Design of a Trustless Smart City system: The #SmartME experiment

Abstract

A Smart City is an example of a domain where citizens and institutions, at any level, should be empowered to cooperate for the greater good of the respective communities, and one of the most powerful ways to attain that is by actually decentralizing any process that can escape single-authority control and the grip of centrally-managed bureaucracies, whilst at the same time not relying on any single party trusting any other. In line with this key insight, in this paper we have designed and implemented a decentralized, trustless DLT-based system for (environmental) sensing, data acquisition, storage, and consumption, in the context of a real-world Smart City deployment, #SmartME, and with the participation of independent, institutional, stakeholders. This Open Data system has been devised to be user-friendly, with an end-user wizard for trustless (i.e., independent) data audit. Indeed, the data collection layer does not trust any IoT node by default, but requires nodes to authenticate themselves when sending readings. Last but not least, the storage layer is again trustless, as institutions can pool together their resources, without trusting one another, nor entrusting the administration of the system to any third party. In this work we extend our preliminary proof-of-concept design, and explore the expected outcomes of scaling the system to comprise an even greater number of active institutions participating in the validation process, by carrying out simulation experiments. Results from these experiments help us in validating our approach and assessing its scalability.