Blockchain for Sustainable Smart Cities
Iftikhar Ahmad, Syeda Warda Ashar, Umamma Khalid, Anmol Irfan, Wajeeha Khalil · 2021
Large scale urbanization posed a number of challenges for the government and city planner. Smart city concept can be applied to overcome these challenges. However, the concept of smart city by itself faces numerous challenges most prominently data handling challenge. The data handling challenge includes data formatting, information sharing, data quality, security and privacy, and scalability. Blockchain is a novel technology mainly associated with the cryptocurrencies. Blockchain is integrated in smart city applications to improve the living standard of citizens and the overall management of the smart city. In this chapter, we present an overview of smart city and discuss the challenges faced for the realization of smart city dream. Specifically, we focus on data handling challenges faced by the smart city. We present blockchain as enabling technology, and present uses cases where blockchain is employed to address the key challenges of a smart city. We observed that the intrinsic properties (such as public/private key combination, time stamped record management, immutability etc.) of the blockchain has the ability to address key challenges of a smart city such as data sharing, privacy and security, health applications, and smart infrastructure management. We conclude the work by discussing potential open research questions.