Decentralized Smart City of Things: A Blockchain Tokenization-enabled Architecture for Digitization and Authentication of Assets in Smart Cities

Abstract

IoT-enabled smart devices have become an essential part of the smart city architectures, which establishes all the underlying architectures to operate altogether, such as the Internet of Things (IoT), Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs), Internet of Cyber-Physical Things (IoCPT), and Internet of Everything (IoE). Similarly, these underlying architectures constitute a system to realize the concept of smart cities and, ultimately, a smart planet. A private blockchain-based architecture, Decentralized Smart City of Things (DSCoT), has been proposed in this study which utilizes Blockchain tokenization (i.e., Non-fungible tokens-NFTs) for the representation and authentication of user and IoT assets by defining smart device attributes. Through NFTs, the uniqueness of the IoT assets and users has been realized, which helps digitize these assets as non-interchangeable units of data stored on a digital ledger. The proposed architecture ensures this functionality of unique asset representation by deploying smart contracts and further for IoT assets and user authentication. The mechanism provides security services such as confidentiality, integrity (using SHA-III one-way encryption), availability, and authorization (CIA). The evaluation of the proposed functions and components has been provided in terms of Gas consumption and time complexity, showing promising results. An innovative approach of functions to query the smart contract for the status of assets in the NFT registry offers no transaction cost (in Ether/Gewi), making the proposed extension efficient in terms of time complexity. This architecture aims to provide a smart city solution that may ensure robust security features utilizing Blockchain, NFTs, and SHA-III encryption mechanisms.