Abstract The new Internet of Things (IoT) applications are enabling Smart City initiatives worldwide. It provides the ability to remotely monitor, manage and control devices, and to create new insights and actionable information from massive streams of real-time data. The main features of a smart city include a high degree of information technology integration and a comprehensive application of information resources. The essential components of urban development for a smart city should include smart technology, smart industry, smart services, smart management and smart life. The Internet of Things is about installing sensors (RFID, IR, GPS, laser scanners, etc.) for everything, and connecting them to the internet through specific protocols for information exchange and communications, in order to achieve intelligent recognition, location, tracking, monitoring and management. With the technical support from IoT, smart city need to have three features of being instrumented, interconnected and intelligent. Only then a Smart City can be formed by integrating all these intelligent features at its advanced stage of IOT development. The explosive growth of Smart City and Internet of Things applications creates many scientific and engineering challenges that call for ingenious research efforts from both academia and industry, especially for the development of efficient, scalable, and reliable Smart City based on IoT. New protocols, architectures, and services are in dire needs to respond for these challenges. The goal of the special issue is to bring together scholars, professors, researchers, engineers and administrators resorting to the state-of-the-art technologies and ideas to significantly improve the field of Smart City based on IoT.