IPFS enabled blockchain for smart cities

Blockchain has emerged as one of the finest and promising technologies in the last decade. Bitcoin started the journey in 2008 and soon blockchain technology paved the way much beyond cryptocurrencies in form of smart contracts deployment, permissioned blockchains, hyperledger, ethereum and the list is endless, so to say with a multitude of variants evolving across. This expansion of the implementations has been across domains, hitherto unthought-of. One such domain with definite connects in future are the evolving smart cities across the countries. Smart city concept pullulates to step-up functional efficiency, share information with the users and better the citizen welfare enabled by information and communication technologies (ICT). The rapidly evolving growth of the smart cities thus has thrown multiple challenges to the widely used traditional way of ensuring seamless, secure, robust exchange of information between devices and entities in the smart city ecosystem. This paper builds upon the concepts of blockchain, smart cities, and InterPlanetary File System and further explores possibilities of realizing blockchain enabled smart cities on InterPlanetary File System architecture concluded by challenges ahead. The proposed architecture is simulated with results in a limited environment. © 2020, Bharati Vidyapeeth's Institute of Computer Applications and Management.