The concept of connecting everyday objects via the existing networks became highly favorable with the emergence of smart devices and their recent advancements. Internet of Things (IoT) resulted from the evolution of conventional networks that connect zillions of connected devices. Technological advancements in ubiquitous computing (UC), wireless sensor networks (WSN), and machine-to-machine (M2M) communication have further strengthened the IoT notion (Silva, Khan, & Han, 2017a; Khan, Silva, Jung, & Han, 2017). Facilitating UC via uniquely identifiable smart devices without or minimal human interaction is being the de-facto principle of IoT (Gubbi, Buyya, Marusic, & Palaniswami, 2013; Khan, Silva, & Han, 2017). Moreover, connected smart devices share own information and access authorized information of other devices to support contextual decision-making (Vermesan et al., 2015). Owing to the extensive attention gained from various interest groups, IoT notion has pioneered striking applications with its expansion i.e. smart home, smart city, smart warehouse, smart health, and so forth (Islam, Kwak, Kabir, Hossain, & Kwak, 2015; Jabbar, Khan, Silva, & Han, 2016; Jin, Gubbi, Marusic, & Palaniswami, 2014; Khan, Silva, & Han, 2016). Smart city has become the spotlight in last few decades, due to dramatic urbanization all over the world. Performing city operations with aid of ICT made cities efficient in various aspects. However, incorporating ICT to perform city operations does not fully interprets a smart city (Hollands, 2008). Smart city has been favored among other urban models i.e. telicity, information city, and digital city, since it represents the abstraction of all other models (Mohanty, Choppali, & Kougianos, 2016). The smart city is an application of the IoT (Silva et al., 2016), hence it inherits the underlying operational mechanisms from IoT. As shown in Fig. 1, IoT provides essential building components for smart cities i.e. data generation, data management, and application handling. In generic terms, smart city is an urban environment that utilizes ICT and other related technologies to enhance performance efficiency of regular city operations and quality of services (QoS) provided to urban citizens. In formal terms, experts have defined smart city considering various aspects and perspectives. A popular definition states that a smart city connects physical, social, business, and ICT infrastructure to uplift the intelligence of the city (Harrison et al., 2010).