Future Smart Cities: Vision, Challenges and Technology Trends

The smart cities paradigm is being adopted by many nations worldwide to offer smart services to their citizens while optimizing the cost of managing crowded and expanding urban areas. The concept is mainly based on the Internet of Things (IoT) infrastructure to utilize its sensed data of intelligent, interconnected devices to create value-added novel services. However, the smart cities paradigm is still not fully realized because of several challenges, such as heterogeneity of the devices and standards involved. This paper provides a vision for future smart cities and emphasizes its challenges. Moreover, the paper discusses the current technology trends that have the potential to materialize the vision of future smart cities. The paper also proposes a scalable and extensible architecture to employ smart cities’ current and future trends.