Middleware for Utility-based Provisioning of Smart City Infrastructure

The utility-based provisioning paradigm of Smart City ICT infrastructure is still in its infancy, mainly because current approaches dealing with IoT Cloud provisioning focus only on providing virtualization solutions for the IoT devices. Although device virtualization is one of the preconditions for utility-based provisioning, such approaches focus largely on vertical solutions. They are intended to support a specific task, such as data integration or data linking, and rely on rigid provisioning models. This effectively prevents the consumption of Smart City infrastructure resources as generic utilities and requires rethinking the existing support for: i) representing the Smart City infrastructure resources, ii) managing their delivery, configuration, consumption and pricing models, as well as iii) composing low-level resource components into usable infrastructures, capable to support novel Complex Coordinated Activities in the context of future Smart Cities. In this chapter we continue our line of research towards utility-based provisioning of Smart City infrastructures and introduce a novel provisioning middleware for the IoT Cloud.