The Intersection of the Internet of Things and Smart Cities: A Tertiary Study

Since the transition from an agricultural to an industrial economy, cities have attracted large masses of people in search of their facilities. Cities are symbols of progress and opportunities. However, urbanization also brings with it several problems and challenges. Smart Cities (SC) offer a way to address these challenges by using technology to make cities more efficient, sustainable, and livable. There are numerous technologies that enable the concept of smart cities, including the Internet of Things (IoT). The IoT provides the fundamental sensing infrastructure that allows connecting and virtualizing the physical world, extracting environmental variables that serve as initial inputs for decision-making processes. Such processes are provided by software systems whose construction and execution need to deal with the dynamism, heterogeneity and often serendipitous nature that permeate both the domains of smart cities and IoT. As the integration of IoT and Smart Cities paradigms is still at an early stage, and there are not yet holistic solutions to explore the full potential of such a synergy, we carried out a literature review on the topic. In particular, the objective of this article is to describe the results of a structured literature review to identify general concepts about quality attributes, applications, technologies, and challenges of IoT solutions applied to the SC domain. Our main goal is to assist in understanding the basic concepts of the research area through the search for secondary studies. This review is a tertiary study covering 17 reviews and aims to promote a high-level discussion on the identified characteristics and provide an overview of the area to promote a better perception of current development needs and opportunities.