Decentralized brokered enabled ecosystem for data marketplace in smart cities towards a data sharing economy

Abstract

Presently data are indispensably important as cities consider data as a commodity which can be traded to earn revenues. In urban environment, data generated from internet of things devices, smart meters, smart sensors, etc. can provide a new source of income for citizens and enterprises who are data owners. These data can be traded as digital assets. To support such trading digital data marketplaces have emerged. Data marketplaces promote a data sharing economy which is crucial for provision of available data useful for cities which aims to develop data driven services. But currently existing data marketplaces are mostly inadequate due to several issues such as security, efficiency, and adherence to privacy regulations. Likewise, there is no consolidated understanding of how to achieve trust and fairness among data owners and data sellers when trading data. Therefore, this study presents the design of an ecosystem which comprises of a distributed ledger technology data marketplace enabled by message queueing telemetry transport (MQTT) to facilitate trust and fairness among data owners and data sellers. The designed ecosystem for data marketplaces is powered by IOTA technology and MQTT broker to support the trading of sdata sources by automating trade agreements, negotiations and payment settlement between data producers/sellers and data consumers/buyers. Overall, findings from this article discuss the issues associated in developing a decentralized data marketplace for smart cities suggesting recommendations to enhance the deployment of decentralized and distributed data marketplaces.