A Distributed Framework Towards Local and Online Service Access

Seamless integration of smart devices into our daily lives is becoming increasingly ubiquitous. In fact, different methods for accessing infrastructure and mobility services as well as connected information systems are part of today's smart cities. The problem is, however, that due to environmental and use case restrictions, no standard authentication and authorization scheme for accessing heterogeneous services (car access, charging, obtaining sensory data) can be applied. In this paper we present a distributed service management framework that provides different means for authentication and authorization to services, infrastructure, and datasets. The platform acts as a scalable trusted cloud layer that enables applications to access online and locally available smart city services. It issues and manages digital tokens for authenticating and entitling connected devices to access these services. Our developed proof of concept is a hybrid system consisting of a multi-layered cloud environment as well as mobile devices acting as clients (service-holders) and kiosks (service-redemption units) for redeeming services online (e.g. access data) or locally (e.g. access area). Even though we use a multi-layer approach, we achieve short waiting times for the user underlining the usability aspect of the developed prototype.