Engineering

Environmental economics

Smart city

Computer security

Systems engineering

Smart grid

Economics

Blockchain

Transparency (behavior)

Computer science

Business

Immutability

Internet of Things

Political science

Decentralization

Data science

Architectural engineering

Electrical engineering

Sustainable Cities and Society

In recent years, smart city has emerged as a new paradigm to provide high quality facilities to the citizens by dynamically optimising the city resources. Smart cities can offer finest services for boosting the daily life of citizens on healthcare, transportation, energy consumption, and education. However, the concept of smart city is still evolving and despite its potential vision, there are proliferating security challenges. Blockchain has the potential to promote the development of smart cities owing to its good properties such as auditability, transparency, immutability and decentralization. Therefore, this paper presents the state-of-the-art blockchain technology to solve the security issues of smart cities. Initially, the paper throws light on the background knowledge and then surveys the utility of blockchain in various smart communities such as healthcare, transportation, smart grid, supply chain management, financial systems and data center networks. Finally, some future research directions are identified through extensive literature survey on blockchain based smart city systems.

Blockchain for smart cities: A review of architectures, integration trends and future research directions