Abstract
Today, smart cities represent an effective digital platform for facilitating our lives by shifting all stakeholders toward more sustainable behavior. Consequently, the field of smart cities has become an increasingly important research area. The smart city comprises a huge number of hybrid networks, with each network containing an enormous number of nodes that transmit massive amounts of data, thus giving rise to many network problems, such as delay and loss of connectivity. Decreasing the amount of such transmitted data is a great challenge. This paper presents a data overhead reduction scheme (DORS) for heterogeneous networks in smart city environments that comprise five different methods: median, nonlinear least squares, compression, data merging, and prioritization. Each method is applied according to the current status of quality of service. To measure the performance of the proposed model, a simulation environment is constructed for a smart city using network simulation package, NS2. The obtained results indicate that DORS has the capability to decrease the size of transmitted data in the simulated smart city environment while attaining a notable performance enhancement in terms of data reduction rate, end-to-end delay, packet loss ratio, throughput, and energy consumption ratio.