Distributed sensor data computing in smart city applications

With technologies developed in the Internet of Things, embedded devices can be built into every fabric of urban environments and connected to each other; and data continuously produced by these devices can be processed, integrated at different levels, and made available in standard formats through open services. The data, obviously f a form of 'big data', is now seen as the most valuable asset in developing intelligent applications. As the sizes of the IoT data continue to grow, it becomes inefficient to transfer all the raw data to a centralised, cloud-based data centre and to perform efficient analytics even with the state-of-the-art big data processing technologies. To address the problem, this article demonstrates the idea of 'distributed intelligence' for sensor data computing, which disperses intelligent computation to the much smaller while autonomous units, e.g., sensor network gateways, smart phones or edge clouds in order to reduce data sizes and to provide high quality data for data centres. As these autonomous units are usually in close proximity to data consumers, they also provide potential for reduced latency and improved quality of services. We present our research on designing methods and apparatus for distributed computing on sensor data, e.g., acquisition, discovery, and estimation, and provide a case study on urban air pollution monitoring and visualisation.