Tracing Data Origins in Smart Cities: An IoT Perspective

The rapid growth in the quantity of interconnected Internet of Things devices causes the continuous production of complex and diverse heterogeneous data sets, which encounter significant challenges in big data processing and security. This study highlights the critical function that data provenance serves within smart cities and IoT frameworks. An important task solved by data provenance is tracking the entire lifecycle of the data: their creation, transmission, storage, and processing. This paper emphasizes the critical role of data quality in the reliability of IoT applications. This review presents a comprehensive analysis of current IoT provenance methods and technologies, and we propose a taxonomy that classifies the key components of IoT data provenance systems in smart cities. The findings aim to assist researchers and practitioners with the design and application of effective data provenance approaches suited to smart city systems. Additionally, a case study on secure air quality monitoring demonstrates how provenance mechanisms can be implemented in a real-world IoT network.