Editorial
Blockchain-enabled secure communications in smart cities

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Abstract

Blockchain is a relative recent research and technological trend, with applications in diverse domains including those associated with a nation’s critical infrastructure sectors (e.g., chemical, commercial facilities, communications, critical manufacturing, dams, defense industrial base, emergency services, and energy). The interest in blockchain is also partly evidenced by the number of submissions we received in this special issue. Of the 54 submissions received, 18 papers were accepted after several rounds of reviews by subject matter experts (i.e., acceptance rate of 33.3%). This special issue presents the research advances and describes existing and emerging challenges outlined in these 18 accepted papers, authored by researchers from institutions in Australia, Canada, China, Denmark, Ireland, New Zealand, Spain, United Kingdom, and United States. These accepted papers also reinforce the importance of collaboration across institutions and countries.

Introduction

With the advent of Industry 4.0 and advances in various technologies, such as communications (e.g., 5G and beyond) and data sensing technologies (e.g., Internet of Things (IoT) sensors), our cities are becoming ‘smarter’ and more interconnected (i.e., smart cities). There are, however, considerable challenges in the design of various systems to support various smart city applications, such as intelligent transportation systems, pandemic monitoring (e.g., COVID-19 related lockdowns), and smart electronic healthcare systems. Hence, there have been interest from both academia and industry to explore the design of various technological solutions, including those based on blockchain.

Blockchain is characterized by decentralization, transparency, immutability, etc., and can potentially be leveraged to improve transparency and facilitate traceability and many other features and services, as reported in this special issue.

Specifically, we will now present the 18 papers (acceptance rate of 33.3%) accepted after several rounds of reviews by subject matter experts in Sections 2 Security, 3 Blockchain-edge-cloud, 4 Privacy preserving, 5 Architecture and consensus.

Section snippets

Security

In “Blockchain-assisted access for federated Smart Grid domains: Coupling and features”, researchers from University of Malaga, Campus de Teatinos, in Spain presented a three layer-based interconnection architecture and several interconnection strategies to facilitate reliable and secure connections between entities, processes, and critical resources. In order to demonstrate the potential of this architecture, the author analyzed the level of coupling of blockchain technology and discussed the

Blockchain-edge-cloud

In “Toward security as a service: A trusted cloud service architecture with policy customization”, researchers from National University of Defense Technology and Wuhan University, both in China, developed a security-on-demand framework, policy-customized trusted cloud service (PC-TCS). The latter is designed to support customized security policy and remote attestation. The authors implemented and evaluated the performance of the PC-TCS prototype based on Xen Hypervisor.

In “Blockchain-based

Privacy preserving

In “SocialBlock: An architecture for decentralized user-centric data management applications for communications in smart cities”, researchers from Universität Oberta de Catalunya in Spain presented an architecture to create user-centric data management applications for communications, with the aim of returning control of the data to data owner. The authors used Ethereum and the Inter Planetary File System (IPFS) as the main tools to demonstrate the feasibility of proposed architecture.

In

Architecture and consensus

In “Securing transmissions by friendly jamming scheme in wireless networks”, researchers from Qufu Normal University in China presented an optimal relay and jammer selection strategy to reduce the computation complexity. They derived the lower and upper bounds of the secrecy outage probability based on the assumptions of existence of only illegitimate node and symmetric case.

In “Automatic blockchain whitepapers analysis via heterogeneous graph neural network”, researchers from Beihang

Future research

While the 18 papers accepted in this special issue have contributed to the knowledge gap in the area of blockchain-enabled secure communications in smart cities, a number of challenges, such as the following, remain to be addressed.

Blockchain-enabled cybersecurity and risk management

  • Blockchain-enabled communication techniques

  • Secure communications in blockchain-enabled distributed sensing

  • Critical techniques in blockchain-enhanced communications for smart grid

  • Blockchain-enhanced mobile sensing in

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

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