Sensing as a service model for smart cities supported by Internet of Things

The world population is growing at a rapid pace. Towns and cities are accommodating half of the world's population thereby creating tremendous pressure on every aspect of urban living. Cities are known to have large concentration of resources and facilities. Such environments attract people from rural areas. However, unprecedented attraction has now become an overwhelming issue for city governance and politics. The enormous pressure towards efficient city management has triggered various Smart City initiatives by both government and private sector businesses to invest in information and communication technologies to find sustainable solutions to the growing issues. The Internet of Things (IoT) has also gained significant attention over the past decade. IoT envisions to connect billions of sensors to the Internet and expects to use them for efficient and effective resource management in Smart Cities. Today, infrastructure, platforms and software applications are offered as services using cloud technologies. In this paper, we explore the concept of sensing as a service and how it fits with the IoT. Our objective is to investigate the concept of sensing as a service model in technological, economical and social perspectives and identify the major open challenges and issues. Copyright (c) 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.