Leveraging Edge Computing for IoT Device Observability in Smart City Environments

Smart cities rely heavily on various IoT applications. By linking IoT devices into a comprehensive system, the potential of a smart city is further improved. Analyzing the interrelationship among the respective heterogeneous smart city use cases poses considerable challenges, as evaluating potential misbehavior in highly distributed systems is complex. This research addresses a deficiency in the domain arising from the limitations of IoT device resources and the unsuitability of established tracing techniques. Therefore, we present an approach to address these limitations by introducing a generic and lightweight architecture designed to offload tracing and other computational tasks to digital twins located at the network's edge. A smart city research project serves as the basis for an exploratory case study. As a result, we demonstrate a streamlined, infrastructure-as-code deployable method designed to provide resource-limited devices with tracing capabilities.

DOI 10.1109/E-TEMS64751.2025.11239205