Smart city and urban planning using the Internet of Things (IoT) has tremendous potential. Rathore et al. present a software architecture and a test implementation for such a system.

The authors utilized a collection of diverse data such as water usage, traffic patterns, healthcare, urban security, and environment sensing data from various urban areas as the base data to test their software architecture, aiming to provide both smart city functionality and assistance in designing future smart cities. The software would provide city administrators and designers with recommendations of various types based on analysis of this data. The software architecture has four tiers: the bottom tier collects and generates raw data from sensors in various devices; the intermedia tier-1 provides communication mechanisms among devices and controllers using protocols such as WiFi, 4G LTE, and Ethernet; intermedia tier-2 is where data processing and management takes place; and the top tier provides interfaces to (mostly human) agents that make use of the information.

The software architecture proposed by the authors provides a useful reference to other researchers. The authors used real data to drive the test. However, the data in different categories came from different urban areas with different scales. It is good to test a model, but it isn’t clear how this data can be used to assist real smart city projects. In addition, input from real urban designers would no doubt help improve the quality of the system.