Integration of utilities infrastructures in a future internet enabled smart city framework

Improving efficiency of city services and facilitating a more sustainable development of cities are the main drivers of the smart city concept. Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) play a crucial role in making cities smarter, more accessible and more open. In this paper we present a novel architecture exploiting major concepts from the Future Internet (FI) paradigm addressing the challenges that need to be overcome when creating smarter cities. This architecture takes advantage of both the critical communications infrastructures already in place and owned by the utilities as well as of the infrastructure belonging to the city municipalities to accelerate efficient provision of existing and new city services. The paper highlights how FI technologies create the necessary glue and logic that allows the integration of current vertical and isolated city services into a holistic solution, which enables a huge forward leap for the efficiency and sustainability of our cities. Moreover, the paper describes a real-world prototype, that instantiates the aforementioned architecture, deployed in one of the parks of the city of Santander providing an autonomous public street lighting adaptation service. This prototype is a showcase on how added-value services can be seamlessly created on top of the proposed architecture.The work described in this paper has been carried out under the framework of the OUTSMART project which has been partially funded by the European Commission under the contract number FP7-ICT-28503

No One Size (PPM) Fits All: Towards Privacy in Stream Processing Systems

Stream processing systems (SPSs) have been designed to process data streams in real-time, allowing organizations to analyze and act upon data on-the-fly, as it is generated. However, handling sensitive or personal data in these multilayered SPSs that distribute resources across sensor, fog, and cloud layers raises privacy concerns, as the data may be subject to unauthorized access and attacks that can violate user privacy, hence facing regulations such as the GDPR across the SPS layers. To address these issues, different privacy-preserving mechanisms (PPMs) are proposed to protect user privacy in SPSs. Yet, selecting and applying such PPMs in SPSs is challenging, since they must operate in real-time while tolerating little overhead. The multilayered nature of SPSs complicates privacy protection because each layer may confront different privacy threats, which must be addressed by specific PPMs. To overcome these challenges, we present Prinseps, our comprehensive privacy vision for SPSs. Towards this vision, we (1) identify critical privacy threats on different layers of the multilayered SPS, (2) evaluate the effectiveness of existing PPMs in addressing such threats, and (3) integrate privacy considerations into the decision-making processes of SPSs.Comment: Vision paper accepted to DEBS 202