Book Type: Edited Volume
Editors: A. El Saddik and M. A. Hossain
Aims and Scopes
Smarter Cities promote an instrumented, inter-connected and intelligent urban ‘Systems of Systems’ to improve the quality of life of citizens by providing healthcare, transportation, public safety, energy and various other smarter services. Multimedia plays a vital role in the smarter cities eco-system due to huge presence of multimodal sensors and smart objects in the environment, increased multimedia collaboration among different organizations, and real-time media sharing between socially-connected people. Consequently, high volume of sensorial media, social media, M2M data, IoT data, open data, and mobile phone data become available in smarter cities, which need effective processing, analysis, and sharing in order to make them useful by the citizens, city government, and businesses. The capture, process and analysis of such media data require rich pool of on-demand resources, massive computation capability, and scalable infrastructure that are hardly supported by traditional multimedia computing facilities. Cloud computing fits well as an enabling technology in this scenario as it provides a flexible stack of computing, storage and software services at low cost. As a result, we are witnessing a paradigm shift toward multimedia cloud computing (MCC), where the computationally-intensive components of multimedia systems, services and applications are moving onto the cloud, and the end user’s mobile device is being used as an interface for accessing those services. Thus, MCC helps to solve several issues related to multimedia computing that are contributing to the realization of smarter cities.
Despite the many benefits and opportunities MCC offers for building smarter cities, there are several research and technical challenges that need attention from the research community. Some of these challenges include: How to develop rich and real-time media cloud applications for smart cities? How cloud can provide quality of service (QoS) provisioning for multimedia services while performing distributed multimedia processing? What are the best strategies for dynamic resource allocation given the huge volume of multimedia data? How to effectively integrate different systems of systems on MCC for smarter cities? How to optimize cloud infrastructure and server distribution for different multimedia analysis tasks needed for smarter cities? In general, this book will provide insights into smart city needs, processes, services, applications, and frameworks using MCC.