Smart cities encompass services in diverse business and technological domains. Presently, most of these services are delivered through domain-specific, tightly coupled systems, which entail limited scalability and extensibility. Such structure is supposed to be transformed into a horizontal architecture through service-delivery platform.
The platform is a new type of platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering that integrates Internet of Things infrastructure and provides services for application providers to employ IoT and cloud resources on demand.
The service-delivery workflows are presented below. The work flows result in three service-delivery models: virtual verticals, third-party applications, and Internet of Things infrastructure as a service (IoT IaaS).
Source: Fei Li et al, Web-Scale Service Delivery for Smart Cities, IEEE Internet Computing, July/Aug 2013.