Smart contracts for automated control system in Blockchain based smart cities

Abstract

Nowadays, smart applications are increasing day by day to improve the standard of living in smart cities. A modern-day smart city is characterized by the presence of numerous smart Information and Communication Technology (ICT)-enabled services such as automated healthcare, automatic building monitoring, home automation, smart parking, traffic management, data security, among others. Such cities employ multitudes of Internet of Things (IoT) devices to collect and share data between trusted users by means of a centralized intermediary for monitoring and control of the myriad automatic activities. However, a centralized intermediary is plagued by issues such as single point of failure, risk of data loss, man-in-the-middle attack, and so forth. Blockchain-based smart contracts for automated control in smart cities provide a decentralized and secure alternative. In this paper, an Ethereum based system design for decentralized applications in smart cities has been proposed that enables systems to share data without an intermediary between trusted and non-trusted stakeholders using Ethereum based self-executing contracts. Such contracts allow automated multi-step workflows for smart applications. Two use cases, have been considered namely smart healthcare and smart building monitoring, as proof of stake of the proposed Ethereum based contract. The performance of the proposed scheme for these use cases has been presented with Keccack 256 transaction hash, the total number of transactions, gas consumed by each contract. Such an attempt is a worthwhile addition to state of the art as evident from the results presented herein. The modeling simulation and analysis of hashing power shows that for hashing power greater than 55% the probability of double spending attack reaches to 42% maximum. So it is concluded that the probability of double spending increases with the increase of transaction values.