Challenges and Opportunities of Waste Management in IoT-Enabled Smart Cities: A Survey

The new era of Web and Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm is being enabled by the proliferation of various devices like RFIDs, sensors, and actuators. Smart devices (devices having significant computational capabilities, transforming them to 'smart things') are embedded in the environment to monitor and collect ambient information. In a city, this leads to Smart City frameworks. Intelligent services could be offered on top of such information related to any aspect of humans' activities. A typical example of services offered in the framework of Smart Cities is IoT-enabled waste management. Waste management involves not only the collection of the waste in the field but also the transport and disposal to the appropriate locations. In this paper, we present a comprehensive and thorough survey of ICT-enabled waste management models. Specifically, we focus on the adoption of smart devices as a key enabling technology in contemporary waste management. We report on the strengths and weaknesses of various models to reveal their characteristics. This survey sets up the basis for delivering new models in the domain as it reveals the needs for defining novel frameworks for waste management.