Blockchain Application of IoT for Water Industry and Its Security

Abstract

Smart water with Internet of Things (IoT) has made advancements in China, whose principle advantage lies in three points. Overall, intelligent water management can be effectively utilized in monitoring the pipeline network at all times and analyzing leakage rapidly by locating the pipeline failures, so that the rate of water leakage can be substantially reduced. Second, the complaints frequently made by users caused by manual meter reading or inaccurate manual estimation. An effective solution to reduce user complaints and improve service quality is to realize automatic meter recording. Third, after breeding and developing in recent years, the countless real-time data, for example, quality, pressure, temperature, etc., of water can be measured and fed back to the database by smart water system, which can visually enhance the capabilities of water utilities. As IoT has been rapidly developed, it has attracted tremendous attention in smart water due to its salient features. The intelligent water industry can achieve real-time identification, location, tracking, monitoring, and triggering of corresponding events. However, it brings systemic security challenges and privacy risks because of inefficient central server. Therefore, blockchain, a decentralized ledger, is regarded as one of the remedies which achieves peer-to-peer transactions with appropriate authentication.