Heterogeneity in IoT-based Smart Cities Designs

Smart city is a strategy of supporting new way of living using data that are collected from different types of electronic devices, analyzed and utilized to enable efficient resource usability and service optimization. Applications of various nature are elaborated in the smart cities, such as traffic planning applications, crowd monitoring, public health care, security, economy and urban planning. Thus, various requirements are needed to incorporate and facilitate efficient development of these applications in the smart city design. Accordingly, smart city can be distinguished via the requirements that support these applications. In this study, the requirements of smart city in relations to the involved applications and its influence on the smart city design are discussed. A list of smart city requirements is concluded and the potentials of various network architecture to facilitate such requirements are discussed. Based on the requirements and the architectures, the existing smart city designs are evaluated and compared.