IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - July 2018 - 56

Due to the interconnected nature
of smart cities with different
technologies, however, it is
difficult to design a fully
optimized architecture.
efficient, scalable, blockchain-based distributed smart-city network architecture enabled by the light-fidelity (Li-Fi) communication technique.
To utilize multiaccess bidirectional Li-Fi communication,
we present a hybrid communications modulation scheme. To
optimize the performance of the distributed network, we also
propose an efficient controller-hopping algorithm. We performed simulation and analysis in several different phases to
evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed model. The result
of the evaluation shows that our offering significantly
improved performance compared to the current state-of-theart model.

EfficiEnt Data-ProcEssing architEcturE
The world's urban population accounts for more than 54% of
the world's total population. The majority of people (even in
lesser-developed countries) are projected to live in urban
areas by 2017 [1]. The global CE industry encompasses all of
the electronic devices used for communications in the smartcity network. According to a recent report by Credence
Research, Inc. [2], by 2023, the global CE industry is expected to surpass US$1.8 trillion and grow at a compound annual
rate of more than 5% from 2016 to 2023. Because of this, and
to optimize energy consumption in cities that include distribution networks and buildings, a key requirement will be to
design and develop new architecture in an energy-intensive
world. In the Internet of Things (IoT), smart-city initiatives
are exploring common urban problems, e.g., reducing environmental pollution and energy consumption and managing
an enormous amount of data [3]. To solve the problems
caused by population growth and urbanization, smart-city
solutions use networking and communication technologies.
In the near future, CE industry items like common objects,
machines, home appliances, offices, and the communication
industry are expected to have the ability to detect, communicate, and process information in a pervasive manner [4]. Due
to the interconnected nature of smart cities with different
technologies, however, it is difficult to design a fully optimized architecture. Additionally, a city's intelligent solutions
must be energy efficient from the perspectives of the users
and their environment.
Today, an enormous volume of high-speed data flow is
generated by IoT devices. With flexible, efficient data center
provisions [5] to process substantial IoT data produced by
distributed IoT devices in a smart city, data are transmitted to
the remote cloud over the Internet [6], [7]. To manage large
56 IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine

july 2018

amounts of IoT data, however, the Internet is neither efficient
nor sufficiently scalable. Furthermore, the transfer of important data consumes more bandwidth, energy, and time. To
explore valuable real-time information in a smart city, it is
essential to design efficient data-processing architectures to
handle a large volume of high-speed IoT data streams.
Enabling smart-city network architecture requires the utilization of several key design principles. To address current
and future challenges and meet the new service requirements
discussed previously, we must design a high-performance,
scalable architecture for the smart-city network and take into
consideration several important design principles.
▼ Scalability: Due to the rapid increase in the number of
smart devices connected to the Internet, scalability is a crucial design principle for future-proof distributed network
architecture for a smart city.
▼ Resilience: The system must have the ability to continue
offering service in case of a node malfunction or some unexpected behavior, and the computation must be performed by
other working nodes.
▼ Adaptability: The architecture of the network should be
able to adapt to the changing environment and expand its
use to meet the growing needs and demands of users.
▼ High availability: In a smart city, we need to design a
high-availability network architecture to provide uninterrupted, real-time data-driven services.
▼ Performance and reliability: To achieve reliability in the
design architecture, we must measure the correlation
between the performances achieved by the system and the
required performance in different environments.
▼ Privacy and security: In a smart city, the privacy and security of information are key conditions for ensuring the continuity of essential services.
▼ Efficiency and ease of deployment: Even if the computing
nodes are heterogeneous and located at the edge of the network, they allow for the use of all of the nodes without a
specific configuration and with excellent performances.
▼ Lifespan and CO 2 emission: Increasing the lifespan and
reducing CO 2 emissions from the data center are important
aspects of a smart-city network.
▼ Research contributions: Based on the motivations de scribed previously and to address the aspects of smart cities that need to be solved, we propose an efficient, scalable
distributed smart-city architecture. We also present a
hybrid communications modulation scheme to enable multiaccess bidirectional Li-Fi communication, including efficient, controller-hopping algorithms for mining controllers
in the distributed blockchain network in the smart city. The
result of the evaluation shows that our work offers significantly improved performance compared to the current
state-of-the-art model.

thE ProPosED Distarch-scnet MoDEl
Based on our analysis of the challenges facing smart-city networks created by the new communication paradigms, we
found that the current architecture for smart-city networks

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - July 2018