InterSCity: A Scalable Microservice-based Open Source Platform for Smart Cities

Smart City technologies emerge as a potential solution to tackle common problems in large urban centers by using city resources efficiently and providing quality services for citizens. Despite the various advances in middleware technologies to support future smart cities, there are no universally accepted platforms yet. Most of the existing solutions do not provide the required flexibility to be shared across cities. Moreover, the extensive use and development of non-open-source software leads to interoperability issues and limits the collaboration among R&D groups. In this paper, we explore the use of a microservices architecture to address key practical challenges in smart city platforms. We present InterSCity, a microservice-based open source smart city platform that aims at supporting collaborative, novel smart city research, development, and deployment initiatives. We discuss how the microservice approach enables a flexible, extensible, and loosely coupled architecture and present experimental results demonstrating the scalability of the proposed platform.