Research Article IoT Architecture for a Sustainable Tourism Application in a Smart City Environment Michele Nitti, 1 Virginia Pilloni, 1 Daniele Giusto, 1 and Vlad Popescu 2 1 Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University of Cagliari, Cagliari, Italy 2 Department of Electronics and Computers, Transilvania University of Bras , ov, Bras , ov, Romania Correspondence should be addressed to Vlad Popescu; vlad.popescu@unitbv.ro Received 5 August 2016; Revised 21 December 2016; Accepted 9 January 2017; Published 30 January 2017 Academic Editor: Claudio Agostino Ardagna Copyright © 2017 Michele Nitti et al. Tis is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. In the past few years, the Smart Cities concept has become one of the main driving forces for the urban transition towards a low carbon environment, sustainable economy, and mobility. Tourism, as one of the fastest growing industries, is also an important generator of carbon emissions; therefore, the recently emerging sustainable tourism concept is envisioned as an important part of the Smart Cities paradigm. Within this context, the Internet-of-Tings (IoT) concept is the key technological point for the development of smart urban environments through the use of aggregated data, integrated in a single decisional platform. Tis paper performs the frst analysis on the feasibility of the use of an IoT approach and proposes a specifc architecture for a sustainable tourism application. Te architecture is tailored for the optimisation of the movement of cruise ship tourists in the city of Cagliari (Italy), by taking into consideration factors such as transport information and queue waiting times. A frst set of simulations is performed using 67-point of interest, real transportation data, and an optimisation algorithm. 1. Introduction IoT leads a sweeping cultural change as a huge number of machines, devices, sensors, actuators, and other objects become interconnected to each other and to higher-level systems. Due to the enormous amount of variety of con- nectable devices and automatically collected data, entirely new services and features can arise, to form the basis of, among other concepts, Smart Cities. IoT and big data are both technology-driven developments leading to scenarios such as the one for the Smart Cities, having the potential to generate enormous market opportunities as well as make citizen lives smarter and more sustainable. Te Smart Cities architectures envisioned or implement- ed up to date deal mostly with use cases from the following categories: energy, waste disposal, environmental manage- ment, and transport. All these use cases can have their needs covered by means of an IoT platform connecting heteroge- neous sensing systems with the upper layers dedicated to services and interfaces [1]. Tourism is not only the largest growing industry in the world but it also accounts for 5 to 12% of global greenhouse gas emissions [2]. Terefore, in the context of the passage towards a low carbon environment and sustainable economy, the term sustainable tourism was recently coined and begins to gain acceptance from both sides: tourists on one side and tour operators and the interested territory on the other side. Without travel there is no tourism, so the concept of sus- tainable tourism is tightly linked to the concept of sustainable mobility which, for the specifc case of an urban environment, can be included in the frame of the Smart Cities para- digm. Based on these aforementioned concepts, this paper pro- poses an IoT architecture for a sustainable tourism applica- tion in a Smart City scenario. Te proposed architecture is tailored for a specifc use case: sustainable movement of tourists in the city of Cagliari in Sardinia, Italy. Te paper is structured as follows: Section 2 analyses briefy the key requirements for an IoT architecture operating in a Smart City environment for the specifc implementa- tion purpose; Section 3 presents the proposed architecture, while Section 4 is dedicated to the use case description Hindawi Mobile Information Systems Volume 2017, Article ID 9201640, 9 pages https://doi.org/10.1155/2017/9201640