The Current and Future Role of Smart Street Furniture in Smart Cities

Recently, street furniture, including bins, seats, and bus shelters, has become smart as it has been equipped with environmental sensors, wireless modules, processors, and microcontrollers. Accordingly, smart furniture is expected to become a vital part of the IoT infrastructure and one of the drivers of future smart cities. This work focuses on how smart street furniture can be exploited within the IoT architecture as a basis of recommender systems, toward achieving smart cities' different components. We present and discuss recent relevant work as well as the key challenges and opportunities for future research. We explain that much work is still required when it comes to combining scalability, real-time processing, smart furniture, and recommender systems.