BEST—Blockchain-Enabled Secure and Trusted Public Emergency Services for Smart Cities Environment

 In the last few years, the Internet of things (IoT) has recently gained attention in developingvarious smart city applications such as smart healthcare, smart supply chain, smart home, smartgrid, etc. The existing literature focuses on the smart healthcare system as a public emergency service(PES) to provide timely treatment to the patient. However, little attention is given to a distributedsmart fire brigade system as a PES to protect human life and properties from severe fire damage. Thetraditional PES are developed on a centralised system, which requires high computation and doesnot ensure timely service fulfilment. Furthermore, these traditional PESs suffer from a lack of trust,transparency, data integrity, and a single point of failure issue. In this context, this paper proposes aBlockchain-Enabled Secure and Trusted (BEST) framework for PES in the smart city environment.The BEST framework focuses on providing a fire brigade service as a PES to the smart home based onIoT device information to protect it from serious fire damage. Further, we used two edge computingservers, an IoT controller and a service controller. The IoT and service controller are used for localstorage and to enhance the data processing speed of PES requests and PES fulfilments, respectively.The IoT controller manages an access control list to keep track of registered IoT gateways and theirIoT devices, avoiding misguiding the PES department.  The service controller utilised the queuemodel to handle the PES requests based on the minimum service queue length.  Further, varioussmart contracts are designed on the Hyperledger Fabric platform to automatically call a PES eitherin the presence or absence of the smart-home owner under uncertain environmental conditions.The performance evaluation of the proposed BEST framework indicates the benefits of utilising thedistributed environment and the smart contract logic. The various simulation results are evaluated interms of service queue length, utilisation, actual arrival time, expected arrival time, number of PESdepartments, number of PES providers, and end-to-end delay. These simulation results show theeffectiveness and feasibility of the BEST framework.