Towards sustainable smart cities: A review of trends, architectures, components, and open challenges in smart cities

Abstract Smart city is an application of Internet of Things (IoT) notion. Unceasing growth of population and urbanization have intensified innovative ways to handle urbanization with minimal impact on environment, citizen lifestyles, and governance. Initial integration of information communication technology (ICT) into city operations have promoted telicity, information city, and digital city concepts. Later, the conception of IoT has founded the smart cities, which support the city operations intelligently with minimal human interaction. Smart city emerged as a solution to address the challenges arise with exponential growth of urbanization and population. However, smart city concept is still evolving and not mainstreamed throughout the globe due to technological, economical, and governing barriers. Therefore, this paper aims to deliver the essence of smart cities. The paper presents a brief overview of smart cities, followed by the features and characteristics, generic architecture, composition, and real-world implementations of smart cities. Finally, we present some challenges and opportunities identified through extensive literature survey on smart cities.