Large-Scale Information and Communications Technology (ICT) Management in Smart Cities based on Edge to Cloud Orchestration

A smart city has changed the city landscape with the assistance of ICT, and sensor-enabled internet of things (IoT) devices. The development of a ubiquitous connected source environment is to be complicated and global to improve service performance delivery, cost-effectiveness, and using all capabilities of technology resources. For gaining those benefits in the smart city, it is necessary to design a capable ICT architecture. The ICT architecture in the smart city must provide the facility to organize all technology resources, the produced data, network communication orchestration, and services in the large scale of smart cities. In today’s smart cities, three main different ICT architecture proposals are available, Centralized, Decentralized-to-Centralized, and Distributed-to-Centralized. Centralized ICT architectures are designed based on Cloud technologies. The Decentralized-to-Centralized and Distributed-to-Centralized ICT architectures are using the multiple facilities from the joined benefits of edge to Cloud technologies orchestration. In this paper, we first describe these three ICT architectures in smart cities. Besides, we present our proposed Decentralized-to-Centralized and Distributed-to-Centralized ICT architectures in smart cities. Second, we show how our ICT architecture can be beneficial for Large-Scale ICT management through different use case studies. Finally, we describe the advantages of our ICT architecture and discuss challenges.