Abstract
Nowadays, many urban areas are developing projects that are included within the area of smart cities. These systems tend to be highly heterogeneous and involve a large number of different technologies and participants. In general, cities deploy systems to integrate data and to provide protocols to ease interconnectivity between different subsystems. However, this is not enough to build a completely interoperable smart city, where control fully belongs to city administrators and citizens. Currently, in most cases, subsystems tend to be deployed and operated by providers creating silos. Furthermore, citizens, who should be the center of these systems, are often relegated to being just another participant. In this article, we study how smart cities can move towards decentralized and user-centric systems relying on distributed ledger technologies (DLT). For this, we define a conceptual framework that describes the interaction between smart city components, their participants, and the DLT ecosystem. We analyze the trust models that are created between the participants in the most relevant use cases, and we study the suitability of the different DLT types.
Highlights
In recent years, many metropolitan areas have deployed so-called smart city projects to be able to more efficiently deal with typical urban problems, such as population growth, mobility, or sustainability [1]
We analyze the trust models that are created between the participants in the most relevant use cases, and we study the suitability of the different distributed ledger technologies (DLT) types
We focus on how DLT can be a key technology to enable user-centric smart cities
Summary
Many metropolitan areas have deployed so-called smart city projects to be able to more efficiently deal with typical urban problems, such as population growth, mobility, or sustainability [1]. Smart cities are usually considered highly heterogeneous environments, where a combination of different participants (e.g., public administrations, providers, and citizens), technologies, and protocols (e.g., traditional web technology, IoT, and wireless communications) meet. One of the goals of public administrations with their smart city initiatives is to eliminate silos and to integrate projects from different areas into a common framework that facilitates the incorporation of new projects and participants into the same technological and procedural ecosystem, facilitating integration and data transmission between systems [2,3]. There are many types of smart cities and, here, we aim to gather the common characteristics that are relevant for the analysis in this paper. Researchers around the world came up with ideas to use a blockchain in other contexts beyond payments This led to proposals to create general purpose blockchains that could handle sophisticated use cases. Ethereum [9] is the most prominent blockchain of this type
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