Software Platforms for Smart Cities: Concepts, Requirements, Challenges, and a Unified Reference Architecture

Making cities smarter help improve city services and increase citizens' quality of life. Information and communication technologies (ICT) are fundamental for progressing towards smarter city environments. Smart City software platforms potentially support the development and integration of Smart City applications. However, the ICT community must overcome current significant technological and scientific challenges before these platforms can be widely used. This paper surveys the state-of-the-art in software platforms for Smart Cities. We analyzed 23 projects with respect to the most used enabling technologies, as well as functional and non-functional requirements, classifying them into four categories: Cyber-Physical Systems, Internet of Things, Big Data, and Cloud Computing. Based on these results, we derived a reference architecture to guide the development of next-generation software platforms for Smart Cities. Finally, we enumerated the most frequently cited open research challenges, and discussed future opportunities. This survey gives important references for helping application developers, city managers, system operators, end-users, and Smart City researchers to make project, investment, and research decisions.Comment: Accepted for publication in ACM Computing Survey

Da ciência à e-ciência: paradigmas da descoberta do conhecimento

Gradualmente, a computação está deixando de ser apenas uma “ferramenta de apoio” a novas pesquisas para se tornar parte fundamental das ciências com que interage e de seus métodos científicos. A sinergia entre ciência da computação e as outras áreas do conhecimento criou um novo modo de se fazer ciência – a e-science (ou e-ciência) – que unifica teoria, experimentos e simulação, ao mesmo tempo em que lida com uma quantidade enorme de informação. O uso de computação em nuvem tem o potencial de permitir que pesquisas antes restritas àqueles com acesso a supercomputadores possam ser realizadas por qualquer pesquisador. Este artigo apresenta uma breve descrição da evolução dos paradigmas do modo de se fazer ciência (do empirismo ao panorama atual da e-science) e aborda o potencial da computação em nuvem como ferramenta catalisadora de pesquisa transformativa.Computer Science is gradually evolving from a mere “supporting tool” for research in other fields and turning into an intrinsic part of the very methods of the sciences with which it interacts. The synergy between Computer Science and other fields of knowledge created a novel way of doing science – called eScience – which unifies theory, experiments, and simulations, enabling researchers to deal with huge amounts of information. The use of cloud computing has the potential to allow any researcher to conduct works previously restricted to those with access to supercomputers. This article presents a brief history of the evolution of scientific paradigms (from empiricism to the current landscape of eScience) and discusses the potential of cloud computing as a tool capable of catalyzing transformative research

Scheduling moldable {BSP} tasks

Our main goal in this paper is to study the scheduling of parallel BSP tasks on clusters of computers. We focus our attention on special characteristics of BSP tasks, which can use less processors than the original required, but with a particular cost model. We discuss the problem of scheduling a batch of BSP tasks on a fixed number of computers. The objective is to minimize the completion time of the last task (makespan). We show that the problem is difficult and present approximation algorithms and heuristics. We finish the paper presenting the results of extensive simulations under different workloads

Perspectives on software-defined networks: interviews with five leading scientists from the networking community

Software defined Networks (SDNs) have drawn much attention both from academia and industry over the last few years. Despite the fact that underlying ideas already exist through areas such as P2P applications and active networks (e.g. virtual topologies and dynamic changes of the network via software), only now has the technology evolved to a point where it is possible to scale the implementations, which justifies the high interest in SDNs nowadays. In this article, the JISA Editors invite five leading scientists from three continents (Raouf Boutaba, David Hutchison, Raj Jain, Ramachandran Ramjee, and Christian Esteve Rothenberg) to give their opinions about what is really new in SDNs. The interviews cover whether big telecom and data center companies need to consider using SDNs, if the new paradigm is changing the way computer networks are understood and taught, and what are the open issues on the topic

CHOReOS: Scaling Choreographies for the Internet of the Future

Poster presented at Middleware '10 11th International Middleware Conference Bangalore, India -- November 29 - December 03, 2010 ACM New York, NY, USAThe Internet has been growing at a impressive rate in many aspects such as size, heterogeneity, and usage. This growth forces the continuous improvement of Internet infrastructure technologies. The Future Internet concept magnifies the required shift for Internet technologies, which shall allow supporting the continuously growing scale of the converging networking world together with new generations of services made available to and brought by the broad mass of end users. The CHOReOS project positions itself in this vision of the Future Internet, whilst focusing on the Future Internet of Services. This research project aims at assisting the engineering of software service compositions in this novel networking environment by devising a dynamic development process, and associated methods, tools and middleware, to sustain the composition of services in the form of large-scale choreographies for the Internet of the future