Blockchain-of-blockchains: An interoperable blockchain platform for ensuring IoT data integrity in smart city

Abstract

We propose a hierarchical blockchain-based platform for ensuring the integrity of smart city Internet-of-Things (IoT) data and blockchain interoperability in this paper. The well-defined structural hierarchy of managing organizations in a smart city face several data management issues. The integration of emerging technologies, such as (IoT), has introduced more complexity to data maintenance in the smart city. At present, cloud-based information systems have become the norm for managing IoT data. Due to the centralized administrative control, the cloud-based information management is untrusted. Hence, it fails to guarantee the integrity of IoT data and traceability of operations to achieve transparency within the smart city organizations. Adoption of blockchain-based information systems can be viable solution to address these challenges. However, it introduces a new challenge of interoperability of transactions among different smart city organizations. In this paper, we introduce a decentralized hierarchy of blockchains, named Blockchain-of-Blockchains (BoBs), for ensuring data integrity and blockchain interoperability at the same time. We implement the proposed concept using Hyperledger Fabric and Ethermint as a proof-of-concept for evaluating the performance of the proposed concept. 2022 Elsevier Inc.