Multi-vendor IoT-based Resource Sharing using OAuth and Blockchain

Scarcity of resources is a major problem associated with growing urbanization across the globe. A natural way to address the issue is to share the resources. This solution is not only cost-effective but also sometimes environment friendly. However, sharing resources among people in a trustless environment (in big cities, people do not know each other) and preserving the participant’s privacy are important issues to be addressed. Internet-of-Things and Blockchain together are being considered by the researchers to develop solutions for different smart city applications. In this paper, we propose a privacy preserving blockchain-based framework for multi-vendor IoT-based resource sharing for smart cities. OAuth is integrated with the proposed framework to authorize the blockchain to make the payment from the requester to the service provider. The proposed solution is implemented on the EOS blockchain instead of Ethereum because EOS does not require a fee for executing the smart contract and can conduct millions of transactions per second.

I. Introduction

One of the significant issues with continuing urbanization is the concentration of a large population in a few big cities. Many people from rural areas and small cities migrate to these big cities primarily because of the good job opportunity. This migration puts much load on the city and inconveniences the people due to limited resources availability [1]. For example, as the number of vehicles in a city increases, parking lots become a problem. Another issue is the in-feasibility of deploying a smart city solution due to resource scarcity. For instance, with the shift in energy technologies and considering the low carbon footprint, the vehicles are moving away from petrol/diesel. They are progressing towards running completely on electricity, i.e., batteries. One of the main reasons why electric vehicles have not been accepted well is the scarcity of their charging stations. This problem can be tackled by increasing the battery capacity or putting up many battery-charging points. There is no concrete way of achieving the first solution as more research is required to design high-capacity batteries without increasing their form factor. The second solution is not being implemented due to the high cost of buying lands, specifically charging points.