In an era shaped by rapid urbanization and digital transformation, smart cities have become a global imperative for sustainable, efficient, and citizen-centric development. This article analyzes Amman’s development into a smart city, highlighting its role as a model for emerging urban areas. Leveraging recent technologies such as AI, IoT, blockchain, and big data, Amman is actively transitioning from a traditional city to a smart one enhancing mobility, energy efficiency, education, healthcare, and citizen engagement. This study examines Amman’s smart city vision and roadmap, technological infrastructure, key application domains, implemented innovation projects, and global rankings. It also explores the challenges the city faces, future research opportunities across various domains, the role of software in urban development, and the critical factors contributing to Amman’s success as a smart city. This article serves as a vital reference for researchers, policymakers, urban planners, and practitioners aiming to shape next-generation smart cities. The case of Amman underscores how strategic governance, public-private collaboration, and the effective use of emerging technologies can accelerate sustainable urban transformation.
Smart city applications demand lightweight, efficient and dependable communication protocols to facilitate the functioning of resource-limited Internet of Things (IoT) devices. This work performs an extensive empirical study of the three most prominent IoT standards; Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT), the Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) and Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) by emulating real-world smart city use cases using a Raspberry Pi based testbed. The primary metrics based on which the protocols are analyzed are latency, message overhead, delivery rate and energy consumption. ANOVA and Tukey's HSD tests are used to determine the statistical significance of experimental data. The test results indicate that CoAP under (QoS-1 reliability) shows the least latency and energy consumption and MQTT due to its support for Quality of Service (QoS) is the most reliable. Among the others, HTTP is in general performance terms certainly at the bottom of all metrics mainly for its verbosity and synchronous nature. The paper then also suggests a decision flowchart for developers to choose the suitable protocol according to application requirements. The results are more than just numbers on a graph, and the research can be deployed for advice for protocol selection in practice, where this study helps identify issues with encryption overhead (over 75\%) while showcasing multi-hop network scalability and adaptive switch mechanisms as areas that remain to be resolved. Such findings can be used as a basis for design approaches to construct secure, efficient and scalable communication protocols in urban IoT settings.