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SUMMARYThe Smart City paradigm has become one of the most important research topics around the globe. Particularly in Europe, it is considered as a solution for the unstoppable increase of high density urban environments and the European Commission has included the Smart City research as one of the key objectives for the FP7 (Seventh Framework Program) and H2020 (Horizon 2020) research initiatives. As a result, a considerable amount of quality research, with particular emphasis on information and communication technologies, has been produced. In this paper, we review the current efforts dedicated in Europe to this research topic. Particular attention is paid in the review to the platforms and infrastructure technologies adopted to introduce the Internet of Things into the city, taking into account the constraints and harshness of urban environments. Furthermore, this paper also considers the efforts in the experimental perspective, which includes the review of existing Smart City testbeds, part of wider European initiatives such as FIRE (Future Internet Research and Experimentation) and FIWARE. Last but not least, the main efforts in providing interoperability between the different experimental facilities are also presented.

Smart environments are composed of an everincreasing number of heterogeneous resources and devices for collecting and processing of a large amount of context data. These activities can be performed at the edge of the smart area, over a distributed and heterogeneous infrastructure, so to be close to the end-user and optimize response time. However, it is hard to define a data model able to support data exchange among different systems and between systems and users. This paper presents the key features of a smart environment and introduces the concept of virtual device, that is an abstracted component characterized by specific high-level functionalities. Then, the paper proposes a data model useful to represent and optimize the adoption of virtual device in smart environments. To better explain the data model features and benefits, we refer to a video surveillance use case, where a smart camera is able to provide the solid angle detection as a service.