A Framework for the Smart-City Nerve Center

Abstract

The smart-city concept represents an inter-domain application of internet-of-things, cloud computing and big data. To realize the vision of a smart-city, novel integration and application of new advances in Software-Defined Networking, Machine Learning, Real-Time Stream Processing, Social Network Analysis and High-Performance Computing are envisaged. We propose a Smart-City Nerve Centre (SCNC) which collates data from diverse sources to create a single control center for the effective and efficient management of real-time IoT traffic. The SCNC is a cloud-based big-data analysis framework receiving large volumes of structured and unstructured data from geographically diverse sensors, streams from social media, inputs from mobile devices of citizens among others. The SCNC processes the received data, derives insights, enables automated actions and escalates issues to human managers for real-world interventions. This paper establishes the need of the SCNC, lists major technical challenges involved and describes a novel SCNC framework that addresses the stated challenges.