Undoubtedly, the main strength of the big data concept
is the high influence it will have on numerous aspects of
a smart city and consequently on people’s lives [1]. Big
data is growing rapidly, currently at a projected rate of
40 % growth in the amount of global data generated per
year versus only 5 % growth in global IT spending.
Around 90 % of the world’s digitized data was captured
over just the past two years. As a result, many governments have started to utilize big data to support the development and sustainability of smart cities around the
world. That allowed cities to maintain standards, principles, and requirements of the applications of smart city
through realizing the main smart city characteristics.
These characteristics include sustainability, resilience,
governance, enhanced quality of life, and intelligent
management of natural resources and city facilities.
There are well-defined components of the smart city,
such as mobility, governance, environment, and people
as well as its applications and services such as
healthcare, transportation, smart education, and energy
[2]. To facilitate such applications and services large
computational and storage facilities are needed. One
way to provide such platforms is to rely on Cloud Computing and utilize the many advantages of using cloud
services to support smart city big data management and
applications. Figure 1 demonstrates how cloud computing can support big data collection, storage and analysis
across cloud nodes and facilities.
Current work and research projects in this field have
generated some literature that highlighted the importance of big data in supporting smart city applications
and services. In addition, some work investigated some
of the issues of utilizing big data in smart cities [3–6].
The main contribution of this paper is reviewing the
application of big data in smart city and exploring the
opportunities and challenges for utilizing big data in
smart city. In addition, the paper investigates the general
requirements for the design and implementation of big
data based applications for smart city applications and
services.