IoT-big data software ecosystems for smart cities sensing: challenges, open issues, and emerging solutions

The Internet of Things (IoT) architecture primarily consists of massive amounts of heterogeneous objects, equipped with sensing, computing, and communication capabilities to continuously sense the smart cities pulse. The coordinated collection of this data produces relevant scalability and management issues not only in terms of communication but also in storage and computing to process and analyze large amounts of incoming big data streams. In these systems, people also play a pivotal role which includes both social and technical issues, making the design of these solutions a very complex task. This paper overviews the prevalent solutions and architecture design principles in IoT-big data ecosystems for smart cities sensing. Furthermore, we present the needs of IoT-big data software ecosystems by exemplifying existing IoT systems. We also provide useful insights towards future innovation to address open issues and challenges that are identified based on the expected growth of data in the next decade.