۱٫ Introduction

۲٫ Blockchain: background and architecture

۳٫ Smart city: characteristics, pillars and security requirements

۴٫ Motivations for Integration of Blockchain and Smart Cities

۵٫ Blockchain in smart cities

۶٫ Open issues and future research directions

۷٫ Conclusion

References

Abstract

In recent years, smart city has emerged as a new paradigm to provide high quality facilities to the citizens by dynamically optimising the city resources. Smart cities can offer finest services for boosting the daily life of citizens on healthcare, transportation, energy consumption, and education. However, the concept of smart city is still evolving and despite its potential vision, there are proliferating security challenges. Blockchain has the potential to promote the development of smart cities owing to its good properties such as auditability, transparency, immutability and decentralization. Therefore, this paper presents the state-of-the-art blockchain technology to solve the security issues of smart cities. Initially, the paper throws light on the background knowledge and then surveys the utility of blockchain in various smart communities such as healthcare, transportation, smart grid, supply chain management, financial systems and data center networks. Finally, some future research directions are identified through extensive literature survey on blockchain based smart city systems.

Introduction

The past few decades have witnessed a meteoric rise in the world’s population that lived in urban area. Nowadays, more than 55 % of the world population are living in urban areas and over the next 30 years, this rate is predicted to reach 70 %, as by 2050, an additional 25 billion people are predicted to move to urban areas [1,2]. The explosive growth in the world’s population coupled with the rapid urbanisation process brings forth numerous social, technical, organizational and economic problems, which tend to endanger the environmental and economical sustainability of cities. Hence, majority of governments are actively interested in adopting “smart” concepts to optimize the use of both tangible (e.g., natural resources, energy distribution networks, and transport infrastructures) and intangible assets (e.g., organizational capital in public administration systems, intellectual capital of companies and human capital) [3, 4]. In this regard, the concept of “Smart City” is proposed that use modern Information and Communication technology (ICT) in an intelligent manner aimed to build a sustainable urban environment and improve the QoL. The smart city has huge range of applications in the modern societies such as smart building for managing the temperature and lighting system [5]; smart energy for optimizing energy consumption using digital technologies; smart healthcare to promote diagnostics [6 – ۸]; smart technology to enable edge processing and intelligent network connectivity [9]; smart education to facilitate the education system using modern technologies; smart governance to provide digital services and policies from the government [10]; smart security to reduce security risks and protect properties, people and information [11].