Unleashing the Power of Participatory IoT with Blockchains for Increased Safety and Situation Awareness of Smart Cities

TL;DR

This paper explores how participatory IoT combined with blockchain technology can enhance safety and situation awareness in smart cities by proposing a scalable virtualized infrastructure model.

Contribution

It introduces the Semantic Virtual Space (SVS) concept and discusses scalable architectures for deploying and managing multiple SVS instances on cloud-enabled IoT infrastructure.

Findings

Proposes the SVS abstraction for smart city IoT infrastructure

Discusses scalable deployment mechanisms for SVS instances

Enhances real-time decision-making in smart city applications

Abstract

IoT emerges as an unprecedented paradigm with great potential for changing how people interact, think and live. It is making existing Internet services feasible in ways that were previously impossible, as well as paving the way for new situation-awareness applications suitable for smart cities, such as realtime video surveillance, traffic control, and emergency management. These applications will typically rely on large numbers of IoT devices to collect and collaboratively process streamed data to enable real-time decision making. In this paper, we introduce the concept of Semantic Virtual Space (SVS), an abstraction for virtualized cloud-enabled IoT infrastructure that is commensurate with the goals and needs of these emerging smart city applications, and propose and discuss scalable architectures and mechanisms that enable and automate the deployment and management of multiple SVS instances on top of the cloud-enabled IoT infrastructure.