Cloud of Things: Optimizing smart city services

Many big cities around the world are planning to adopt the smart city concept to enhance the quality of life for their residents. Smart cities rely on deploying different technologies and optimization techniques to improve the performance and services in transportation, energy, security, and other sectors and to reduce the costs and resources consumption. One of the promising technologies supporting smart city applications is the Cloud of Things (CoT). The CoT can provide a powerful platform for implementing and operating different types of smart city services. Another promising technology that can be used to support and in various cases enhance the CoT for smart cities is Fog Computing. Fog computing can provide platforms that operate geographically close to certain smart city areas to provide value-added features for smart city services. This paper discusses optimization applications and opportunities of using the CoT, supported by fog computing, for providing smart city services. We attempt to identify the requirements for implementing such services, and recognize the issues and challenges to be resolved to achieve better utilization of the CoT in optimizing smart city services.