IJACSA Vol.6, No. 11, 2015 1 | Page www.thesai.org Smart City Architecture: Vision and Challenges Narmeen Zakaria Bawany Systems Research Laboratory, FAST-National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences Karachi, Pakistan nshawoo@gmail.com Jawwad A. Shamsi Systems Research Laboratory, FAST-National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences Karachi, Pakistan jawwad.shamsi@nu.edu.pk Abstract— The concept of smart city was born to provide improved quality of life to citizens. The key idea is to integrate information system services of each domain, such as health, education, transportation, power grid etc., of the city to provide public services to citizens efficiently and ubiquitously. These expectations induce massive challenges and requirements. This research is aimed to highlight key ICT (Information and Communication Technology) challenges related to adaptation of smart city. Realizing the significance of effective data collection, storage, retrieval, and efficient network resource provisioning, the research proposes a high level architecture for smart city. The proposed framework is based on a hierarchical model of data storage and defines how different stakeholders will be communicating and offering services to citizens. The architecture facilitates step by step implementation towards a smart city, integrating services, as they are developed in a timely manner. Keywords — Smart city, Data management, urban technology, socio-technical systems, smart city architecture I. INTRODUCTION Smart city brings enormous opportunities and exciting challenges. In general, a metropolitan area can be considered as smart when city operations and services such as healthcare, education, transport, parking, and electricity grid are supported through ICT infrastructure in order to facilitate efficiency and ease of operation. Some valid examples of such services would be looking for a job, applying for a driver’s license, buying of car and property, change of the address, request for a passport, start of a new business, reporting of a crime, declaration of income taxes, seeking health services, and so on. All such services require execution of several services under an orchestrated coordination. The smart city design must be citizen-centric. Despite the complexity of the city's systems, the architecture must bring benefits to the people regardless of their ICT abilities. The primary goals of the smart city include, offering digital means for supporting social needs in all daily transactions, to adapt the citizens to the notion of the information society and to collect information from the public departments and citizens in order to support sustainable growth of the city. Above all, development of smart city will give way to implementation of a citizen-centered public administration, where corruption phenomena and time- consuming bureaucratic procedures are eliminated [1],[2]. Smart city has been actively studied and researchers have come up with different definitions, frameworks, and implementations of smart city [3],[4],[5],[6],[7]. The key objective of almost all the research is to present a strategy to mitigate the problems generated by the urban population growth by using information and communication technology. Cities and megacities generate new kinds of problems. Difficulty in waste management, scarcity of resources, air pollution, human health concerns, traffic congestions, electricity generation, distribution, and billing, and inadequate, deteriorating, and aging infrastructures are among the more basic technical, physical, and material problems [8][9][10]. Many cities have taken the initiative in this direction and more work is in progress. [11],[12],[3],[13],[14]. In this above context, a smart city system can be considered as a massive information system comprising of several smaller but efficient subsystems that may be connected with each other. Each of these subsystems require efficient and enhanced capabilities to handle components for data storage, information retrieval, networking, and communication. There are numerous challenges in realization of a city that monitors and integrates all of the city infrastructure and services to leverage the collective intelligence. From technical infrastructure, that needs to be put in place, to adaption of system by citizens various technical and non-technical obstacles are to be dealt with. For example, smart transport management system has immense potential to improve road safety and reduce traffic congestions. However, the system may require new types of networks such as Vehicular AdHoc