Big Data Processing Platforms: Big data applications
for smart cities need to perform data analytics that
usually require huge processing capability. This
leads to the need for scalable and reliable software
and hardware platforms. The software platforms
for smart cities should offer high performance
computing capabilities, be optimized for the hardware
being used, is stable and reliable for the different
data-intensive applications being executed, supports
stream processing, provides a high-levels of fault
resilience, and is supported by a well-trained and
capable team and vendor. There are different available
software platforms for big data analytics such as
Hadoop Mapreduce [28], HPCC [29], Stratosphere
[30], and IBM Infosphere Streams [31], which
provide the stream processing required by real-time
big data applications such as intelligent transportations in a smart city [19]. These platforms work well
on cluster systems that can provide a powerful and
scalable hardware platform to meet the requirements
of big data applications for smart cities. Big data can
be also processed on the Cloud using both big data
Platform as a Service (PaaS)
and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) [32]. This
will relieve the application owners from the Burdon of
securing dedicated platforms, which is usually very
costly and allow them to use well tested
highly reliable platforms offered by the Cloud
service providers.