On the Way to Distribute Compute Continuum Urban Applications by Deploying Clusters of Drones

Nowadays, Smart Cities leverage cutting-edge tech-nologies to improve quality of life, optimize sustainability, and streamline urban infrastructure. Among the key technologies revolutionizing urban planning and infrastructure development, drones and the IoT have established themselves as true catalysts of change. The following steps in urban environment evolution go through the Compute Continuum paradigm adoption, where distributed applications seamlessly integrate into the urban fabric, extending computing power from the cloud to edge devices such as drones. These quickly deployable drones assist in traffic management, car parking, crowd monitoring and control, weather assessments, security, and emergency responses. This is possible thanks to the exploitation of drones' bird's-eye view, enabling urban planners and stakeholders to collect precise data, conduct inspections, and perform assessments with unprecedented efficiency. On the other hand, IoT sensors and devices provide real-time insights into various aspects of urban life, from traffic patterns and air quality to waste management and energy consumption. The use of drones in Smart Cities is not limited to simple data collection; they are versatile tools with numerous applications, particularly in the areas of surveying, mapping, and inspections, by the acquisition of data from their sensors that may be processed in near Fog devices belonging to Smart City Compute Continuum infrastructure. This work presents a study describing architectural insights, application deployment and management of drones in cluster acting as sensing elements.