Blockchain for edge-enabled smart cities applications

The Internet of Things (IoT)-enabled devices are increasing at an exponential rate and share massive data generated in smart cities around the globe. The time-critical and delay-sensitive nature of this data means that cloud service providers are unable to meet the demands and requirements of smart IoT devices. Edge computing has the ability to meet these demands as it enables the smart applications to perform data processing and execution at the network edge rather than transferring the data to the cloud. However, it is quite challenging to model and implement the system design, transmission protocols, resource allocation , and management of system delay in an edge infrastructure. As a result, they are at risk due to low reliability and are prone to various security and privacy breaches. To achieve information security and privacy, blockchain technology has attracted massive attention from researchers due to its unique feature of transparent and mutually agreed transactions among the communicating entities. Hence, this special issue aims to analyze the importance of blockchain-based security and privacy provisioning in edge-enabled smart cities applications to keep the cities safer and a better place of livelihood. As part of this special issue, we received a number of papers. Upon rigorous review over multiple rounds, only ten high quality papers were accepted for publication. The first paper in this special issue is entitled as Dynamic Pricing in Industrial Internet of Things: Blockchain Application for Energy Management in Smart Cities. This paper presented a novel approach using smart contracts in smart grids using blockchain for secure and trustable dynamic pricing. The main highlights of this paper is the automated bidding process for transactions which enables pricing being calculated using the demand in the network and then supply accordingly. This not only keeps the user privacy intact but also provides anonymity while using the calculations of the predicted price. In the second paper, entitled Blockchain-based Scheme for the Mobile Number Portability, the authors used an Ethereum blockchain technology and call routing mechanism to handle the request of the users. The secured royalty contract transactions and secure call routing mechanism are the potential part of the proposed scheme. The experimental results show that the transition time taken by the proposed scheme is only 4 seconds for 200 blocks and the traditional mobile number portability system took 6 seconds to execute the 200 blocks. The third paper of this special issue, entitled Blockchain-Enabled Healthcare System for the Detection of Diabetes, presented a Blockchain-enabled diabetes disease detection framework that provides an earlier detection of diabetes by using various machine learning (ML) classification algorithms and maintains the Electronic Health Records (EHRs) of the patients in a secured manner. The proposed EHRs sharing framework combines symptom-based disease prediction, Blockchain, and interplanetary file system (IPFS) in which the patient's health information are collected via wearable sensor devices. The stored information is then transmitted to EHRs manager, where an ML model is executed for further processing to collect the desired results. The proposed system helps the healthcare society by storing, processing, and sharing the patient health information in a secure manner. The fourth paper of this special issue, entitled A Lightweight Signcryption Method for Perception Layer in Internet-of-Things, proposed a lightweight Signcryption method for the perception layer of Internet of Things. The emergence of resource-constrained IoT devices raises significant challenges to current cryptographic algorithms. Hence, a lightweight authentication protocol for IoT devices was proposed using PHOTON-lightweight hash. This approach reduced the number of communication steps and analyzed the energy consumption, memory utilization, and complexities. The fifth paper is entitled as Privacy and Preservation of Virtual Circuit (VC)-based Drones and UAV Data using Blockchain Technology. In this paper, the authors introduced a Blockchain Technology (BCT) based mechanism to improve the privacy and preservation of VC-based devices data. Information about the instructions to the vehicle (devices), authentication, integrity and vehicle reactions are maintained in a cloud platform wherein Pentatope-based elliptic curve cryptography and SHA are adopted for privacy-preservation of data storage