Cloud Support Data Management Infrastructure for Upcoming Smart Cities

This paper presents a novel large scale data management model for future smart cities. The system is exploiting the emerging cloud computing services availability over the globe by processing the collected data at the edge. To handle the large scale requirements in smart city, we introduce a Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) framework in order to increase the reliability of the deployed applications. MEC is a promising framework to reduce the cloud core utilization as well as to provide applications that require low latency to mobile end users. As near as possible to the location of the end user, MEC relates to the mobile network applications and data stream acceleration through caching and/or compressing of relevant data at the edge of the mobile network. Although MEC is not yet deployed in real-life systems, recent studies discussed some technical details and related concepts. This paper studies the definition of MEC and similar concepts with respect to typical application scenarios, like in smart cities, and provides scope and limitations that may be encountered when implementing and deploying MEC. Then, a MEC framework is used to explore the data management infrastructure for upcoming smart cities.