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patient data safely and securely is growing. Electronic health record
(EHR) services are increasingly cloud-based. Tele-diagnosis and tele-
medicine tasks are being activated and accomplished through cloud-
based software applications.
Healthcare data posted in cloud environments are easily accessible
and shared across the regions by doctors, practitioners, and so on.
Governmental rules and regulations stringently mandate storage of
data for an extended period of time. Besides the mainstream appli-
cations, the data backup, archival, and recovery requirements force
hospitals and clinics’ IT managers to consider the cloud movement.
Medical imaging is a very critical need in healthcare. Extracting
reusable patterns and insights from medical images in time goes a
long way in empowering physicians, medical experts, and caregivers
in prescribing or administering the correct medicine in the perfect
dosage. It is therefore clear that cloud technology is going to be criti-
cal for visualizing next-generation medical applications and deliver-
ing them with all the quality of service (QoS) attributes embedded.
Clouds will emerge as the one-stop solution for taking patient care to
the next level fluently and elegantly.
3.5.10 Sensor-Cloud Integration for Smarter Cities
Sensors and actuators are the eyes and ears of future IT for the effort-
less capture of disparate data from an increasing array of distinct
sources. Correspondingly there are cloud-based analytical solutions to
incredibly capitalize the accumulated data to extract actionable knowl-
edge toward achieving and sustaining the smarter world vision. With
clouds emerging as Web-scale, enterprise-class, highly organized and
optimized IT infrastructures, there is a persistent and pressing need
for sensors on the ground to be seamlessly and spontaneously inte-
grated with online, on-demand, and on/off-premise cloud environ-
ments. at is, sensors and actuators could be interfaced with remote
clouds for exchanging data and control messages then and there. It
is going to be a two-way communication. at is, data are transmit-
ted to the cloud and cloud-based services in turn monitor, measure,
manage, and maintain scores of physical sensors and devices. In a
nutshell, by adding sensors and actuators into the mix, new opportu-
nities and fresh possibilities for contextualization and geo-awareness
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arise continuously. In the future, we may read, feel, and even expe-
rience “sensing and actuation as a service” (SAaaS). us ordinary
objects are connected with one another as well as service-enabled
to interact with cloud-based applications so that they could exhibit
exemplary behavior. Sensors are thereby empowered to be smart to
join in the mainstream computing to be a great enabler of people in
the days ahead. All small and big environments filled and saturated
with a number of different sensors are going to be greater contributors
toward smart cities [8].
3.5.11 Social and Sensor Data Fusion in Cloud
Mobile phones are not only enabled with communication capabili-
ties but also possess computing power these days. Further, a variety
of minuscule sensors are smartly embedded inside mobile phones to
make them multifaceted in their offerings and outputs. at is, with
the unprecedented advancements in miniaturization technologies,
phones are becoming slim and sleek, trendy and handy, yet are multi-
media, multisensor, multiplatform, and multipurpose devices. Phones
are also cloud-enabled; thereby all kinds of applications and data
being deposited in cloud environments can be discovered, accessed,
and used using phones at any time and any place. at is, mobile
phones become smart through the internal integration of multiple
electronics and the external integration with on-demand and online
cloud infrastructures.
Smart phones could capture/record and accumulate large volumes
of data related to our daily lives and upload them in social websites
and in remote powerful computing machines and storage systems.
Smart phones facilitate connected people just as sensors and actua-
tors enable common, casual, and cheap items to become connected
entities. at is, people are increasingly connected with one another
all the time as well as with the outside world through smart phones.
In a nutshell, phones are not only effective input/output devices but
also a data aggregation and transmission platform. A wider category
of cloud-based people-centric applications are being delivered to
humans through smart phones.
Without an iota of doubt, today the two popular types are social
and sensor data, collected from different and distributed sources and
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fused to be right and relevant for people in their daily personal and
professional lives. Social-networking services facilitate users to share
their ideas, opinions, pictures, videos, news, and other various forms
of contents over the Internet, the most pulsating and pioneering
communication infrastructure. Sensors are primarily for gathering
environmental data toward self, surroundings, and situation-aware
information. In short, advanced context-aware applications run in
the cloud; social and sensor data are gleaned and fed to cloud-based
applications as the cloud provides tremendous processing, memory,
and storage capabilities; and the resulting insights can be readily and
rewardingly shared with people through smart phones in time. us
mobile cloud computing is a greater enabler for smarter cities.
Surender Reddy Yerva and his team [9] have built a travel recom-
mendation system that allows blending the heterogeneous social and
sensor data for integrated analysis and then extracting information on
weather predictions for times and places where users wish to travel.
e architecture of the recommendation system comprises several
components for accomplishing effective, large-scale social and sensor
data fusion. Such sensor and social data fusion features and func-
tionality lead to a sequence of activities toward ultimate knowledge
engineering and delivery: gleaning and fusing of data from multiple
sources; applications deployed in clouds receiving and leveraging them
in real-time to aggregate, process, transform, mine, and analyze to emit
actionable insights; smart phones emerging as the all-encompassing
device for disseminating the emitted context knowledge to empower
those concerned to ponder the next course of action with full confi-
dence and clarity; and so on.
3.5.12 Integrating Sensors with Cloud Using Dynamic Proxies
Sensor networks exceedingly contribute to real-time data capture,
processing, and analytics. However, they have a few noteworthy
constraints and clouds are capable of overcoming them to the full-
est. erefore the integration of sensors with cloud environments has
picked up very recently through a host of viable approaches [10]. e
first approach is based on message-oriented communication that uses
low-level application-specific APIs to exchange messages between
sensors and motes platforms such as TinyOS and Contiki. ese are
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INTELLIGENT CITIES
integrated with clouds by using a lightweight IP stack. is approach
provides communication infrastructure, but doesn’t provide application-
level service distribution. e second approach is to use services
(simple object access protocol [SOAP] or RESTful) and the applica-
tion layer functionality of services can be accessed via ports. Sensor
data are encapsulated in SOAP packets that lead to high complexity
and resource requirements. e RESTful approach is quite simple.
An example is TinyREST, which uses a gateway to connect sensor
nodes to clouds by mapping messages to HTTP requests. Another
example is CoAP, which reduces the HTTP overhead by using a sub-
set of HTTP. is approach adds overhead from processing HTTP
requests. A further example is LooCI, which provides an extensible
networking framework and an event bus abstraction to bind reusable
components. LooCI has a key advantage in that its communication
is based on Inter Isolate RPC (IIRPC). Its macro-components can
support multiple threads and utility libraries by running each macro
component in isolation. LooCI can implement multicast to multiple
nodes network-wide. e LooCI middleware has been deployed on
a variety of platforms such as the SunSPOT, Contiki, and OSGi.
us the topic of sensor–cloud integration has been rapidly gaining
momentum. ere are approaches, middleware solutions, and frame-
works for simplifying and streamlining sensor-to-cloud integration to
come out with a number of people-centric and city-critical services.
3.5.13 e Next-Generation Hybrid Clouds
For a variety of reasons, private cloud options are being seriously con-
sidered by business establishments. Especially for the sake of having
deeper visibility of the total IT environment, the end-to-end con-
trollability, the guaranteed performance, and dependability with nil
network latency, and above all, impenetrable and foolproof security,
private cloud environments are being prescribed as part of enterprise
IT strategy. Public clouds are also important as they are Web-scale;
cost-effective; manned by trained, experienced, and skilled experts;
continuously standardized toward open, interoperable, connected,
and federated clouds; and so on. Other noteworthy cases for public
clouds include the fact that every kind of customer-facing application
is being modernized and migrated to public clouds and there are a
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THE ROLE OF CLOUD INFRASTRUCTURES
number of social networking sites on the Web. at is, everything is
service-, Web, and cloud-enabled to be found, bound, and composed
toward bigger and better things. us public clouds are turning out
to be the core and central service-oriented platform for all kinds of
applications (social, business, embedded, mobile, analytical, trans-
actional, and IoT) and data. us for any growing enterprises, the
hybrid cloud, which is the seamless combination of private as well as
public clouds, is the way forward.
As we all know, read, and experience, the device ecosystem is on
the fast track these days. Every human being is all set to be assisted
by tens of devices (wearable, portable, pocketable, implantable, etc.)
in his or her daily life. Every home is being filled with scores of hi-fi
electronics, appliances, media players, Wi-Fi routers, and so on; every
car is being empowered with a large number of electronics such as
in-vehicle infotainment system, network gateway, controllers, sensors,
chips, and actuators; every manufacturing floor is saturated with a
number of connected machines, equipment, instruments, and so on;
and every library is filled with hundreds of tagged books; and so on.
We have heard, read, and even written about device clouds. All kinds
of physical devices in our entire environment are being linked to far-
away clouds for data transmission and analytics and are being signifi-
cantly dynamically empowered with a growing array of cloud-based
software services. However, our focus here is not on the extreme con-
nectivity but rather on smartly leveraging the computing, storage, and
network capabilities of devices among us to create a kind of personal
cloud for accomplishing an emerging array of real-time and personal
applications with complete security and judiciousness.
e industrialization and commoditization aspects that consider-
ably elevated the power of cloud computing are now penetrating every-
day devices in our midst. Devices are becoming steadily miniaturized
yet computationally powerful, fitted with more storage capability,
increasingly interconnected and service enabled. It is expected that
these new-generation devices will substantially embolden and extend
the traditional cloud model to form and firm up an even bigger, less
expensive, high-performing, resource-aware, extensible, versatile, and
resilient cloud that is more right and relevant for end-users. Now with
the abundant arrival and overwhelming acceptance of generic as well
as purpose-specific devices, the prevailing concept of the hybrid cloud
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