BEST—Blockchain-Enabled Secure and Trusted Public Emergency Services for Smart Cities Environment

Abstract

In the last few years, the Internet of things (IoT) has recently gained attention in developing various smart city applications such as smart healthcare, smart supply chain, smart home, smart grid, etc. The existing literature focuses on the smart healthcare system as a public emergency service (PES) to provide timely treatment to the patient. However, little attention is given to a distributed smart fire brigade system as a PES to protect human life and properties from severe fire damage. The traditional PES are developed on a centralised system, which requires high computation and does not ensure timely service fulfilment. Furthermore, these traditional PESs suffer from a lack of trust, transparency, data integrity, and a single point of failure issue. In this context, this paper proposes a Blockchain-Enabled Secure and Trusted (BEST) framework for PES in the smart city environment. The BEST framework focuses on providing a fire brigade service as a PES to the smart home based on IoT device information to protect it from serious fire damage. Further, we used two edge computing servers, an IoT controller and a service controller. The IoT and service controller are used for local storage and to enhance the data processing speed of PES requests and PES fulfilments, respectively. The IoT controller manages an access control list to keep track of registered IoT gateways and their IoT devices, avoiding misguiding the PES department. The service controller utilised the queue model to handle the PES requests based on the minimum service queue length. Further, various smart contracts are designed on the Hyperledger Fabric platform to automatically call a PES either in the presence or absence of the smart-home owner under uncertain environmental conditions. The performance evaluation of the proposed BEST framework indicates the benefits of utilising the distributed environment and the smart contract logic. The various simulation results are evaluated in terms of service queue length, utilisation, actual arrival time, expected arrival time, number of PES departments, number of PES providers, and end-to-end delay. These simulation results show the effectiveness and feasibility of the BEST framework.