Outdoor UPnP for Services Discovery in Smart Cities

Smart cities is a new concept that allows using New Information and Telecommunication Technologies to make cities smart in order to offer easier life for their citizens. Currently, among the most difficult problems facing citizens is the discovery of available services and their required information. Solving this problem is very important mainly when the use of such services is vital; for example, when someone is seeking to acquire a medicine in a city that he has never visited before. In such a case, he needs to find the nearest pharmacy that sell this medicine and the way to go toward it. Without the help of the smart city, this operation may take a long time (even many hours). In order to tackle this problem, we propose to migrate the Universal Plug and Play (UPnP), used to discover devices and services at home, from the indoor to the outdoor environment. Thus, we propose the Outdoor UPnP (OUPnP). The major contributions of this work may be enumerated as follows: (i) extending the description mechanism of UPnP to take into account business services, (ii) replacing the broadcasting mechanism used by UPnP by a server to broadcast discovery messages, (iii) using the concept of fog computing to limit broadcasting messages to a narrow geographic area and finally (iv) enhancing the performance of the system by preserving end-users privacy. In order to validate the proposed solution, we consider a case study which consists of looking for a medicine in Meftah city.