Towards a smart city based on cloud of things, a survey on the smart city vision and paradigms

Abstract Smart city represents one of the most promising, prominent and challenging Internet of Things (IoT) applications 1. In the last few years, indeed, the smart city concept has played an important role in academic and industry fields, with the development and deployment of various middleware platforms and IoT‐based infrastructures. However, this expansion has followed distinct approaches creating, therefore, a fragmented scenario, in which different IoT ecosystems are not able to communicate between them. To fill this gap, there is a need to re‐visit the smart city IoT semantic and to offer a global common approach. To this purpose, this paper browses the semantic annotation of the sensors in Cloud, and innovative services can be implemented and considered by bridging Cloud of Things (CoT) and IoT. Things like semantic will be considered to perform the aggregation of heterogeneous resources by defining the CoT paradigm. We survey the smart city vision, providing information on the main requirements and highlighting the benefits of integrating different IoT ecosystems within Cloud under this new CoT vision. This paper also discusses relevant challenges in this research area. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.