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

TLDR

Rapid urbanization creates economic, social, and environmental challenges that smart cities aim to address by leveraging ICT and blockchain’s trust‑free, transparent, and secure features. The paper surveys how blockchain technology is applied to smart cities to improve public resource use, citizen services, and quality of life. The survey reviews literature on blockchain applications across smart citizen, healthcare, grid, transportation, and supply‑chain domains, and discusses challenges and future directions.

Abstract

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.