Towards a Secure, Distributed, and Reliable Cloud-Based Reference Architecture for Big Data in Smart Cities

Abstract

Current revolutions with respect to big data affect people's everyday life more and more. New ways of living, communication, and knowledge sharing have been created under the smart city umbrella. Information and communication technologies (ICT) are used to improve urban services. Examples are car sharing, energy consumption, adaptive traffic management, etc. A closer look at these services reveals that data, produced and consumed by people (or automatically by devices), are the cornerstone for working and reliable urban services. For this, large volumes of data with a great variety have to be processed at a high velocity which is commonly known as big data. This chapter designs a secure, distributed, and reliable cloud-based reference architecture that logically separates confidential data and distributes them to various databases in different clouds. It increases the reliability of the distributed data with high-availability mechanisms to protect data against various threads (e.g., hackers, terrorists, data collecting companies, etc.).