Internet of Things and M2M Communications as Enablers of Smart City Initiatives

This paper describes Internet of Things (IoT) and Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communications as the enablers of smart city initiatives. The challenges in modern cities are briefly identified. Utilization of IoT based applications and services could mitigate these challenges. The paper then introduces an architecture based on oneM2M standards for smart cities. The key elements of the architecture are described along with the common service functions. The main contributions of the work are -- (i) uniform metadata exchange with things using Sensor Markup Language and its extensions, (ii) uniform description of heterogeneous things for configuration management, (iii) OMA Lightweight M2M based device management framework, (iv) resource discovery framework and (v) Machine-to-Machine Measurement framework based M2M data processing and analytics. The core functionalities of these frameworks are exposed to the consumers through RESTful web services. An application scenario on crowdsourcing in the smart cities is highlighted. Finally the paper concludes with future research directions.