۱٫ Introduction

۲٫ Literature review

۳٫ Enabling technologies in smart city

۴٫ Challenges and issues in realization of smart cities

۵٫ Sustainable smart cities

۶٫ Conclusions, discussion and future directions

Declaration of Competing Interest

References

Abstract

The technological interventions in everyday processes has led to the rise of Smart ecosystems where all aspects of everyday life like governance, transportation, agriculture, logistics, maintenance, education and healthcare are automated in some way or the other and can be controlled, managed and accessed remotely with the help of smart devices. This has led to the concept of Smart cities where Information Communication and Technology (ICT) is merged with the existing traditional infrastructure of a city which is then coordinated and managed using digital technology. This idea of smart cities is slowly but surely coming into reality as many countries around the globe are adopting this idea and coming up with their own model of smart cities. At the core of smart city lies the sensors and actuators embedded in the smart devices that sense the environment for facilitating effective decision making. The microcontrollers available in these devices are programmed to take decisions automatically based on the information received from the sensors. This involves integration of several information and communication technologies like artificial intelligence, protocols, Internet of things (IoT), wireless sensor network (WSN) etc. This paper discusses and extensively reviews the role of enabling technologies in smart cities. The paper further highlights the challenges and limitations in the development of smart cities along with the mitigation strategies. Specifically, three categories of challenges are identified namely technical, socio-economic and environmental giving specifics of each category. Finally, some of the best practices for attaining sustainable smart cities are provided.

Introduction

The cutting edge technological advancements in today’s world has helped realize the long awaited dream of a modern utopian world that aims to balance the traditional systems with advanced technological interventions. The technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), machine learning (ML), deep learning (DL), cognitive computing and big data analytics have contributed immensely in the realization of this dream [1][2][3]. Smart city is one such hopeful project that has been adopted globally with an aim to make the lives of the habitants more convenient and inclusive [4][5].The idea is to use modern day technologies to convert every entity of a conventional city into an autonomous object performing its operation automatically without any substantial external help. All everyday processes like governance, policies, services and feedbacks are automated and the users are able to access these with the help of smart devices from anywhere around the globe. This automation has provided a decent help in curtailing the environmental hazards by means of applying environment friendly and cost-effective techniques. The core entities of a smart city consists of smart infrastructure, smart governance, smart policies, smart transportation, smart healthcare, smart agriculture, smart education, smart economy, smart environment, smart industry, smart energy and smart feedback mechanisms that helps to truly realize the concept of a smart city ecosystem [1][2][3][4][5]. The word “smart” refers to an automated mechanism which is adopted to perform the desired activity within a domain. For example, in a smart home all gadgets and electric equipment (like fans, tube-lights, washing machines, HVAC systems, ovens etc) are embedded with miniature sensory devices that are able to sense the surrounding environment, collect information and transfer that information to the processing hubs where decisions can be taken with the help of dynamic rules and regulations.