Heterogeneous Sensors Become Homogeneous Things in Smart Cities

Abstract

Smart Cities offer a new approach for optimizing services, reducing costs, simplifying the management of Future Cities, enabling new services for citizens. In the Future Internet initiatives, Sensors Networks assume even more a crucial role, especially for making smarter cities. Sensors, becoming smart, will represent the peripheral elements of a complex future ICT world. However, due to the specific application field, smart sensors are very heterogeneous in terms of communication technologies, sensing features and elaboration capabilities. To overcome issues due to the high heterogeneity in this paper we present a new architecture able to make a dual abstraction of complex sensing infrastructures along with data they collect. An important key of this work is to provide a service at world wide level, that is scalable and flexible. The architecture implementation is based on Sensor Web Enablement standard specifications and makes use of the Contiki Operating System for accomplishing the Internet of Things.