The world population is growing at a rapid pace. Towns and cities are
accommodating half of the world's population thereby creating tremendous
pressure on every aspect of urban living. Cities are known to have large
concentration of resources and facilities. Such environments attract people
from rural areas. However, unprecedented attraction has now become an
overwhelming issue for city governance and politics. The enormous pressure
towards efficient city management has triggered various Smart City initiatives
by both government and private sector businesses to invest in ICT to find
sustainable solutions to the growing issues. The Internet of Things (IoT) has
also gained significant attention over the past decade. IoT envisions to
connect billions of sensors to the Internet and expects to use them for
efficient and effective resource management in Smart Cities. Today
infrastructure, platforms, and software applications are offered as services
using cloud technologies. In this paper, we explore the concept of sensing as a
service and how it fits with the Internet of Things. Our objective is to
investigate the concept of sensing as a service model in technological,
economical, and social perspectives and identify the major open challenges and
issues.Comment: Transactions on Emerging Telecommunications Technologies 2014
(Accepted for Publication