An Event and Service Mesh Architecture Supporting Service Integration in Society 5.0 enabled Smart Cities

Society 5.0 envisions a more resilient, sustainable, and human-centered society fostered by ever-evolving cooperation and knowledge sharing among the many digital systems already shaping our daily lives. However, the current state of smart cities often consists of siloed systems, with different actors and stakeholders managing their services and assets independently. This phenomenon is evident in both technological and operational domains, posing challenges to seamless collaboration. In this context, new cloud computing models and technologies like event and service mesh promise to reduce the burden associated with the development and integration of solutions. In the attempt to pave the way for more integrated IT environments, we propose a practical architecture that combines service and event mesh technologies, enabling the seamless exploitation of service invocation and composition based on event distribution and direct service calls. Our proposal allows applications to remain transparent of the underlying technology, facilitating various optimizations on the network and management plane, necessary to meet the diverse operational requirements of complex and heterogeneous applications. We validate our proposal in a real-use case scenario implementation, discussing the tradeoffs that emerge.