Conceptual technological framework for smart cities to move towards cecentralized and user-centric architectures using DLT

Abstract

Nowadays, many urban areas are developing projects that are included within the area of smart cities. These systems tend to be highly heterogeneous and involve a large number of different technologies and participants. In general, cities deploy systems to integrate data and to provide protocols to ease interconnectivity between different subsystems. However, this is not enough to build a completely interoperable smart city, where control fully belongs to city administrators and citizens. Currently, in most cases, subsystems tend to be deployed and operated by providers creating silos. Furthermore, citizens, who should be the center of these systems, are often relegated to being just another participant. In this article, we study how smart cities can move towards decentralized and user-centric systems relying on distributed ledger technologies (DLT). For this, we define a conceptual framework that describes the interaction between smart city components, their participants, and the DLT ecosystem. We analyze the trust models that are created between the participants in the most relevant use cases, and we study the suitability of the different DLT types.