6.4 IoT Challenges in Data and Citizen-centric Smart City
possible solution faced in smart city governance. In this way, the citizen partici-pation and cooperation will make activities of smart city governance popular and people friendly. Cluster or distributed data center will be helpful in creating knowledge centre with improved efficiency in processing and decision making. At the moment, IoT data looks a bit unstructured which in some sense is hindering mass adoption.
Real-time data need to be carefully normalized. Reliability of data, authenticity of device and data sources, efficient mechanism for sharing and distribution of city information and scalability are still data management challenges in data and citizen-centric smart city governance.
Fig. 6.8 IoT challenges and solutions to data and citizen-centric smart city governance
6.4.2 Data Reusability
In data and citizen-centric smart city governance, data reusability is part of data management. When voluminous data is generated data redundancy and duplication are inevitable. When services of smart city governance are many in number, user database will be multiplied for want of efficient data storage and analytics. Data reusability is one method, where the voluminous data can be shrunk. For example, linking smart city governance services like health care, driving license, passport, birth certificate, address, etc. to Unique Identification Number (UID) can merge all these service details. All departments of the government and their service records can be merged under single UID for each citizen. In this way, data reusability in smart city governance can be usefully achieved.
6.4.3 Identity and Privacy
One of the main reasons why IoT technology smart city governance has not been successful among citizens is that citizens have doubts about identity and privacy.
Identity and privacy preservation are essential components of smart city gover-nance. Especially, when it comes to services of smart city governance like online financial transactions, individual preferences, healthcare details, details of energy, water consumption, etc. Trust and confidence are essential components of these services. Privacy in commerce, health care, digital communications, financial matters, education, and many other areas can be viewed as trusted interactions between two parties. Personal identity and the ability to authenticate and protect it are issues in the design and delivery of personalized services in smart city gover-nance. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), Information-centric System (ICS) and Capability-based Access (CBA) are efforts to address the challenges of identity and privacy.
Anonymization is another attempt to manage identity and privacy. However, there are two main challenges for anonymization in IoT environment. One is the difficulty related to anonymization of data during data collection process. Another is the risk of re-identification of the individual from the aggregation of anonymized data. IoT environment for smart city governance relies heavily on cloud platform to store user data, process and retrieve information, where cloud provider is mostly considered trusted. Identity and privacy preservation is a great challenge when the deployment is large.
6.4.4 Cybersecurity
Cybersecurity in data and citizen-centric smart city governance is a big challenge for citizens, government officials, ICT managers and business houses. Networks continue to collect vast amounts of data from an increasing number of sources. This has serious impacts on the social, political, and economic undertaking of gover-nance. Security has taken renewed importance associated with increasing depen-dence on massive database. Cybersecurity in smart city governance has to protect communication networks, individuals, organizations, systems, and infrastructure from fraud, errors, hackers, and attacks. These attacks may hamper service delivery and effective management of smart city governance services. According to the 2013 Symantec Internet Security Threat Report, 22% of targeted attacks are aimed at governments and energy utility companies, while government and healthcare institutions are the target of 24% in identity breaches [16]. In this regard, Fig.6.9 explains the relationship between connectivity, complexity, and information.
IoT environment for large data and citizen-centric smart city governance consists of hyper-connectivity, hyper-complexity, and hyper-information. These compo-nents also bring hyper-vulnerability to IoT environment. Cybersecurity is an important issue across all layers of the IoT network. Sensing devices, communi-cation network, data and service management (cloud, big data, knowledge centre) and applications (users) need to be secured from unauthorized users. The most common attacks on smart city governance are Denial of Service (DOS), sinkhole attack, tunnel attack, phishing, evesdropping, man in the middle attack, identity theft, etc. The vulnerability increases with large deployments. Cybersecurity in smart city governance can be improved by developing fault tolerant networks, cyber resilience systems and context-aware self-healing networks.
6.4.5 Trust
Data and citizen-centric smart city governance is basically built on trust. Currently, trust is emphasized more on online business transactions in smart city governance.
Breach of trust can bring disastrous effect on the IoT network. Communication in smart city governance procedures frequently requires clear and unambiguous identification of the citizen and the public entity involved before the commence-ment of relations, otherwise, the operation cannot be carried out. Without the relevant relations, citizens are restricted to the simple unauthorized services.
Fig. 6.9 Hyper-vulnerability
There are many issues relating to trust deficit in IoT environment such as lack of standardization, deployment of IoT products without proper security mechanisms in place, private ownership of telecommunication networks and compromise on security to maximize profit. In data and citizen-centric smart city governance, respect for privacy, security, and legal rights need to be emphasized. For this reason, the authorities are obliged to respect in principle that the user should be free to opt for one out of a number of qualified providers. In fact, smart city governance services should be made available free of charge to citizens regardless of their income or specific knowledge [17]. In democracy, elected representatives act in the best interests of the people on behalf of the people. The power, credibility, and authority of government emanate from citizens and are rooted in trust, so gov-ernments are sustained only as long as citizens are minded to sustain them.
6.4.6 Multilayer Integration
The efficiency of data and citizen-centric smart city governance can be improved by multilayer integration. We discussed in Sect.6.4.5that lack of standardization is a trust deficit as well as security issue in IoT environment. So integration of all layers and adding security mechanism at each layer can secure data and citizen-centric smart city governance model from security threats. The type of security mechanism may differ from layer to layer. For example, the constrained nodes at the sensing layer need to be secured through lightweight cryptographic techniques but this approach will not be sufficient for data and service management layer. This layer needs strong cryptographic techniques. Likewise, the processing capacity of sys-tems at data and service management should be higher than other layers.
Multilayer integration can also help a new node in the IoT network to join and leave without affecting the network. The issue of scalability is also met with multilayer integration. Multilayer integration helps in easy movement of data through all the layers of the network.
6.4.7 Social Media Integration
Social Media like Facebook, Whatsapp, Twitter, and many more are gaining popularity in smart city scenario. Increasing use of smartphones, easy and cheap access to internet has made social media growing day by day. Citizen’s interaction with one another by social media is increasing enormously. In fact, live content of what happens in the city spreads virally in short time. This impacts the way citizens perceive and respond to initiatives of smart city governance.
Figure6.10, gives the details of leading social websites and their increasing growth for years 2013, 2014, and 2015 [18]. People from all walks of life interact with one another in a casual way sharing texts, images, audio, and videos. Topics
ranging from education, health, politics, stories, jokes, help messages, alerts, etc.
are constantly posted by people. Social media can be of great help for smart city governance. Citizens can post positive messages, feedbacks, suggestions, solutions, etc. to smart city governance initiatives. In a way, social IoT can become a handy tool to strengthen data and citizen-centric smart city governance services. Citizen input is essential to representative democracy and government needs to focus on openness, transparency, and participation. Engaging the citizens online might enhance feelings of being consulted and listened to. There are many successful stories around the world, where citizens effectively used social media to organize people’s movements and forced governments to change policies.
From a user perspective, social connectedness of families and friends instill interest and confidence than technological connectedness. The user engagement in social networking sites can bring awareness about IoT technology for smart city governance. In the coming years, research directions in IoT should consider the bundle of information obtained through social media in smart city scenario for governance.
Fig. 6.10 Use of social media for smart city governance