Cloud Internet of Things Framework for Enabling Services in Smart Cities

In the future internet era, the Internet of Things (IoT) has consolidated its presence in the smart cities with a variety of innovative IoT platforms for the provisioning of relevant services. The provisioning of such services requires ubiquity, reliability, high-performance, efficiency, scalability. In order to accomplish this popular trend is to merge IoT and Cloud concepts by combining multi-Cloud IoT architectures. The introduction of cognition was the first step for the IoT success, as it brought essential self-management and awareness capabilities combined with knowledge-generation functionality. The Cloud-IoT architectural vision is paving the way to the next/vital step for the IoT success and for new business value propositions for the IoT world leveraging cloud principles. Towards this direction, in this effort, a set of challenges have been identified, with a set of different research initiatives that aim to address them. A promising architecture for enabling Cloud-IoT services in smart cities is presented together with a case study that reveals the high potential that Cloud-IoT can achieve in the context of smart cities. The work concludes with the lessons learnt through the study and the elaboration of the Cloud-IoT concepts.