This chapter explores the growing use of technology in various aspects of people's lives and focuses on smart cities. First, it provides a comprehensive survey that examines the need for smart cities, their architectural elements, and the characteristics and purposes of different architectural layers. The chapter also offers an overview of notable smart cities such as London, New York, Singapore, Busan, Amsterdam, and Sunshine Coast Regions, highlighting their unique features. Next, privacy and security concerns associated with smart cities are addressed, emphasizing the importance of privacy issues and suggesting potential solutions. The chapter discusses future research directions, including the integration of blockchains, security considerations, collaborative filtering, and infrastructure upgrades in smart city applications. The analysis of privacy and security concerns is organized into three subsections: smart city security traits, leveraging issues, and privacy challenges and solutions. Finally, the chapter concludes by presenting future research trends in this field.
TopIntroduction
The concept of a “smart city” strives to create environmental sustainability by integrating advanced information and communication technologies (ICT) while promoting efficient use of resources. Sustainable development and the creation of smart cities have gained widespread acceptance as urbanization trends. The most cutting-edge innovative information and technology integration has made it possible to create a model smart city (Yang et al., 2021). Intelligent living environments, abundant connectivity, easy access to goods and services, smart decision-making via high-tech government, and optimum resource management are all merits that the public in smart cities can use. More applications of smart cities are presented together with the identification of prominent smart city examples worldwide.
Residents of smart cities will have convenient and continuous access to resource sharing, allowing them to efficiently manage their daily lives using collective secure digital intelligence (Elrawy et al., 2018). Availing an acceptable life experience for inhabitants is part of the smart city concept, encompassing intelligent transportation, decentralized economics, and government. To appreciate these smart developments in existing smart cities, there is a need to pay attention to the application and its associated related impact on both the public and the technology industry. The prediction is that the number will increase to 70% regardless of the current covid-19 pandemic (Nam & Pardo, 2011).
A self-sufficient community known as a smart city prioritizes its residents' quality of life above everything else. A smart city requires sustainability, comprising a comfortable social life and a greener way of living. The smart city ecosystem is preserved by ecological effluence reduction and effective waste management like recycling and smart grids. Decentralized and fully transparent government and economy are essential. In addition, several security assaults might jeopardize the infrastructure and applications of smart cities (Shafik, 2023). Numerous businesses, for instance, banks, insurance firms, hospitals, and others, may suffer from data loss and experience a severe technological catastrophe.
A detailed analysis of various applications and potential research areas for smart cities highlights the need for increased security and safety measures. They pointed out that while monitoring everything online in a smart city can enhance security, it may also raise privacy concerns (Gharaibeh et al., 2017). Components and applications overview of smart city infrastructure to better understand its architecture (Sookhak et al., 2019). Thoroughly examined security concerns, protocols, intrusion problems, and responses based on the Internet of Things (IoT) in smart cities. The authors also presented a comprehensive analysis of fault detection systems, providing a thorough overview.
A thorough summary of the architecture, use, and future trends of smart cities and broad and thorough representations of the architecture, uses, and characteristics of many smart cities across the world has been presented in the recent literature (Du et al., 2019; Silva et al., 2018). An accurate review of recent research on smart city challenges, including a comparison of these studies, was presented (Sánchez-Corcuera et al., 2019). The authors provide an overview of designs, applications, examples of smart cities, and upcoming research paths. An explanation of the state of the smart city around the ecosphere illustrating the contemporary problems associated with smart cities' privacy and their cutting-edge remedies was depicted (Curzon et al., 2019).
To give the researcher a clear knowledge of the smart city motivations and outstanding research questions, (Chen et al. 2019) gave an exhaustive assessment of the recently expanding study field of AI in smart city applications. Lau et al. (2019) provided an exhaustive analysis of AI-based approaches for addressing numerous smart city difficulties. Laufs et al. (2020) discussed security and architectural problems. One of the most recent works on smart city surveys explored smart cities, reviewed the research on smart city surveys and valid summaries on the applications, components, and smart city future (Kirimtat et al., 2020).