Amalgamation of Advanced Technologies for Sustainable Development of Smart City Environment: A Review

The concept of smart city evolved with the integration of information and communication technology (ICT) in various sub-systems and processes in urban environment. The development of the smart cities is the best possible solution to major urban issues. It contributes towards economic and social development of the residents. It aims to provide the cordial environment in the domains of healthcare, education, transportation, power generation and dissipation, security, living, industry, etc., to the inhabitants to make their lives comfortable. Sustainability of these services is another major objective in a smart city framework. Along with the true realization of the idea of a smart city, advanced computational and communication technologies are contributing hugely towards its sustainable development. Communication technologies act as backbone to ensure connectivity at the various levels in a smart city framework. Novel smart city solutions for different application domains are designed and deployed by the industry using advanced computational technologies like IoT, Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain, Big Data and Cloud Computing. In this work, authors discuss the concept of smart city, its architecture and sustainability. Different operational domains in a smart city ecosystem are elaborated. The cyber physical aspect of the smart cities is discussed in brief. The role of various computational and communication technologies in the sustainable development of smart cities is presented. Limiting factors in the deployment of various advanced technologies in different smart city domains are highlighted. Security issues associated with the technological sustainable development of different smart city services along with existing solutions are discussed. The article is concluded by highlighting the future research directions.