D2C-SM: Designing a Distributed-to-Centralized Software Management Architecture for Smart Cities

Abstract

Smart city innovations can enhance the quality of citizens' life through different smart technology management solutions, including resource management, data management, and software management. Nowadays, there are two primary proposals for smart technology management architectures in smart city environments, centralized, and distributed-to-centralized. The distributed-to-centralized schema architecture has several advantages. These advantages emerge from the contribution of distributed (e.g., Fog and cloudlet), and centralized (e.g., Cloud) technologies. For instance, decreasing network communication traffic and its latencies, improving data quality, and upgrading the security and privacy levels. In this paper, we develop our proposed Distributed-to-Centralized Data Management (D2C-DM) architecture and suggest novel contributions. First, we describe a new fully hierarchical software management architecture for smart cities based on Fog, cloudlet, and Cloud technologies. This Distributed-to-Centralized Software Management (D2C-SM) architecture can provide different software and services layers (including local, historical, and combined) through using distinct data types gathered from physical (e.g., sensors and smartphones) and non-physical (e.g., simulated data, and external databases) data sources in the smart city. Second, we envisage that our proposed D2C-SM can fit the software requirements of the Zero Emission Neighborhoods (ZEN) center. Thereafter, we use three different use cases of the ZEN center to depict the easy adaptation of our proposed ICT architecture, including D2C-SM and D2C-DM architectures.

A Novel Edge-to-Cloud-as-a-Service (E2CaaS) Model for Building Software Services in Smart Cities

“…Edge of smart city networks as a Service can be realized by different distributed technologies [4,5] and demonstrated by different service models, "EaaS", "MECaaS", "FaaS", and "caaS". The models can be applied through three layers of city/Edge networks as shown in Fig.…”

“…These devices can work together to combine their computational power and perform higher demanding tasks. Distributed-to-Centralized computing platforms use both potentials of distributed and centralized technologies for processing and storage at the same time, such as Fog-to-Cloud (F2C) [12,13] and Fog-to-cloudlet-to-Cloud (F2c2C) [4,5,14]. b) "ICT Management" is an important aspect in smart cities due to the wide variety of available ICT resources and components.…”

“…In our D2C-ICT architecture [1,4,5], we already pointed out that the cloudlet is a good option to manage the large-scale ICT networks through different KPIs and requirements. In this paper [5], we designed "I2CM-IoT (Integrated and Intelligent Control and Monitoring of IoT)," where the cloudlets act as a control layer.…”

A Cost Model for Data Discovery in Large-Scale IoT Networks of Smart Cities

“…More details about ICT architectures are described in [34]. However, there are still open challenges through designing an efficient D2C-ICT architecture for smart cities through the different city and ICT requirements such as data management [1,7,33] and software services management [7].…”

“…As we discussed in [6,7,16], we introduce a completely hierarchical distributed (from sensors and IoT devices) to centralized (Cloud computing technologies) ICT architecture for the ZEN center as a context of smart cities. Our D2C-ICT architecture for the ZEN center is based on Fog, cloudlet, and Cloud technologies [6,16].…”