The Role of Cloud of Things in Smart Cities

The recent demographic trends indicate towards a rapidly increasing population growth and a significant portion of this increased population now prefer to live mostly in cities. In connection with this, it has become the responsibility of the government to ensure a quality standard of living in the cities and also make sure that these facilities trickle down to the next generation. A program named Smart City Mission has been started for this purpose. With an extremely diverse population, that is only second to China in the world in terms of size, the Indian government has engaged in serious thinking for a better city planning and providing numerous opportunities for the citizenry. It was, therefore, planned that the Smart City Mission program will be able to provide a highly responsive infrastructure, network security, a good living environment and the like. Internet of things (IoT) application in smart cities turns out to be the most challenging in this phase. The information available in the internet has made accessible to many devices through IoT and it also aware the citizen in many aspects. But with the increasing number of devices and information, it is now becoming increasingly difficult to depend on IoT to manage things in the internet space with a similar degree of ease. As a result, cloud-based technologies have given preferences over the existing one and IoT has been replaced by the newly introduced Cloud of Things (CoT) paradigm. This paper intends to connect different smart city applications for the betterment of city life with the Cloud of Things (CoT). Our proposed smart city architecture is based on Cloud of Things, and the focus is also given to identify the existing as well as the forthcoming challenges for the concerned program of the government. By identifying the difficulties it is expected that the project will be materialized with a great success.