The advent of Internet of Things (IoT) brought innovation along with unprecedented benefits of convenience and efficacy in many operations that were otherwise very cumbersome. This innovation explosion has surfaced a new dimension of vulnerability and physical threat to the data integrity of IoT networks. Implementing conventional cryptographic algorithms on IoT devices is not future-proof as these devices are constrained in terms of computational power, performance, and memory. In this paper, we are proposing a novel framework, a unique model that integrates IoT networks with a blockchain to address potential privacy and security threats for data integrity. Smart contracts are instrumental in this integration process and they are used to handle device authentication, authorization and access-control, and data management. We further share a new design model for interfaces to integrate both platforms while highlighting its performance results over the existing models. With the incorporation of off-chain data storage into the framework, overall scalability of the system can be increased. Finally, our research concludes how the proposed framework can be fused virtually into any existing IoT applications with minimal modifications.

https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/20/5/1389/pdf

Proof of Concept of Scalable Integration of Internet of Things and Blockchain in Healthcare.

The concept of smart city evolved with the integration of information and communication technology (ICT) in various sub-systems and processes in urban environment. The development of the smart cities is the best possible solution to major urban issues. It contributes towards economic and social development of the residents. It aims to provide the cordial environment in the domains of healthcare, education, transportation, power generation and dissipation, security, living, industry, etc., to the inhabitants to make their lives comfortable. Sustainability of these services is another major objective in a smart city framework. Along with the true realization of the idea of a smart city, advanced computational and communication technologies are contributing hugely towards its sustainable development. Communication technologies act as backbone to ensure connectivity at the various levels in a smart city framework. Novel smart city solutions for different application domains are designed and deployed by the industry using advanced computational technologies like IoT, Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain, Big Data and Cloud Computing. In this work, authors discuss the concept of smart city, its architecture and sustainability. Different operational domains in a smart city ecosystem are elaborated. The cyber physical aspect of the smart cities is discussed in brief. The role of various computational and communication technologies in the sustainable development of smart cities is presented. Limiting factors in the deployment of various advanced technologies in different smart city domains are highlighted. Security issues associated with the technological sustainable development of different smart city services along with existing solutions are discussed. The article is concluded by highlighting the future research directions.

Amalgamation of Advanced Technologies for Sustainable Development of Smart City Environment: A Review

In the coming years, services offered in the Smart City environment by autonomous robotic platforms with appropriated functionality have a high potential. They can be implemented in several key areas that increase the quality of life in Smart City: health, security, public order, tourism, education, maintenance etc. This paper presents a robotic platform which incorporates innovative hardware and software elements that ensure its functionality within the Smart City's information and communication networks and can provide specific functions by developing applications according to the needs of citizens, public authorities and various social partners, in this case study, a health kiosk.

Robotic Platform with Medical Applications in the Smart City Environment

Blockchain has emerged as one of the finest and promising technologies in the last decade. Bitcoin started the journey in 2008 and soon blockchain technology paved the way much beyond cryptocurrencies in form of smart contracts deployment, permissioned blockchains, hyperledger, ethereum and the list is endless, so to say with a multitude of variants evolving across. This expansion of the implementations has been across domains, hitherto unthought-of. One such domain with definite connects in future are the evolving smart cities across the countries. Smart city concept pullulates to step-up functional efficiency, share information with the users and better the citizen welfare enabled by information and communication technologies (ICT). The rapidly evolving growth of the smart cities thus has thrown multiple challenges to the widely used traditional way of ensuring seamless, secure, robust exchange of information between devices and entities in the smart city ecosystem. This paper builds upon the concepts of blockchain, smart cities, and InterPlanetary File System and further explores possibilities of realizing blockchain enabled smart cities on InterPlanetary File System architecture concluded by challenges ahead. The proposed architecture is simulated with results in a limited environment.

IPFS enabled blockchain for smart cities

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a key developing innovation aimed at linking objects via the Internet. While, Software Defined Networking (SDN) is another modern networking domain intelligence innovation that increases network efficiency and enhances security, reliability, and protection through dynamic software programs. In this paper, we proposed a distributed secure SDoT-NFV architecture for smart cities with Network Function Virtualization (NFV) implementation. We integrated highly protected SDN that delivers better network ef- ficiency, protection, and privacy results. It also secures metadata within each layer as well as payload.In addition, this architecture attempted to implement a more efficient method for constructing a cluster via SDN. Moreover, SDN-IoT with the NFV ideas brings benefits in terms of energy conservation and load balancing to the relevant fields. In addition, several distributed controllers have suggested enhancing accessibility, integrity, anonymity, con- fidentiality, and so on. We also implemented an energy-efficient Cluster Head Selection (CHS) algorithm to make use of our proposed architecture. The network offers greater protection of each network layer as opposed to the traditional network in the proposed architecture. Lastly, we analyze the efficiency of the proposed architecture with different network parameters (throughput, RTT, and Time sequence) for smart cities.

SDoT-NFV: A Distributed SDN Based Security System with IoT for Smart City Environments

The massive deployment of Internet of Things (IoT) is allowing Smart City projects and initiatives all over the world. The IoT is a modular approach to merge various sensors with all the ICT solutions. With over 50 billion objects will be connected and deployed in smart cities in 2020. The heart of smart cities operations is the IoT communications. IoT is designed to support Smart City concept, which aims at utilizing the most advanced communication technologies to promote services for the administration of the city and the citizens. This paper is presenting a comprehensive review of the concepts of IoT and smart cities and their motivations and applications. Moreover, this paper describes the main challenges and weaknesses of applying the IoT technologies based on smart city paradigms,

Tibor Cinkelr

Papers

IoT based Smart Cities