Challenges Faced by IoT Smart Cities: Security, Heterogeneity, Reliability, and More

This report discusses the challenges faced by IoT-enabled smart cities, including security, heterogeneity, reliability, and more. The report provides a literature review of previous works and discusses appropriate methodologies to solve these problems.

Running head: IoT SMART CITIES
IoT Smart Cities
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Problems faced by the IoT Smart Cities:
IoT is an emerging technology and brings a lot of benefits. IoT is associated with
making the lives of become much easy. This technology has already been adopted by almost
each and every field. This technology has been associated with making various kind of work
easy and the process of collecting the data has also become much easy (Scuotto, Ferraris, &
Bresciani, 2016). But despite of the benefits there exists certain challenges which are faced
by the IoT technology. The various type of challenges that are faced by the IoT enabled smart
cities have been listed below:
1. Security and Privacy
After collection of the entire information has been done they are evaluated by making
use of the same IoT platform. This evaluation of information would be associated with
putting forward the various kind of attacks which mainly includes the cross-site scripting, and
side-channels. Besides this it is also seen that the system might be subjected to various kind
of vulnerabilities. Along with this the multi-tenancy that the system is having might be
leading toe various kind of security which might be resulting in the leakage of the data. So it
is essential to make sure of the fact that the smart cities are associated with the adaptation of
some serious security which would be responsible for ensuring the privacy and security of
data of the citizens (Centenaro et al., 2016). Absence of this would make the citizens loose
trust over the entire system and this would be initially resulting in the rising of difficulties
during the process of collecting the data. Besides this it is essential to make sure of the fact
that the systems are resistant to any type of cyber-attacks. A successful smart city consisting
of IoT applications should be consisting of privacy and security at the top of their priority list.
The figure that has been provided below is associated with depicting the some aspects of
security in IoT which includes the privacy along with the trust and data confidentiality
(Balsamo et al., 2017). Besides this the figure also depicts the possible solution.

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Fig 2: Various kind of security issues faced by IoT and their mitigation techniques
Source: (Centenaro et al., 2016)
2. Heterogeneity
Development of the IoT systems are generally done by considering some specific and
notable solutions. This solutions generally consists of solutions where it is seen that each of
this elements are connected to a special application in order to conduct specific tasks.
Depending on this the authorities are having the responsibility of examining the goal
scenarios that they are having, along with providing definitions of the hardware or the
software that is needed which is followed by the aggregation of these heterogeneous
subsystems (AlEnezi, AlMeraj, & Manuel, 2018). Providing of this kind of substructures
along with the procurement of a proper cooperating scheme amongst them is generally
considered to one of the major challenge in the IoT systems.

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3. Reliability
Problems related to the reliability is also caused by the systems which are based upon
the usage of IoT technology. One such example is the information which is provided by the
moving cars. Due to the mobility of the car the interconnection which exists might not very
much reliable (Memos et al., 2018). Besides this the number of smart technologies are
increasing day by day which is initially leading to challenges in the reliability or better to say
mainly regarding the failure of this technology.
4. Large Scale
Some of the defined scenarios are there where there exists the need of interacting with
enormous amount of distributed devices which are generally considered to be embedded in a
wide area environment. The IoT system is associated with providing a proper platform where
it is possible to analyse and aggregate the extracted information extracted from different kind
of devices (Zhang et al., 2017). Despite of this there exists the need of a proper storage for
this huge amount of data, and besides this there should also exist computational ability. This
mainly happens because of the reason that the data which are gathered at high rates might be
associated with giving rise to usual challenges which are very difficult to solve (Chapman et
al., 2015). Additionally it is seen that the IoT devices which are distributed throughout the
entire city might be associated with creating an influence upon the actions related to
monitoring actions which mainly happens because of the reason that the devices have to deal
with various kind of delays that are related to the dynamics and connectivity of the devices.
5. Legal and Social Aspects
According to the user-provided data the IoT is generally considered to be a
service.due to this reason the servce providers are generally dependent upon the different
kind of local as well as international rules. In a similar way the applicants are associated with
facing a sufficient incentives for the purpose of attending some scenarios and also for the

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purpose of gathering data. In case if the opportunity was provided to the applicants to choose
along with participate in the process of registering the information which are associated with
indicating an event then it would be much more comfortable (Strohbach et al., 2015).
References are associated with handling the subject that the systems are having which
generally includes the people as a source of data for the purpose of having interactions that
are totally safe.
6. Big Data
There exists about more than 50,000,000,000 devices, so it is very essential to put a
special attention towards the process of transferring the data, storage of the data and recalling
of the data. Besides this special emphasis is to be put during the process of analysing the
large amount of data which are collected from the IoT devices. The big data problems, can be
classified into three major sections which includes the number of devices sending the data,
speed of the transfer and lastly come the data of different kind (Arastehet al., 2016).
7. Sensor Networks
This is generally considered to be a remarkable technology which is associated with
enabling the IoT technology. They are capable of forming the world which is generally done
by means of providing the capabilities related to the measuring, inferring, and understanding
of the various environmental indexes (Chen et al., 2014). The recent development along with
the improvements made in the technologies have been associated with providing an efficient
as well as cheap devices so as to apply for the utilization of the large-scale remote sensing.
Additionally the smartphones also consists of different kind of sensors which initially results
in the providing of empowerment to various kind of mobile.
8. DR Barriers
The responsive demand in a system is also assisted by the IoT technology but despite
of this there exists several kind of barriers which are having the capability of restricting the

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IoT in taking part in the various Demand Response or DR programs (Samuel, 2016). The
figure provide below is associated with categorizing the barriers. This barriers can be divided
into three key sets which mainly includes the customer’ barriers, providers’ barriers, and
framework barriers.
Fig 2: The various kind of barriers in Demand Response
Source: (Arasteh et al., 2016)
Format of the report:
This section of the report is associated with discussing about the various kind of
problems that are faced by the IoT smart cities. The main report is would be following a
simple research methodology where in the first section of the report a general overview of the
usage of the IoT technology by the smart cities have been provided. Which is followed by
providing an overview of the different kind of challenges that are faced by the IoT enabled
smart cities. Followed by this is the literature review which would be depicting the previous
works done regarding the technology. This would be described in the next section of the
report. Lastly in report would be discussing about the appropriate methodology that is best
suited for this technology in order to solve the various kind of problems.

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References:
AlEnezi, A., AlMeraj, Z., & Manuel, P. (2018, April). Challenges of IoT Based Smart-
Government Development. In Green Technologies Conference (GreenTech),
2018 (pp. 155-160). IEEE.
Arasteh, H., Hosseinnezhad, V., Loia, V., Tommasetti, A., Troisi, O., Shafie-Khah, M., &
Siano, P. (2016, June). Iot-based smart cities: a survey. In Environment and Electrical
Engineering (EEEIC), 2016 IEEE 16th International Conference on (pp. 1-6). IEEE.
Balsamo, D., Merrett, G. V., Zaghari, B., Wei, Y., Ramchurn, S., Stein, S., ... & Beeby, S.
(2017, September). Wearable and autonomous computing for future smart cities:
Open challenges. In Software, Telecommunications and Computer Networks
(SoftCOM), 2017 25th International Conference on(pp. 1-5). IEEE.
Centenaro, M., Vangelista, L., Zanella, A. and Zorzi, M., 2016. Long-range communications
in unlicensed bands: The rising stars in the IoT and smart city scenarios. IEEE
Wireless Communications, 23(5), pp.60-67.
Chapman, L., Muller, C. L., Young, D. T., Warren, E. L., Grimmond, C. S. B., Cai, X. M., &
Ferranti, E. J. (2015). The Birmingham urban climate laboratory: an open
meteorological test bed and challenges of the smart city. Bulletin of the American
Meteorological Society, 96(9), 1545-1560.
Chen, S., Xu, H., Liu, D., Hu, B., & Wang, H. (2014). A vision of IoT: Applications,
challenges, and opportunities with china perspective. IEEE Internet of Things
journal, 1(4), 349-359.
Memos, V. A., Psannis, K. E., Ishibashi, Y., Kim, B. G., & Gupta, B. B. (2018). An efficient
algorithm for media-based surveillance system (EAMSuS) in IoT smart city
framework. Future Generation Computer Systems, 83, 619-628.

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Samuel, S. S. I. (2016, March). A review of connectivity challenges in IoT-smart home.
In Big Data and Smart City (ICBDSC), 2016 3rd MEC International Conference
on (pp. 1-4). IEEE.
Scuotto, V., Ferraris, A., & Bresciani, S. (2016). Internet of Things: Applications and
challenges in smart cities: a case study of IBM smart city projects. Business Process
Management Journal, 22(2), 357-367.
Strohbach, M., Ziekow, H., Gazis, V., & Akiva, N. (2015). Towards a big data analytics
framework for IoT and smart city applications. In Modeling and processing for next-
generation big-data technologies (pp. 257-282). Springer, Cham.
Zhang, K., Ni, J., Yang, K., Liang, X., Ren, J., & Shen, X. S. (2017). Security and privacy in
smart city applications: Challenges and solutions. IEEE Communications
Magazine, 55(1), 122-129.