Sapparchi: An Architecture for Smart City Applications from Edge, Fog and Cloud Computing

In the Smart Cities context, a plethora of Middleware Platforms has been proposed to support applications execution and data processing. However, just a few of them have explored the overall Smart Cities computing environment. The vast majority focuses on specific domains, typically presenting a sensor-acquisition architecture for processing in Cloud Computing. Most recent initiatives try to include Cloud Computing and Edge Computing, while few of them use the three computing levels (Cloud, Fog, and Edge). Besides, many of these platforms do not define the services that should be deployed at each level, nor how the developer can better use each feature. This work fulfills this gap presenting an architecture for applications classifying services implemented by a typical Computing Environment of Smart Cities. Our architecture uses all the computational levels (Cloud, Fog, Edge) of a city infrastructure, and it defines how to deploy each type of service at each level. We also present an example of the proposed architecture that we are implementing in the city of Natal, where some evaluative tests have been carried out.