A New Paradigm for a Marketplace of Services: Smart Communities in the IoT Era

We propose a vision and a new paradigm for a Marketplace of Services as an integral part of a Smart Community Infrastructure. The Smart Communities of the (near) future will provide a large number of services to be offered as utilities and sold on a metered basis. These services will be aggregated and synthesized from a hierarchy of resources produced and shared by the community itself. Smart Community members or visitors will purchase as much or as little of these services as they find suitable to their needs and are billed accordingly. The context and condition of the members and the environment play a major role in service offerings and adaptations. Smart Communities have four fundamental characteristics: sustainability, resilience, empathy-driven proactive intelligence, and emergent behavior. These fundamental characteristics are a direct consequence of the underlying platform construction and management of the marketplace and its underlying IoT infrastructure. We illustrate our vision using examples of services that the marketplace may offer. We also highlight some major research challenges that need to be resolved to make our vision reality.