Towards a foundation for a collaborative replicable smart cities IoT architecture

The pervasive instrumentation of the physical world with sensors and actuators provides an unprecedented level of information granularity that is useful in decision-making processes. As municipalities and the public sector at large begin to leverage the Internet of Things (IoT) for civic solutions, there exist greater necessity and impetus to maintain a certain level of standardization in the platform and data architecture. Ideally, these standards should be in place well ahead of legislation which encourages adoption. For this reason, it is important for technologists and public policy experts to collaborate in the codification process. Currently existing Smart City deployments serve as case studies, but the unification process of best practices will require in-situ deployment and testing. This work introduces an initial investigation into a collaborative, replicable, Smart Cities, IoT Architecture through targeted real-world deployment. This paper performs the following tasks in order to actualize the envisioned collaborative framework (1) delineation of the guiding principles of the Smart-City framework, (2) development of foundational assets in an existing cloud provider, (3) demonstration of the existing functionality through a real-world use-case, and (4) call for collaboration through our online repository.