Emerging Smart World: Technologies, Concerns and Challenges

The penetration of smart solutions for ICT industry has revolutionized the outlook of modern society. Technology is in access of humans regardless of their knowledge and expertise level and beyond the social barriers. Advances in mobile communications and web engineering tools have given rise to a new social setup called Smart world. The smart cities support layered architecture abstracting the physical spaces and devices into virtual domains interconnected through ubiquitous infrastructure for information sharing and response systems. Social networking has been a widely accepted platform for communication and information sharing. The information regarding human behavior, requirements, likes and dislikes etc., collected through such networks, can be used for statistical analysis and taking intelligent marketing decisions by analysts and planners. Internet of Things has been the result of wireless sensor networks and intelligent devices. Big data analytics is needed to handle huge amount of data being generated continuously. The smart city projects have been intelligently designed to extract and present information to users through internet. While these new developments are interesting they pose a host of new challenges. Being human centric, the sensitivity and the concerns regarding information propagation and usage have to be carefully handled. We propose services architecture for a ubiquitous smart city built on SOA and cloud computing paradigms. The virtualization by core, essential and extended service layers will be used to address the issues like security, flexible information management, multi-tenant/multi-dimensional activities, ubiquitous data analysis and presentation for users in normal and emergency situations.