Jorge F Hernandez¹, Victor M Larios¹, Manuel Avalos¹ and Ignacio Silva-Lepe², ¹CUCEA, Mexico
and ²Thomas J. Watson Research Center, USA

Sustainability, appropriate use of natural resources and providing a better quality of life for citizens has become a prerequisite to change the traditional concept of a smart city. A smart city needs to use latest generation Information Technologies, IT, and hardware to improve services and data, to offer to create a balanced environment between the ecosystem and inhabitants. This paper analyses the advantages of using a private cloud architecture to share hardware and software resources when it is required. Our case study is Guadalajara, which has seven municipalities and each one monitor’s air quality. Each municipality has a set of servers to process information independently and consists of information systems for the transmission and storage of data with other municipalities. We analysed the behaviour of the carbon footprint during the years 1999-2013 and we observed a pattern in each season. Thus our proposal requires municipalities to use a cloud-based solution that allows managing and consolidating infrastructure to minimize maintenance costs and electricity consumption to reduce carbon footprint generated by the city.

Smart Cities; Cloud Architectures; Cost Estimation; City Services