Modeling of Trusted Public Emergency Services for Smart Cities Using Blockchain and IoT-based Cognitive Networks

Abstract The Internet of Things (IoT) recently gained attention from the last few years due to various smart city applications deployment. The existing literature discusses different public emergency service (PES) aspects from smart-healthcare to smart-home automation. However, less work explores for the smart-fire-brigade system. The PESs require high computation, timely service fulfillment, service transparency, and trust, which are difficult to achieve through a centralized system. In recent years, blockchain technology has gained enormous popularity for immutable data management that ensures transparency, reliability, and data integrity using distributed storage. This paper presents a blockchain based model for secure and trusted public emergency service in IoT-enabled smart cities (BMSTP) to handle the PES requests in real-time fairly. An edge compute server (ECS) is introduced to enhance data processing speed and local data storage. Simultaneously, a queuing theory model is used to process PES requests quickly. The ECS manages an access control list (ACL) for smart-home IoT devices to protect against the illegal placement of any new IoT devices near smart-home to misguiding public emergency service departments (PESDs). Further, a reputation model is designed for PESDs to scale their service quality. We explored the BMSTP for smart-homes placed under different sub-areas of a smart-city. The experiment results show the proposed system model is efficient in scheduling the smart-home PES requests to an appropriate PESD and minimizing the delay to reaching the smart-home location.