Block-A-City: An Agricultural Application Framework Using Blockchain for Next-Generation Smart Cities

Abstract

Conventional lifestyles and working methods are motivated by rising trends and new technologies to form smart cities. Distributed chains are growing to computerize with a highly complicated framework. It is becoming an essential source of additional advantages in today's digital and smart city. Customers or users of smart cities are highly concerned about the quality of food and farm products. On the other hand, tracking the source information is challenging and, preserving its provenance throughout the supply chain network. Traditional supply chain networks are centralized, where a third party does the trading. These centralized systems lack of quality transparency and distribution accountability. Therefore, we provide a promising approach with a unique strategy for converting conventional agriculture to smart agriculture, concerning smart cities, considering blockchain technology and the Internet of Things (IoT) features. The blockchain technique is responsible for maintaining the immutability of the existing network. Still, it faces problems resolving fundamental issues in the distribution chain, like the trustworthiness of the different involved members, transaction responsibility, and real-time tracking. As a result, a trustworthy organization with traceability, conviction, confirmed transportation, and transparent mechanisms in the e-farm supply chain is proposed. Ethereum is used to deploy the proposed smart contract. Testing with the Hyperledger caliper measuring tool shows performance evaluation of several factors such as latency, throughput, resource consumption transaction per second, and so on are assessed. The findings support the effectiveness of the recommended strategy.

KEYWORDS:

• Blockchain
• Security
• Agriculture
• Food chain
• Smart city
• Trustworthy organization

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Puja Das

Puja Das is currently pursuing her PhD in the field of blockchain. Her research area is QoS provisioning in intelligence and secure healthcare system for IoT. E-mail: [email protected]

Moutushi Singh

Moutushi Singh received her PhD degree in the field of network security from the Department of CSE, MKAUT. She is a member of IEEE & ACM. Her research interest includes intrusion detection systems and network security. She is the editorial board member and reviewer of several international and national journals and conferences of repute. E-mail: [email protected]

Dimitrios A. Karras

D A Karras received his PhD in electrical engineering, from the NTUA, Greece. He has published more than 70 research refereed journal papers and in more than 185 international conferences. He is, also, former editor-in-chief (2008-2016) IJSISE, academic editor in the TWSJ, ISRN Communications, and the Applied Mathematics Hindawi journals as well as associate editor in various scientific journals, including CAAI, IET. E-mail: [email protected]

Deepsubhra Guha Roy

Deepsubhra Guha Roy is currently working as assistant professor senior grade at Vellore Institute of Technology, Vellore. Prior to that he completed two post docs from IISc Bangalore, India and University of Tartu, Estonia, Europe. He did his PhD and MTech from MAKAUT, India. He is the founder developer of Centre of Mobile Cloud Computing at MAKAUT, WB, India. He is an associate editor of IET Software journal and lead guest editor of various SIs.