Turning Messina into a Smart City: The #SmartME Experience

The Cloud computing paradigm applied to Internet of Things (IoT) has recently found an interesting and innovative application area in the Smart City context. #SmartME is a crowdfunding project that aims at exploring such a possible synergy with the intent of morphing Messina into a Smart City. However, in the process of integrating Cloud computing and IoT related technologies, a data oriented approach has been mainly considered in the past, employing Cloud infrastructures as mere repositories for data collected by scattered devices. In the #SmartME project, the University of Messina Mobile and Distributed Systems Lab (MDSLab) research group is focusing on a different approach in which sensing and actuation resources are considered as extensions of the data center and the Cloud is adopted as a virtual infrastructure manager providing the infrastructure administrator with a management and monitoring surface. In this paper, details about the first year of the #SmartME project are provided with particular emphasis to the social, bureaucratic, and technical steps that conducted to the current deployment of tens of boards throughout Messina. In particular, the Stack4Things framework, which represents the core and soul of the #SmartME project, is presented; describing the underlying technologies and providing an overview of the Web portals that are used for administration and data retrieval.