Emerging Trends, Issues, and Challenges in Big Data and Its Implementation toward Future Smart Cities

The articles in this special section focus on Big Data as it impacts future smart cities. The world is experiencing a period of extreme urbanization. Moreover, this process will continue, and the global urban population is expected to double by 2050. Smart city has been proposed to improve the efficiency of services and meet residents’ needs for better quality of life. Essentially, smart city integrates the Internet of Things and emerging communication technologies such as fifth generation (5G) solutions to manage the citys’ assets, including transportation systems, hospitals, water supply networks, waste management, and so on. Therefore, smart city is driving innovation and new technologies, especially big data technologies for the big data era. In the future smart city, there is an urgent need to address the following issues: how to design algorithms to process mass data and how to utilize big data to improve the quality of service (QoS) for future smart cities.