Secure Routing Protocols Using Trust-Based Mechanisms in the Internet of Things for Smart City Environment Challenges and Future Trends

Introduction

Smart City is an innovative new technological paradigm that uses Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), and different types of electronic data collection sensors to supply information, which can be used to manage assets and resources efficiently, provide digital connectivity and improve quality of lives. Recently, significant technological, economic and ecological changes have generated interest in smart cities, including financial restructuring, climate change, environmental monitoring, smart social housing, and many more. Subsequently, in the intricate architecture of the smart city, the application of the Internet of Things is of interest, as it responds to the efficiency, security, and the provision of low-risk technology choices in building smart city environment and solutions, thus realising the so-called Smart environment. For example, some building managers across the world are more frequently looking to incorporate IoT devices and solutions into their infrastructures to reduce costs and improve the quality of their buildings.

The Internet of things (IoT) is the network of physical devices, vehicles, home appliances and other items embedded with electronics, software, sensors, actuators, and connectivity which enables these objects to connect and exchange data (Gubbi, Buyya, Marusic, & Palaniswami, 2013). The Internet of Things (IoT) system connects the physical world into cyberspace via sensors, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags, to provide environmental information, body conditions, etc., in smart cities. Subsequently, the potential applications of IoT in building smart cities is limitless, and the growth of IoT technologies will profoundly accelerate the adoption and the efficient design of smart cities in the coming years.

There are several application areas of IoT for smart cities in the areas of commercial, military and domestic purposes: for example, Smart Appliances, Smart Cars, Wearable Devices, Connected Cars, Sensor Actuator Networks (SANETs), etc. A high-level illustration of an IoT-based smart city can be seen Fig. 1 (Mehmood et al., 2017). From the figure, the applications of IoT in smart cities were grouped into personal and home utilities, smart transportation, etc,. The personal and home applications of IoT include e-healthcare pervasive computing devices and services, which help doctors monitor patients remotely; utilities applications such as smart grid, smart metering/monitoring, water network monitoring, and video-based surveillance. Given the different application domains, efficient routing and secure data forwarding between devices in IoT networks are essential. (Bello, Liu, Bai, & Narayanan, 2015b). The IoT devices and systems are not complicated but designing and building communication between them can be a complex task. Subsequently, building secure and effective communication among the IoT wide variety of devices is essential in designing a smart city environment. Furthermore, the generalizability of the communication mode of the Internet of Things (IoT) follows the Device-to-Device network paradigm: a communication mode that allows two or more devices to communicate among themselves directly instead of through a central wireless access point. Thus, the deployment of IoT systems tend to give rise to spatially heterogeneous device distributions and employs a distributed, multi-hop network architecture in which devices are equally privileged participants in the networking and routing processes. Next section present the brief about the communication technologies and protocols for IoT in smart cities environments.

Figure 1.

An illustration of an IoT-based smart city