An Information-Centric Platform for Social- and Location-Aware IoT Applications in Smart Cities

Recent advances in Smart City infrastructures and the Internet of Things represent a significant opportunity to improve people’s quality of life. Corresponding research often focuses on Cloud-centric network architectures where sensor devices transfer collected data to the Cloud for processing. However, the formidable traffic generated by countless IoT devices and the need for low-latency services raise the need to move away from centralized architectures and bring the computation closer to the data sources. To this end, this paper discusses SPF, a middleware solution that supports IoT application development, deployment, and management. SPF runs IoT services on capable devices located at the network edge and proposes an information-centric programming model that takes advantage of decentralized computation resources located in the proximity of application users and data sources. SPF also adopts Value-of-Information based methods to prioritize the transmission of essential information.