A Survey of Blockchain Technology Applied to Smart Cities: Research Issues and Challenges

By Jun-feng Xie, Helen Tang, Tao Huang, F. Yu, Renchao Xie, Jiang Liu, Yun-jie Liu. IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials, 2019

614 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In recent years, the rapid urbanization of world’s population causes many economic, social, and environmental problems, which affect people’s living conditions and quality of life significantly. The concept of “smart city” brings opportunities to solve these urban problems. The objectives of smart cities are to make the best use of public resources, provide high-quality services to the citizens, and improve the people’s quality of life. Information and communication technology plays an important role in the implementation of smart cities. Blockchain as an emerging technology has many good features, such as trust-free, transparency, pseudonymity, democracy, automation, decentralization, and security. These features of blockchain are helpful to improve smart city services and promote the development of smart cities. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey on the literature involving blockchain technology applied to smart cities. First, the related works and background knowledge are introduced. Then, we review how blockchain technology is applied in the realm of smart cities, from the perspectives of smart citizen, smart healthcare, smart grid, smart transportation, supply chain management, and others. Finally, some challenges and broader perspectives are discussed.

Subfields: Computer Networks and Communications, Information Systems, Media Technology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7117fdbfc3f3a4561ddc7843a54eec31b7373f18

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Citations in the corpus

Blockchain for the Internet of Vehicles Towards Intelligent Transportation Systems: A Survey (2020, background): “The taxonomy and comparative analysis of the latest solutions, architectures, and requirements of blockchain with application to smart cities are discussed in [33]–[38].”
Future of industry 5.0 in society: human-centric solutions, challenges and prospective research areas (2022, background): “Therefore, Blockchain technology delivers the data by providing shared and completed information stored in the immutable ledger that the network members access [96–99].”
How should we understand the digital economy in Asia? Critical assessment and research agenda (2020, neutral): “Efforts also are being made in different Asian nations to create more digitally-enabled municipal and federal government organizations, and these are open for researchers to explore the issues (Ghandour et al., 2019; Xie et al., 2019).”
Edge-Computing-Enabled Smart Cities: A Comprehensive Survey (2019, neutral): “A blockchain is a type of distributed ledger technology (DLT) that offers several striking features of decentralization, transparency, democracy, enhanced security, and immutability [2].”
The Future of Healthcare Internet of Things: A Survey of Emerging Technologies (2020, background): “The primary application of blockchain in healthcare lies in the storage and access control of the collected medical data [192].”
Blockchain Meets Cloud Computing: A Survey (2020, result): “…has rarely addressed by prior survey studies, even though some recent studies surveyed blockchain techniques in different perspectives, e.g., digital currencies [20]–[22], security [23], [24], privacy [21], [25], edge-integration [26], IoT-integration [27], [28], and smart city-integration [29].”
A Survey on Blockchain Technology: Evolution, Architecture and Security (2021, methodology): “Some survey articles have also presented different Blockchain applications [26], [151] while major review focus has been on Blockchain applications with other technologies like IoT and smart cities [8], [9], [14], [21]– [25].”
Blockchain for 5G and Beyond Networks: A State of the Art Survey (2019, background): “have gained momentum in the academia, with a number of surveys published in [9], [10], [11], [12], [13], [14], which have discussed many aspects such as architecture, concepts, technologies and application domains.”
Differential Privacy Techniques for Cyber Physical Systems: A Survey (2018, background): “Similarly, the concept of “smart city” refers to implification of all possible available resources and technologies in a coordinated and intelligent manner with an aim to develop more sustainable and habitable urban centers [192], [193].”
Enabling Massive IoT Toward 6G: A Comprehensive Survey (2021, background): “Conﬁ-dentiality, integrity, and authenticity of the data are protected by the immutability, anonymity, and encryption of blockchain [20], [21].”