4-Tier Service-Oriented Architecture for Building Smart Cities
Youssef Bassil

Youssef Bassil, Chief Science Officer of the Lebanese Association for Computational Sciences (LACSC), Beirut, Lebanon.
Manuscript received on March 02, 2019. | Revised Manuscript received on March 05, 2019. | Manuscript published on March 30, 2019. | PP: 18-21 | Volume-8 Issue-6, March 2019. | Retrieval Number: F3183038619/19©BEIESP
Open Access | Ethics and Policies | Cite | Mendeley
© The Authors. Published By: Blue Eyes Intelligence Engineering and Sciences Publication (BEIESP). This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)

Abstract: Currently, the world is increasingly focusing on transforming its traditional way of living into a digital, intelligent, mobile, and futuristic new urban environment called Smart City. This new paradigm shift heavily relies on information and communication technologies and has led to the rise of web services, service-oriented architectures, digital ecosystems, intelligent transport systems, e-services, and online social collaboration. This paper proposes a 4-Tier, Distributed, Open, and Service-Oriented Architecture for building Smart Cities. It is a 4-Tier architecture comprising Presentation, Middleware, Service, and Data tiers. It exploits Distributed computing as it is made up of small computational units operating over distant machines. It is open due to its scalable and extendable architecture, and it is Service-based as it is composed of granular interoperable and heterogeneous micro services. At the core of the proposed architecture is the middleware which provides Standardization and Communication Language, Application Programming Interface, Service Registry, and Security Services. All in all, the proposed architecture could prove to be a role model for building sustainable, interoperable, scalable, agile, open, and collaborative Smart Cities for 21st century. Future research can improve upon the proposed architecture so much so that data intelligence can be integrated into the middleware allowing the system to infer, reason, and help in decision making and problem solving. 
Keywords: Distributed Computing, Service-Oriented Architecture, Services, Smart City