CiTe: A Testbed for Smart City Applications and Architectures

With the continuous development of smart city systems and architectures and their real-world implementation arises the need for a reliable way of verifying their integrity. Most smart city set-ups consist of subsystems derived from the IoT sector, focussing on building sensor networks and powering heterogenous devices of all shapes and sizes. The IoT industry and research sector have long known the benefits of testing new systems in a controllable, minimal environment. These testbeds have become an integral part of hardware evaluation and embedded-systems development. Testbeds for the Smart City application scenario have to meet their own specific requirements. This paper presents a testbed tailored to smart city research. The testbed is based on a model city with integrated sensors and actuators interconnected by a cloud native backend architecture. By this means the testbed allows studying modern smart city software architectures and the interplay of real hardware and software. The testbed is fully implemented and in daily use for research projects and university teaching.