two fundamental layers of smart city applications, namely, the data collection and services layers. Since these two layers ensure the connection between the physical and digital worlds, they constitute the central pillars of smart city projects. The literature review also shows that the smart city development still requires stronger cooperation between the smart city technology-centered research, mainly based on the IoT, and the smart city citizens-centered research, mainly based on crowdsourcing. This cooperation could beneficiate in recent developments in the field of crowdsensing that combines IoT and crowdsourcing.