A new article, entitled “Towards Blockchain-Based Fog and Edge Computing for Enabling Privacy-Preserving Smart Cities”, has been published in Frontiers in Sustainable Cities, section Smart Technologies and Cities, thanks to the collaborative work done in the DataCloud H2020 Research and Innovation Action. UBITECH’s Giannis Ledakis and Ioannis Plakas, and their co-authors from SINTEF, TELLU (Norway), IEXEC (France) and JOT (Spain), discuss a variety of modern technologies for Smart Cities and proposes our integrated architecture, which connects Blockchain technologies with modern data analytic techniques (e.g., Federated Learning) and Edge/Fog computing to address the current data privacy issues in Smart Cities.
In particular, the authors propose a vision of a new privacy-preserving platform and framework for building Smart City applications. Their design is based on three pillars; first, a computing and data marketplace will provide smooth interactions between consumers and providers of computing resources, data and devices from the Cloud Continuum, and bring it all within one namespace; second, a Blockchain-based computing infrastructure will provide trust, traceability and auditability in data processing activities; third, Privacy-preserving processing techniques such as Federated Learning and Trusted Execution Environments (TEE) will ensure data privacy and confidentiality from end to end.
The framework the authors propose is based on the most recent software research and hardware components and is provided as Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). First, a Domain Specific Language (DSL) is used for describing high-level application requirements; second, a software platform selects the most appropriate resources from the Computing Continuum for satisfying the requirements; then the platform provisions the resources and deploys the application services; finally, the platform monitors both the resources and the application, adapting them automatically to infrastructure and environment changes.
For more info, you may access the full article here: https://doi.org/10.3389/frsc.2022.846987
