Blockchain for Smart Cities

By Valentina Emilia Balas and Raghvendra Kumar

Focusing on different tools, platforms, and techniques, Blockchain and the Smart City: Infrastructure and Implementation uses case studies from around the world to examine blockchain deployment in diverse smart city applications. The book begins by examining the fundamental theories and concepts of blockchain. It looks at key smart cities’ domains such as banking, insurance, healthcare, and supply chain management. It examines Using case studies for each domain, the book looks at payment mechanisms, fog/edge computing, green computing, and algorithms and consensus mechanisms for smart cities implementation. It looks at tools such as Hyperledger, Etherium, Corda, IBM Blockchain, Hydrachain, as well as policies and regulatory standards, applications, solutions, and methodologies. While exploring future blockchain ecosystems for smart and sustainable city life, the book concludes with the research challenges and opportunities academics, researchers, and companies in implementing blockchain applications.

• Independently organized chapters for greater readability, adaptability, and flexibility
• Examines numerous issues from multiple perspectives and academic and industry experts
• Explores both advances and challenges of cutting-edge technologies
• Coverage of security, trust, and privacy issues in smart cities

• Language: English
• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Release date: Aug 25, 2021
• ISBN: 9780323859882

Book preview

Blockchain for Smart Cities

Editors

Saravanan Krishnan

Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Anna University Regional Campus, Tirunelveli, India

Valentina Emilia Balas

Full Professor, Department of Automatics and Applied Software, Faculty of Engineering, Aurel Vlaicu University of Arad, Arad, Romania

E. Golden Julie

Department of CSE, Regional campus, Anna University, Tirunelveli, India

Y. Harold Robinson

Post Doctoral Fellow, School of Information Technology and Engineering, Vellore Institute of Technology, Vellore, India

Raghvendra Kumar

Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, GIET University, Gunupur, India

Table of Contents

Cover image

Title page

Copyright

Contributors

Biographies

Chapter 1. Smart cities with blockchain technology: a comprehensive survey

1. Introduction

2. Related work

3. Permissioned and permissionless blockchain in the smart city environment

4. Applications of blockchain technology in smart cities

5. Case studies

6. Conclusion

Chapter 2. Future of Sustainable Smart Cities: an insight

1. Introduction

2. Characteristics and technologies used in SSC

3. Future of IoT and Blockchain and its impact on the various sectors of smart cities

4. Conclusion

Chapter 3. Artificial intelligence and machine learning approaches for smart transportation in smart cities using blockchain architecture

1. Introduction

2. Related works

3. Proposed system

4. Results and discussion

5. Conclusion

Chapter 4. Blockchain architecture for intelligent water management system in smart cities

1. Introduction

2. Blockchain in water management

3. Proposed system

4. Results and discussion

5. Conclusion

Chapter 5. Blockchain-based energy-efficient smart green city in IoT environments

1. Introduction

2. Related works

3. Proposed system

4. Domestic wastes collection and management

5. Overview of proposed architecture design

6. Results and discussion

7. Conclusion

Chapter 6. Applications of blockchain in smart cities: detecting fake documents from land records using blockchain technology

1. Introduction

2. Related survey

3. Existing land registration framework

4. Proposed framework

5. Implementation

6. Conclusion

Chapter 7. Citizen e-governance using blockchain

1. Introduction

2. Use cases

3. Considerations involved in implementation

4. Case studies

5. Summary

Chapter 8. Cloud/edge computing for smart cities

1. Introduction

2. Characteristics

3. Frameworks

4. Existing system

5. Infrastructure architecture

6. Smart city challenges and concerns

7. Why do we need smart cities?

8. Applications of edge computing

9. Features of edge computing

10. How edge computing making cities smarter and better

11. Conclusion

Chapter 9. Waste management in smart cities using blockchaining technology

1. Introduction

2. Objective

3. Proposed work

4. Conclusion

Chapter 10. Introduction to blockchain and distributed systems—fundamental theories and concepts

1. Introduction

2. Literature review

3. Blockchain concepts

4. Blockchain taxomony

5. Applications of blockchain

6. Challenges of blockchain

7. Conclusions

Chapter 11. Blockchain for green smart cities

1. Introduction

2. Green smart city

3. Blockchain technology

4. Characteristics of blockchain to develop smart city

5. Smart city application integrated with blockchain

6. Conclusion and future directions

Chapter 12. A novel Blockchain-based Access Control Manager to Electronic Health Records (EHRs)

1. Introduction

2. Related work

3. Blockchain as an Access Control Manager for EHRs

4. Access Control Policies

5. Conclusion

Chapter 13. Application of blockchain in automotive industry, waste management, and seed traceability

1. Introduction

2. Literature review

3. Blockchain in the automotive industry

4. System model

5. Blockchain in waste management

6. Seed traceability using smart contracts

7. Electronic voting system

8. Conclusion

Chapter 14. Blockchain-based health care monitoring for privacy preservation of COVID-19 medical records

1. Introduction

2. Background and related works

3. Blockchain taxonomy

4. Proposed work

5. Efficiency of proposed model

6. Conclusions

Chapter 15. A reliable blockchain and edge–cloud architecture for facilitating fault-tolerant IoT applications

1. Introduction

2. Related work

3. Reliable blockchain and edge–cloud architecture for facilitating fault-tolerant IoT applications

4. Simulation results and discussion

5. Conclusions

Chapter 16. Applications of blockchain technology for smart cities in a nutshell

1. Introduction

2. Application of blockchain technology in smart cities

3. Conclusion

Chapter 17. Standards and Protocols of Blockchain

1. Introduction

2. Standards of Blockchain

3. Protocols of Blockchain

4. Conclusion

Index

Copyright

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Contributors

A. Amuthan,     Department of CSE, Pondicherry Engineering College, Puducherry, India

T. Ananth Kumar,     Department of CSE, IFET College of Engineering, Villupuram, Tamil Nadu, India

V. Ashok,     Department of CSE, Rajalakshmi Institute of Technology, Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India

J.V. Bibal Benifa,     Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Information Technology, Kottayam, Kerala, India

Usharani Chelladurai,     University College of Engineering BIT Campus, Anna University Tiruchirappalli, Tiruchirappalli, Tamil Nadu, India

R. Dinesh Kumar,     Siddhartha Institute of Technology and Sciences, Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh, India

Lakshmi Prabha Ganesan,     Department of Computer Applications, Sri Sarada College for Women, Tirunelveli, Tamil Nadu, India

Amol Goje,     Society for Data Science, Pune, India

K. Gokulakrishnan,     Anna University-Regional Campus, Tirunelveli, Tamil Nadu, India

E. Golden Julie,     Anna University-Regional Campus, Tirunelveli, Tamil Nadu, India

Y. Harold Robinson,     School of Information Technology and Engineering, Vellore Institute of Technology, Vellore, Tamil Nadu, India

S. Jeba Prasanna Idas,     Department of CSE, College of Engineering and Technology, International University of Technology Twintech, Sanaa, Yemen

A. Jaya Kumar,     Department of CSE, IFET College of Engineering, Villupuram, Tamil Nadu, India

J. Jesu Vedha Nayahi,     Anna University-Regional Campus, Tirunelveli, Tamil Nadu, India

D. Jeyabharathi,     Department of Information Technology, Sri Krishna College of Technology, Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, India

D. Kesavaraja,     Department of CSE, Dr. Sivanthi Aditanar College of Engineering, Tiruchendur, Tamil Nadu, India

Saravanan Krishnan,     Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Anna University Regional Campus, Tirunelveli, Tamil Nadu, India

Sakthi Kumaresh,     M.O. P. Vaishnav College for Women, Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India

V.N.S. Manaswini,     Siddhartha Institute of Technology and Sciences, Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh, India

A.S. Radha Mani,     V.V. College of Engineering, Tirunelveli, Tamil Nadu, India

J. Nulyn Punitha Markavathi,     Department of CSE, PSN College of Engineering, Tirunelveli, Tamil Nadu, India

C.M. Naga Sudha,     Anna University-MIT Campus, Chrompet, Tamil Nadu, India

R. Nishanth,     Cochin University College of Engineering Kuttanad, CUSAT, Kuttanad, Kerala

V. Padmapriya,     Innovation Cluster Lab, Department of Computer Applications, B. M. S. College of Engineering, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India

Sneha Pandey,     Department of Information Technology, Netaji Subhas University of Technology, New Delhi, India

Seethalakshmi Pandian,     University College of Engineering BIT Campus, Anna University Tiruchirappalli, Tiruchirappalli, Tamil Nadu, India

S. Porkodi,     Dr. Sivanthi Aditanar College of Engineering, Tiruchendur, Tamil Nadu, India

N.R. Rajalakshmi,     Computer Science and Engineering, Vel Tech Rangarajan Dr. Sagunthala R & D Institute of Science and Technology, Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India

T. Sangeetha,     Department of Information Technology, Sri Krishna College of Technology, Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, India

V.V. Satyanarayana Tallapragada,     Tallapragada Department of ECE, Sree Vidyanikethan Engineering College, Tirupati, Andhra Pradesh, India

Rishabh Setiya,     Department of Information Technology, Netaji Subhas University of Technology, New Delhi, India

Madhavi Shamkuwar,     Zeal Institute of Business Administration, Computer Application and Research, Savitribai Phule Pune University, Ganesh Khind, Pune, Maharashtra, India

Deepak Kumar Sharma,     Department of Information Technology, Netaji Subhas University of Technology, New Delhi, India

Neha Sharma,     Analytics and Insights, Tata Consultancy Services, Pune, India

Ayush Kumar Singh,     Department of Information Technology, Netaji Subhas University of Technology, New Delhi, India

Inderjit Singh,     Vara Technology Pvt Ltd, Pune, India

D.N. Sujatha,     Innovation Cluster Lab, Department of Computer Applications, B. M. S. College of Engineering, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India

S. Sundaresan,     Department of ECE, SRM TRP Engineering College, Trichy, Tamil Nadu, India

K. Suresh Kumar,     Department of CSE, IFET College of Engineering, Villupuram, Tamil Nadu, India

Angelin Merling Thava,     Department of Information Technology, Jayaraj Annapackiam CSI College of Engineering, Nazareth, Tamil Nadu, India

V. Usha,     Computer Science and Engineering, Vel Tech Rangarajan Dr. Sagunthala R & D Institute of Science and Technology, Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India

G. Venifa Mini,     Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Noorul Islam Centre for Higher Education, Nagercoil, Tamil Nadu, India

Biographies

Dr. Saravanan Krishnan is a Senior Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Anna University, Regional Campus, Tirunelveli, Tamilnadu. He did his ME in Software Engineering and PhD in Computer Science Engineering. His research interests include cloud computing, software engineering, Internet of Things, and smart cities. He has published research papers in 14 international conferences and 27 international journals. He has also written 9 book chapters and 5 books with international publishers. He has done consultancy works for Municipal Corporation and Smart City schemes. He is an active researcher and academician. Also, he is a reviewer for many reputed journals in Elsevier, IEEE, etc.

Valentina E. Balas is a Professor in the Department of Automatics and Applied Software at the Faculty of Engineering, Aurel Vlaicu University of Arad, Romania. She holds a PhD Cum Laude in Applied Electronics and Telecommunications from Polytechnic University of Timisoara. Dr. Balas is author of more than 350 research papers. Her research interests are in intelligent systems, fuzzy control, soft computing, smart sensors, information fusion, modeling, and simulation. She is the Editor-in-Chief of IJAIP and IJCSysE journals in Inderscience, member of Editorial Board of several national and international journals, and evaluator expert for national and international projects and PhD theses. Dr. Balas is the Director of Intelligent Systems Research Centre and Director of the Department of International Relations, Programs, and Projects in Aurel Vlaicu University of Arad. She is recipient of the Tudor Tanasescu Prize from the Romanian Academy for contributions in the field of soft computing methods (2019).

E. Golden Julie is a Senior Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Anna University, Regional Campus, Tirunelveli. She has received PhD in Information and Communication Engineering from Anna University, Chennai, in 2017. She has more than 13 years of experience in teaching. She has published more than 35 papers in various international journals and presented more than 20 papers in both national and international conferences. She has written 10 book chapters in books published by Springer and IGI Global. Her research areas include wireless sensor ad-hoc networks, soft computing, block chain, fuzzy logic, neural network, soft computing techniques, clustering, and IoT. She is also an active life-time member of the Indian Society of Technical Education.

Dr. Y. Harold Robinson is currently working in the School of Information Technology and Engineering, Vellore Institute of Technology, Vellore. He received his PhD in Information and Communication Engineering from Anna University, Chennai, in 2016. He has more than 15 years of experience in teaching. He has published more than 100 papers in various international journals and presented more than 45 papers in both national and international conferences. He is acting as an editor for many research books. His research areas include wireless sensor networks, ad-hoc networks, soft computing, blockchain, IoT, and image processing.

Dr. Raghvendra Kumar is an Associate Professor in Computer Science and Engineering Department at GIET University, India. He received BTech, MTech, and PhD in Computer Science and Engineering, India, and Postdoc Fellow from Institute of Information Technology, Virtual Reality, and Multimedia, Vietnam. He has published number of research papers in international journal and conferences. He also published 13 chapters in edited book published by IGI Global, Springer, and Elsevier. His research areas are computer networks, data mining, cloud computing and secure multiparty computations, theory of computer science, and design of algorithms. He has authored and edited 23 computer science books on IoT, data mining, and biomedical engineering.

Chapter 1: Smart cities with blockchain technology

a comprehensive survey

Saravanan Krishnan ¹ , and Lakshmi Prabha Ganesan ²       ¹ Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Anna University Regional Campus, Tirunelveli, Tamil Nadu, India      ² Department of Computer Applications, Sri Sarada College for Women, Tirunelveli, Tamil Nadu, India

Abstract

Because urban populations will be the growing faster in years to come, many initiatives including smart city projects have been proposed to meet the needs of urban people and to improve their quality of life. Sustainability, energy efficiency, and a green environment are the major aspirations of smart cities. Many challenges, including air quality, energy efficiency, urban mobility, safety and security, have been faced to make the smart cities concept a reality. However, perhaps in all such things the major challenge faced by the smart cities is data privacy and security. In this paper we have discussed securing smart cities using block chain technology. A smart city uses many sensors and actuators, and it is relying completely on the concept of the Internet of Things (IoT). To maintain sustainability and real-time deployment of smart cities the necessary factors required are secured wireless connectivity and IoT. Being smarter also makes the city more vulnerable to cyber attacks. We have proposed a comprehensive survey about various applications such as healthcare systems, smart vehicles, smart trafficking, and smart economy sharing services in the smart cities, which implements blockchain technology. Case studies of smart Dubai and smart London have also been presented in this paper.

Keywords

Blockchain; Case study; Smart cities; Smart economy; Smart healthcare

1. Introduction

2. Related work

3. Permissioned and permissionless blockchain in the smart city environment

3.1 Permissionless BCT

3.2 Permissioned BCT

4. Applications of blockchain technology in smart cities

4.1 Sharing economy services

4.2 Smart vehicles

4.3 Smart Healthcare Services (SHS)

5. Case studies

5.1 Smart Dubai using Blockchain

5.1.1 Use cases of Blockchain strategy in Dubai Government Services

5.2 Blockchain in the United Kingdom

5.2.1 UK projects related to Blockchain

5.3 UK and India Consortium

6. Conclusion

References

Further reading

1. Introduction

Because blockchain has a disruptive and decentralized nature, it has attracted research communities and has many applications, such as smart contracts, cryptocurrency, secure payments, securing healthcare systems, and so forth. Due to its decentralized nature blockchain systems have no third-party authority to be trusted on the transactions; instead, every node in the system should trust each other for successful implementation of the systems. To attain consensus among different types of nodes in a system there are several common consensus mechanisms proposed.

To maintain equality and fairness among the nodes, the consensus models have specific objectives, and each block added to a transaction must satisfy a set of rules. The common objectives include coming to an agreement, collaboration among the nodes, cooperation, equal rights for all the nodes in the system, and active participation of every person in the system. Fig. 1.1 shows the workflow model of blockchain.

Consensus mechanisms will only work if all the elements in the system work in harmony. If any of the nodes malfunction, then the whole system will fail. This will lead to the Byzantine Generals’ Problem. The main problem with Byzantine is to reach an agreement. If even a single fault occurs, nodes cannot come to an agreement. In this paper the different consensus mechanisms used in different applications in a smart environment have been discussed, particularly proof of work (PoW), proof of stake (PoS), and their variations, different Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT) mechanisms and their applications in smart environments. The consensus algorithms are reviewed based on three features, namely their real-time implementation (Castro and Liskov, 1999), security, and fault tolerance. In the PoW systems, there are mainly two features that have contributed to the wide popularity of this consensus protocol: (1) it is hard to find a solution for the mathematical problem; and (2) it is easy to verify the correctness of that solution. Perhaps the features there are also some shortcomings of this protocols they are 51% of risk, resource consumption, time consuming, and the time elapsed during the confirmation of the transaction. BFT is the property of a system that is able to continue operating even if some of the nodes fail or act maliciously. BFT is a crucial part of an effective blockchain and there are multiple ways in which it can be implemented. Deciding which approach to take requires weighing the nature and priorities of the community associated with the blockchain an organization wants to build (Sun and Duan, 2014). The variants of BFTs have higher efficient when combined with other consensus methods. To compare the consensus mechanisms factors such as preserving node identity, vulnerability and mining processes are taken into account.

Figure 1.1 Shows the process of updating blockchain.

2. Related work

A Smart city environment completely relies on data to meet the needs of a growing urban population. Secured wireless connectivity and the Internet of Things (IoT) technology are the factors mandatory for real-time deployment of smart cities. To achieve this, blockchain is integrated with the IoT in smart city environment (Botello et al., 2020). The key elements of blockchain technology (BCT) include distributed ledger, immutable transactional records, and smart contracts, which makes the smart environment more reliable and secured. Blockchain is a sequence of blocks where blocks have a complete record of all the transactions. Fig. 1.2 shows the structure of a blockchain. A block is the basic fundamental unit of a blockchain, which has two divisions, namely, (1) block header and (2) block body (Chandel et al., 2019). The header part contains the information about the block version, timestamp, nonce, hash of its parent block, Merkle tree root hash, where the information about all the other blocks in the blockchain has been located, and nBits. The block body contains the actual data and the hash value. The workflow of a blockchain framework has been shown in Fig. 1.1 where a user initiates the transaction request and the transaction data is packaged into a block and sent through the network to all its members. Then the transaction is validated through consensus mechanism and approved by the network. Finally the block is added to the chain through its hash value in the Merkle tree.

The correctness, latency, and security of a blockchain integrated model is achieved through consensus mechanisms and there are several algorithms for consensus have been proposed in the literature. A tamper-resistant memory-hardened PoW model has been proposed in Sharma and Park (2018) to ensure the security and privacy in the blockchain framework. Alfandi et al. (2020) has proposed an integrated IoT model with fog computing and a BFT consensus algorithm, namely, pBFT, where all the devices in the system will participate in updating blockchain and it can tolerate up to one-third of the total devices being faulty, hence the system is fault-tolerant and minimizes the computational overhead and latency. The proposed system has two types of vehicles: (1) critical vehicles for which secured data transfer is required; and (2) normal vehicles. To reduce the computational overhead, consensus is applied only for critical infrastructures, and the data is finally updated in the fog. Sharma and Park (2018) has proposed a hybrid distributed framework for meeting the architectural challenges in a smart city environment such as scalability, network bandwidth, single point of failure, privacy and security, and high latency. To reduce the single point of failure, edge nodes preprocess the raw data from IoT devices and send the data to the core network if necessary; the core network, which has miners, update the blockchain by processing and verifying the PoW, so they had stated that their work is well-suited for a smart city environment.

Figure 1.2 The structure and how the blocks are organized.

3. Permissioned and permissionless blockchain in the smart city environment

There are several public as well as private sector applications where the BCT can be applicable such as financial services (Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc.,), healthcare systems, public security (Cash & Bassiouni, 2018), digital identity, and so on. BCT has a decentralized nature over the data so it is not applicable for sharing the confidential data in which data security and privacy is a major concern. So a variation of blockchain known as permissioned BCT found many applications where the data confidentiality is at the top. Some degree of decentralization is gained in permissioned BCT, and data privacy, integrity, and security can be maintained for organizational purposes, enterprises, several public sectors, and healthcare systems.

3.1. Permissionless BCT

Permissionless blockchains are the first generation of blockchain. These are the distributed ledgers where the data is transparent to all the participating nodes and the governing rules can be on-chain or off-chain. It is completely decentralized. Bitcoin and Ethereum are the well-known permissionless blockchain applications. The anonymity of the nodes participating in the blockchain network is a major challenge in the permissionless BCT. However, the data once batched into block and added to the blockchain by attaining consensus among the participants in the network cannot be modified by any node in the network. Hence the data integrity is achieved.

3.2. Permissioned BCT

Permissioned BCT is run by the members of a consortium. Only preapproved entities can run the nodes that validate transaction blocks and execute smart contracts on the blockchain. It is applicable where the interaction between the participants must be secure and they do not even have to trust each other, so the consensus mechanism should be fault tolerant and have fast finality of transactions. Hence BFT consensus can be used in such systems. The Hyperledger project is one of the distributed ledgers hosted by the Linux foundation (Sukhwani et al., 2017). The nuances between the permissioned and permissionless block chain systems are

(1) Decentralization: Permissionless BCT must be decentralized and distributed so that no one entity can bring the network down, whereas the measure of decentralization is less in permissioned BCT when compared to the former. It is based on the structure of business relationships between the consortium members.

(2) Transparency: In permissionless BCT the transaction information such as how the transaction is ordered and batched into blocks is transparent to all the miners in the network, since they have cryptoeconomic incentives (Androulaki, Barger et al., 2018). But this is not the case in permissioned BCT because they do not have cryptoeconomic incentives built into them; instead they focus on how to minimize the cost, time of the information, and security in sharing the information.

(3) Privacy or Anonymity: In permissionless BCT, the miners and other participants in the network can stay anonymous; for example, Bitcoin and Ethereum can be considered as pseudo-anonymous. A permissioned BCT offer fine-grained access to the transactions and assets so degree of data privacy is high when compared to the former.

(4) Governance: There is no preexisting level of trust is needed between the participating nodes in a permissionless BCT network. All the peers participate in validating and processing of transactions through consensus. It offers both off-chain (e.g.,: Etherum, Bitcoin) and on-chain (e.g., Tezos) governance. In permissioned BCT it needs some degree of preexisting trust and the transactions are validated and processed only by those who are already recognized by the ledger.

(5) Security: Due to complete decentralization and distributed ledger technology (DLT) permissionless blockchain is resistant to hacking and DDoS attacks. The security of a public blockchain relies completely on its proof of work. The data privacy and scalability are the major challenges in a public blockchain, so this limits the adaptation of security token in a public blockchain. A private blockchain, on the other hand, can offer higher scalability and performance than the public blockchain but is more vulnerable to hacking and DDoS attacks.

4. Applications of blockchain technology in smart cities

4.1. Sharing economy services

Sun et al. (2016) proposed a conceptual framework for smart cities that is based on human need, organization, and technology. The service relationships among these three factors make the framework trust-free, decentralized, secured, and democratized. Decentralization is achieved by replacing central authorities with a community of peers to form a peer-to-peer network. This work focuses on how a BCT can be adopted in a smart city environment through sharing economy services and service relationships. Their work elicited the researches toward how a blockchain can contribute to sharing economy services in a smart city environment.

Gori et al., (2015) narrated the interdependence between the smart city concept and sharing economy. They have stated that the cities become even smarter if they have implemented the sharing economy services. Sharing platforms can contribute to the economic success of a city through meeting the needs of the citizen by sharing personal assets, microbusiness needs, and sharing transportation services. However a framework for sharing economy services has not been discussed in the paper. This paper narrates the difficulties in sharing economy services in terms of law and regulations and how start-up and microeconomy services can be benefited through smart sharing.

4.2. Smart vehicles

The work of Sharma, Moon, and Park (2017) proposed a vehicular network architecture using blockchain for a smart city environment. They have framed a vehicular network named Block-VN, which primarily aims at high scalability. There are two types of nodes in the proposed system, namely, controller/miner nodes and the ordinary nodes. The system is highly scalable, and the use of BCT by miner nodes makes the system reliable and the availability of networks can be enhanced through interaction between the miner nodes. A detailed schema of their proposed system is not provided so the challenges that may occur during the implementation of such a system may not be addressed.

A permissioned BCT is implemented by Michelin et al. (2016) where the vehicles, road side infrastructures (RSI) and service providers (SP) are the entities. Their proposed system is resistant to Sybil attacks as the ordinary vehicles are identified using location-based trust model. The RSI and SP are only authorized to manage the blockchain where the ordinary vehicles only store their public key hash value in the Merkle tree. This can reduce storage of unnecessary data where a large number of vehicles can participate in the proposed system of smart city environment.

4.3. Smart Healthcare Services (SHS)

The work of Solanas et al. (2014) stated smart health services (SHS) as a provision of ICT infrastructures and technology in the smart cities. They have stated that SHS is the augmentation of smart city infrastructures, mobile health, and e-health services. This paper reviewed the opportunities of their term smart health in different healthcare apps and medical services. They have also discussed about various challenges in the implementation of SHS in real-time scenarios. The following works are the extents of Solanas et al. (2014). A detailed schema of SHS ecosystem has been discussed in (Capossele et al., 2018). A descriptive model for interaction between the stakeholders in the development of SHS applications has been presented in the paper. Here, blockchain is proposed to form the core of middleware, which is placed at the top of the diverse set of assets and SHS applications. The legal, technical, and commercial challenges in implementing such a model have been discussed. The privacy, access control of the assets, trust, and data integrity are major factors to be considered while implementing such SHS apps. They have paved the way for future research directions in terms of compliance and sustainable SHS apps.

The sensitivity of medical data of the patients and healthcare systems, data privacy, and security challenges are addressed in Tripathi, Ahad, and Paiva (2020) using BCT in smart healthcare services. They have proposed a secured SHS named S2HS to provide data transparency to all the actors in the system while maintaining the privacy of the patients. The middleware consists of permissioned Hyperledger BCT. To preserve integrity of the data, encryption and digital signatures schemes have been used. The system is resistant to eavesdropping and data theft. The patient’s EHR is stored in the blockchain using the hash value despite the patient’s identity so the privacy of the patient is preserved while achieving the data transparency and also the mismatching of EHR is avoided.

An integration of IoT, blockchain, and machine learning is done in (Chakraborty et al., 2019) to monitor the patient’s health condition continually and so the quality of living and healthcare systems in a smart city can be improved. The IoT module collects the patient’s health data through sensors and wearable devices which are stored externally using the block chain technology and the machine learning module monitors the data collected and find out the anomalies if any. A permissioned BCT has been used in their proposed model to provide accurate data. A consortium model of hospital, doctors and patients using permissioned BCT and cryptographic security has been proposed (Ramani et al., 2018). They have proposed a secured model of healthcare systems in which updating blockchain requires the authentication of doctor’s identity and patient’s approval. The authentication mechanism is done by using elliptic curve cryptography (ECC).

5. Case studies

5.1. Smart Dubai using Blockchain

Dubai is a fast-growing city that has developed as a global hub for business, trade, and tourism over the last four decades. The Dubai smart city project aims to encourage collaboration between the public and private sectors to achieve targets in six focus areas: smart life, smart transportation, smart society, smart economy, smart governance, and smart environment (Kerr, 2016).

As smart phones become more ubiquitous and technology rapidly changes our lives, Dubai is marching toward a new era of improvement and embracing a higher quality of life. To provide a better communication, exchange of data and information and seamless connectivity for public and private sectors Dubai Data Law has been proposed and it consists of four data principles open data, shared data, big data, and rich data (Khan et al., 2017).

• Open data: Data published by the government or private sector to be used or exchanged with individuals or third parities openly.

• Shared data: Data to be available for sharing and reuse among entities.

• Big data: Large amounts of data to be analyzed to reveal patterns, trends, and associations.

• Rich data: Big data to be further utilized to deeper, often qualitative analyses, and extracting insights.

The Dubai Government has set up the Global blockchain Council, which is a public private initiative that brings government entities with local and international business/start-ups to foster blockchain development with test cases. Fig. 1.3 describes the blockchain strategy of Dubai Government. Dubai Multi Commodities Center is engaged in a test case related to the authentication and the transfer of Kimberley certificates. The Emirates Integrated Telecommunication Corporation (Du) is piloting a use case for health records to share data records between SP (Michelin et al., 2016).

5.1.1. Use cases of Blockchain strategy in Dubai Government Services

(1) Identity Management and Record Keeping: Emirates ID Authority can manage electronic identity of UAE citizens, for record keeping and the use of this identity for any other government services.

(2) Value Registry and Assets Management: Dubai Land Department (DLD) has achieved another technical milestone by becoming the world’s first government entity to adopt BCT. Following the launch of the Dubai blockchain Strategy in October 2016, which aims to make Dubai the first government in the world to apply all transactions through this network by 2020, DLD created a smart and secure database that records all real estate contracts. This strategy is in the stage of infancy and it is likely to be implemented in the sectors of FinTech, banking, and real estate to increase the efficiency of government’s operations.

Figure 1.3  Future directions of smart Dubai through the implementation blockchain technology. 

From https://schoolofdisruption.com/exponential-technologies/blockchain/.

(3) Voting System: Voting system with BCT can be used by the government for Federal National Council elections.

(4) Healthcare Record keeping: Dubai Health Authority may use BCT to securely maintain health record data and enable the sharing of data.

(5) Smart Cities and IoT: The Dubai Government has recently lunched Dubai Internet of Things strategy which aims at building the world’s most advanced IoT ecosystem for Dubai smart city to improve people’s lives. The integration of blockchain with IoT has many use cases as it allows peer-to-peer communication between IoT devices, and hence it enables the peer-to-peer market. Moreover, the blockchain enables the tracking of assets throughout the supply chain using IoT devices without the manual intervention from users (Christidis & Devetsikiotis, 2016).

(6) Smart Tourism ObjectTech is working with the Dubai Immigration and Visas Department to develop digital passports that can potentially eliminate manual checks at Dubai International airport (Nam, Dutt, Chathoth, & Khan, 2021). Their proposed system combines biometric verification and BCT, and will use a preapproved and entirely digitized passport to authorize passengers’ entrance into the country. The system will further verify individuals through a three-dimensional scan via a short tunnel as they walk from the aircraft to claim their baggage. Using BCT, the digitized passport will incorporate a feature called self-sovereign identity for privacy protection, which it claims allows passengers to control which parties can view their passport information.

5.2. Blockchain in the United Kingdom

The combination of continued urbanization and increased requirements for enhanced citizen participation continues to fuel the vision of the smart city. To promote the adoption of BCT across the government and private sectors across the country a nonprofit organization namely British Blockchain Association has been set up (DKV, nd). The British Blockchain Association has a vision to accelerate progress and collaboration of blockchain based projects in the United Kingdom. Table 1.1 shows the application of blockchain in public services through GovTech companies of the UK government (Fig. 1.4).

Table 1.1

Figure 1.4 GovTech companies that are identified for public services.

5.2.1. UK projects related to Blockchain

1. Blockchain technology for algorithmic regulation and compliance (BARAC): BARAC investigates the feasibility of using BCT for automating regulation and compliance producing a proof-of-concept platform and facilitating knowledge transfer by means of a bottom-up cross-disciplinary approach developed together with industry and regulators. This project aims to have impact in several sectors including finance, food industry, education, business models and managerial practices.

2. ARCHANGEL - Trusted Archives of Digital Public Records: The aim of ARCHANGEL is to ensure the long-term sustainability of digital archives though the design, development and trialing of transformational new DLT to promote accessibility and ensure integrity of content, while maximizing its impact through novel business models for commodification and open access. ARCHANGEL will leverage cutting-edge machine learning to collect robust digital signatures derived from digitized physical and born-digital content, within a permissioned DLT. Both signatures and programmatic code to render content and verify its provenance and integrity will be encoded within the