Empowering Smart Cities: A Comprehensive Edge Computing Framework for Enhanced IoT Situation Awareness

The Internet of Things (IoT) / Web of Things (WoT) presents numerous advantages for the development of intelligent cities. With the help of a vast array of diverse IoT devices, these cities can collect a tremendous amount of data, opening up opportunities for advanced analysis and insights. Given the diversity of information sources in smart cities, processing these data and extracting meaningful insights for decision-makers is a significant hurdle. While the conventional cloud computing paradigm offers substantial computing and storage capabilities for this purpose, it necessitates transferring all data from user endpoint edge equipment to the cloud, thereby causing considerable latency. Our study aims to mitigate the latency issue in data processing by utilizing the edge computing technique. Since a significant amount of data originates from user endpoint devices, handling the data at the edge can enhance overall performance. Our findings reveal that conducting raw IoT data processing at the edge devices yields a seamless situational awareness for smart city decision-makers while minimizing latency.