Cloud, Edge, and Mobile Computing for Smart Cities

Smart cities evolve rapidly along with the technical advances in wireless and sensor networks, information science, and human–computer interactions. Urban computing provides the processing power to enable the integration of such technologies to improve the living quality of urban citizens, including health care, urban planning, energy, and other aspects. This chapter uses different computing capabilities, such as cloud computing, mobile computing, and edge computing, to support smart cities using the urban heat island of the greater Washington DC area as an example. We discuss the benefits of leveraging cloud, mobile, and edge computing to address the challenges brought by the spatiotemporal dynamics of the urban heat island, including elevated emissions of air pollutants and greenhouse gases, compromised human health and comfort, and impaired water quality. Cloud computing brings scalability and on-demand computing capacity to urban system simulations for timely prediction. Mobile computing brings portability and social interactivity for citizens to report instantaneous information for better knowledge integration. Edge computing allows data produced by in-situ devices to be processed and analyzed at the edge of the network, reducing the data traffic to the central repository and processing engine (data center or cloud). Challenges and future directions are discussed for integrating the three computing technologies to achieve an overall better computing infrastructure supporting smart cities. The integration is discussed in aspects of bandwidth issue, network access optimization, service quality and convergence, and data integrity and security.