When do we call a city ‘smart’? Investments made in human
capital & technology enabling high quality life, economic development and
management of natural resources through human engagement together comprises of
a smart city. The
definition of a smart city differs from state to state and city to city
depending on willingness to change and level of development needed. Indian
Government’s definition of a smart city is “Smart
City offers sustainability in terms of economic activities and employment
opportunities to a wide section of its residents, regardless of their level of
education, skills or income level”. Under any Smart City there are
certain services which needs to be assured like water and electricity supply,
solid waste management and sanitation, public transport, safety and security,
IT connectivity, smart parking and many other basic needs which the smart city
addresses.
In a smart city there are various software’s and
applications which connect, fetches and manages data from a set of devices such
as sensors and software’s that generate real time information, intelligence and
analytics which aims to transform the overall city. It is understood that there
is enormous amount of heterogeneous data generated by the applications, but to
handle such high capacity of data we need larger silos and high compute power,
thus the latest developments in smart cities is the adoption of cloud computing.
Smart cities need to make use of various Information and
Communications Technology (ICT) solutions to monitor functions in the city and
also needs the capacity to manage and process this large scale data in real
time in a specific manner. The cloud eases big data storage, integration,
processing and analysis of data in certain time frame. There are various
services on cloud which smart cities can use for their benefits in delivering the
best in diverse business and technological domains by offering internet based
service delivery that encourages creation of services which are based on domain
independent service delivery platform. Cloud
computing enhances sharpness, speed and cost savings by providing on demand
access, through a network to a pool of shared computing resources which can be
quickly provisioned and scaled as needed.
We can study the extent of cloud computing through the means of highly innovative and scalable
service platforms through which smart city services can be enabled. Smart City deployment requires the
incorporation of a distributed open source network and decentralized cloud
based platform. The tailored IoT
functionalities which will be provided by the cloud platform will permit
several multi-sensor applications to perform complex big data processing
through distributed sensor networks. In India the smart city mission consists
of various plans which the government wants to execute which differs from city
to city based on the level of improvements needed. Rural and urban areas in India are targeted to
transform into Smart Cities with a
vision to provide ease in all day to day activities and to enhance quality of
life and increase contact between citizens and government. Promoting the use of
land for various purposes, expanding housing opportunities for all, promoting a
variety of transport options, making governance citizen friendly and cost
effective and giving an identity to a city, all these features are important
for the development of a Smart City.
Cloud computing offers a big platform for Smart Cities and
offer services which domain specific applications require and drive all system
component design and determine most of the technical choices, ranging from smart
devices to sensors to middleware components and computing infrastructure.
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