Big Data, Cloud Computing, and Internet-Enabled Infrastructures for Sustainable Development: A Comprehensive Technological Convergence

Abstract

Sustainable development has emerged as a global agenda because the societies are experiencing more and more problems in terms of climate change, rapid urbanization, depletion of resources, and degradation of the environment. The integration of Big Data, Cloud Computing, and Internet-based infrastructures, including the IoT, Edge and Fog computing, Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), and next-generation networks, provides an powerful platform of developing smart, effective, and sustainable systems. This survey discusses the technology fundamental, integration models and cross domain applications that facilitate data-driven, real-time, and energy-efficient solutions to environmental monitoring, smart cities, agriculture, transportation and industrial ecosystems. Big Data analytics and Cloud Computing provide deep insights with large processing and predictive modeling, and scalable computational resources with complex sustainability workloads. IoT and associated infrastructures enable continuous sensing, and autonomous decision-making in a variety of physical environments. The paper also highlights the main security, privacy, and ethical issues, as well as unresolved problems related to interoperability, energy usage, and implementation in resource-limited environments. The future research direction is focused on AI-based sustainability, digital twins, decentralized analytics, and green communication technologies including 6G. Overall, this survey highlights the importance of the integration of digital infrastructures to achieve long-term global sustainability objectives.