Blockchain Technology for Smart Cities

A smart city is described as far from being an unambiguous concept, changing with each iteration of a much smarter version of residents living or economic activity. However, in recent years the governments around the world have been trying hard to provide the most advanced form of life to residents that their resources can afford. This means that there is no pre-defined definition and any city that is deemed to provide value to its citizens as well as generate benefit for the global society shall be considered smart. The motive of this paper is to provide a comprehensive review on Blockchain technology based smart city and enterprises their motivation, challenges and applications, in order to overcome their services, and production costs. This chapter will further explain about use cases of Blockchain technology for smart city application.

Since the inception of blockchain and Bitcoin (Nakamoto, Bitcoin: A peer-to-peer electronic cash system (2008) [18]), a decentralized-distributed ledger system and its associated cryptocurrency, respectively, the world has witnessed a slew of newer adaptations and applications. Although the original distributed ledger technology of blockchain is deemed secure and decentralized, the confirmation of transactions is inefficient by design. Recently adopted, some distributed ledgers based on a directed acyclic graph validate transactions efficiently without the physically and environmentally costly building process of blocks (Lerner, Dagcoin: a crytocurrency without blocks (2015) [17]). However, centrally-controlled confirmation against the odds of multiple validation disqualifies that newer system as a decentralized-distributed ledger. In this regard, we introduce an innovative distributed ledger system by reconstructing a chain of antichains based on a given partially ordered pool of transactions. Each antichain contains distinct nodes whose approved transactions are recursively validated by subsequently augmenting nodes. The boxer node closes the box and keeps the hash of all transactions confirmed by the box-genesis node. Designation of boxers and box-geneses is conditionally randomized for decentralization. The boxes are serially concatenated with recursive confirmation without incurring the cost of box generation. Rewards are paid to the contributing nodes of the ecosystem whose trust is built on the doubly-secure protocol of confirmation. A value-preserving medium of payment is among numerous practical applications discussed herein.

The increasing urbanization demands development of smart cities. Smart cities can be considered as to serve the requirement of its citizen in better way. The smart cities have many applications involving intelligent gas monitoring. In this chapter we will find about the intelligent gas monitoring in smart city scenario. We will see the aspects of smart gas monitoring, understand the concept of gas sensing, requirement of gas monitoring viz., classification and quantification of gases/odors and the brief introduction about the gas sensing. Further, we will understand the application of blockchain in the intelligent gas monitoring.

This article describes three points: (1) how a fine-grained yet systematic model of regional material sustainability called Commodity Ecology is being linked to current technological trends (2) of societies evenly saturated with ever cheaper and more mobile Information Communication Technologies (ICT) and (3) increasingly organized by decentralized ledgers like Blockchain. We live in a society connected by the Internet and increasingly served by and even ruled by online platforms. Particularly, an evenly shared mobile-phone revolution in ICT is putting platform access in the hands of all peoples around the world. Another disruptive technology after the Internet is blockchain technology which has revolutionized the exchange of information in areas such as cryptocurrency, supply chain management, healthcare and smart contracts. Thanks to these technological developments, instead of just smart cities, we now live among real/virtual ‘smart regions’ that on their own are capable of deliberating, finding, and buying/selling en masse toward their own better choices in sustainable material choices and better waste handling. These trends are utilized by the first online blockchain-based virtual community platform for ‘smart regions’ that facilitates this global, multi-regional drive to more democratic, holistic, and sustainable ecological design in all of our consumptive choices. Commodity Ecology is a model, rubric, and checklist for sustainability in 130 material categories, on a virtual platform for deliberation in over 860 distinct ecoregions simultaneously. The United Nations Academic Impact Office called Commodity Ecology a top global initiative for actually achieving Sustainable Development Goal #12, Responsible Consumption and Production.

We propose a novel Blockchain architecture for providing services with insertion and deletion features without compromising decentralization and integrity. In our proposed architecture, we construct three stage multiple layered blockchain. In previous blockchain architectures, it is difficult to modify the contents and contents-index because they are in one public blockchain. In our architecture, extra blockchain manages the link between contents and content-index to resolve the difficulty in modifying the contents. We present various use cases of our multiple layered blockchain architecture to demonstrate its effectiveness.

With the concept of Smart City, the concept of a Smart Traffic Management System comes up automatically. Traffic chaos has increased a lot nowadays. There are now more vehicles than there are men on road. Due to this boom in urbanization and the number of vehicles on road, the problem to keep a check on the riders has also become very difficult for the policemen. People take traffic safety measures for granted and do not take them seriously. As a result, a lot of accidents happen heavily due to not wearing helmet on motorcycles, and not following the safety measures prescribed by the traffic police department of the nation. To overcome this challenge, this solution will act as a helping hand for the policemen in controlling the traffic. The solution will detect the riders for the helmet, and help the policemen to get an actual glimpse of the helmet-wearing status in the city and better control the traffic accidents and enforce the traffic rules. If the rider is found to be not wearing a helmet then his or her number plate will be scanned and stored in the fine database, from where a fine will be generated based on the vehicle registration number that has been captured by the surveillance camera.

Smart cities are becoming smarter because of the currently development of technology world. A smart city includes different electronic devices such as street cameras, sensors for transportation system, GSM module for smart waste management, etc. Blockchain Technology in smart cities is provide efficient secure peer to peer network in huge data world in those generated in smart cities use cases such as healthcare data, autonomous vehicles communication environment. Smart city technologies are encouraging the use of smart phones to connect with everything’s, and also person can access the things data through the smart phone. Therefore, Internet of Things (IoT) are playing a great role in making the cities smarter. This chapter aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the use of smart city technologies and its application challenges. This chapter will further conclude about the smart systems which is going to install in smart cities to reduce the human efforts and ensure more security and ease to human beings.

Nowadays, data are generated both by users and other systems deriving new data from the previous ones for supporting decision making. The Electronic Health Records contains from structured data (e.g. hospital id, etc.), semi-structured data (e.g. a Health Level Seven-based records), to unstructured data (e.g. patient’s symptoms). The big challenge with health in smart cities is associated with the prevention, both the business and human health point of view. That is to say, avoid the propagation of certain diseases’ patterns is the best option no just for people, but also from the city’s health and the local economy. Thus, an architecture able to integrate into an Organizational Memory the medical data coming from heterogeneous repositories with the aim of gathering different kinds of symptoms is introduced. The query in the architecture is understood such as an unstructured text (i.e. symptoms) or an electronic health record. In this sense, the architecture is able to reach similar cases from the organizational memory based on a textual similarity analysis for limiting the search space. Next, using the International Classification of Diseases is possible to convert a case to a vector model representation in order to compute metric distances and get other cases order by a level of similarity. Each query answer contains a set of recommendations based on the frequency of diagnoses related to similar cases are given in order to share previous experiences. The processes point of view related to architecture is outlined. Finally, some conclusions and future works are outlined.