Smart City System Design

Recent global smart city efforts resemble the establishment of electricity networks when electricity was first invented, which meant the start of a new era to sell electricity as a utility. A century later, in the smart era, the network to deliver services goes far beyond a single entity like electricity. Supplemented by a well-established Internet infrastructure that can run an endless number of applications, abundant processing and storage capabilities of clouds, resilient edge computing, and sophisticated data analysis like machine learning and deep learning, an already-booming Internet of Things movement makes this new era far more exciting. In this article, we present a multi-faceted survey of machine intelligence in modern implementations. We partition smart city infrastructure into application, sensing, communication, security, and data planes and put an emphasis on the data plane as the mainstay of computing and data storage. We investigate (i) a centralized and distributed implementation of data plane’s physical infrastructure and (ii) a complementary application of data analytics, machine learning, deep learning, and data visualization to implement robust machine intelligence in a smart city software core. We finalize our article with pointers to open issues and challenges.