A scalable architecture for geo-localized service access in smart cities

The Internet of Things era is now ”knocking on our doors” and will carry a capillary diffusion of mobile devices and sensors in a whole heterogeneous network. Among other opportunities, this will lead to dramatic changes in the applications and services offered to citizens, allowing ”smart cities” to become reality. In this context novel communication paradigms need to be exploited, in order to cope with the high number of connected entities and specific characteristics of the applications envisaged. In this work, we focus on the issue of geo-localization, and propose an efficient mechanism for distributing Internet services, where look-up is inherently based on the geographical position of resources and users. We are inspired by the concept of Service Oriented Architecture, where components can be efficiently orchestrated and re-used. The distribution protocol exploits the multiple Distributed Hash Table concept, which is well established in peer-to-peer overlays. A smart city use case is reported as a proof-of-concept.