sustainability

Article
Sustainable Smart Cities: Convergence of Artificial Intelligence
and Blockchain
Ashutosh Sharma *, Elizaveta Podoplelova, Gleb Shapovalov, Alexey Tselykh and Alexander Tselykh

Department of Information and Analytical Security Systems, Southern Federal University,

Rostov-on-Don 344006, Russia; [email protected] (E.P.); [email protected] (G.S.);
[email protected] (A.T.); [email protected] (A.T.)
* Correspondence: [email protected]

Abstract: Recently, 6G-enabled Internet of Things (IoT) is gaining attention and addressing various
challenges of real time application. The artificial intelligence plays a significant role for big data
analytics and presents accurate data analysis in real time. However, designing big data analysis
through artificial intelligence faces some issues in terms of security, privacy, training data, and
centralized architecture. In this article, blockchain-based IoT framework with artificial intelligence is
proposed which presents the integration of artificial intelligence and blockchain for IoT applications.
The performance of the proposed architecture is evaluated in terms of qualitative and quantitative
measurement. For qualitative measurement, how the integration of blockchain and artificial intelli-
gence addresses various issues are described with the description of AI oriented BC and BC oriented
AI. The performance evaluation of proposed AI-BC architecture is evaluated and compared with
existing techniques in qualitative measurement. The experimental analysis shows that the proposed



framework performs better in comparison with the existing state of art techniques.



Citation: Sharma, A.; Podoplelova, Keywords: blockchain; Internet of Things (IoT); artificial intelligence; big data analysis
E.; Shapovalov, G.; Tselykh, A.;
Tselykh, A. Sustainable Smart Cities:
Convergence of Artificial Intelligence
and Blockchain. Sustainability 2021, 1. Introduction
13, 13076. https://doi.org/10.3390/
A smart city requires information technology for the integration and management
su132313076
of physical, social, and business infrastructures in order to deliver better facilities to its
residents while confirming efficient and optimal use of available resources [1]. Informa-
Academic Editor: Zubair Baig
tion of things is an approach that helps to provide interconnection among humans and
Received: 14 September 2021
devices with the internet, termed as Internet of Things (IoT). These devices are capable of
Accepted: 17 November 2021
performing intercommunication including smart homes, intelligent automotives, smart
Published: 25 November 2021 industries, and smart vehicles [2]. There are many solutions for various fields provided by
Internet of Things to optimize their production effectively and efficiently. Considering all
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral
the advantages, IoT also faces some issues like data security, centralization, data analyt-
with regard to jurisdictional claims in ics, connectivity and other hardware constraints. In an analysis, more than 800,000 user
published maps and institutional affil- devices were reported to be compromised through spam emails and distributed phishing
iations. in the year of 2015 [3]. Cui et al. [1] suggested that with the increasing number of smart
devices, a huge volume of data is being produced. Therefore, big data analytics is a critical
issue for any IoT application. To address this issue of data analytics, various research
has contributed and proposed different solutions with technologies such as artificial in-
Copyright: © 2021 by the authors.
telligence and deep learning for IoT applications [2]. The deep learning analytical tool
Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.
is implemented for the analysis of huge data and to provide necessary information for
This article is an open access article decision making, prediction and classification processes. The deep learning analytics tool
distributed under the terms and supports feature extraction and scaling of a huge volume of data from IoT applications [3].
conditions of the Creative Commons Osuwa et al. [4] presented the study for the integration of artificial intelligence and IoT.
Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// Their study also discusses about the profits, future opportunities, and open research issues
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ in various IoT applications. Misra et al. [5] suggested a user-oriented IoT system that
4.0/).

Sustainability 2021, 13, 13076. https://doi.org/10.3390/su132313076 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/sustainability

Sustainability 2021, 13, 13076 2 of 16

works on two mechanisms; first is a bidirectional method of processing, and the other is an
uncertainty-oriented arbitration approach.
Blockchain technology provides a decentralized, distributed, and secure network.
Each node in blockchain technology is connected in a distributed peer-to-peer manner
where every transaction is recorded quickly along with timestamps and transactions are
shared without any outside interference. The blockchain approach provides an efficient so-
lution for areas such as agriculture, healthcare, security, and finance. The data available in
blocks are further attached and secured in chains with digital signs through cryptographic
hashing. It is impossible for the hackers to hack transactions by adding malicious input
to the system since each block relates to the last block. The integration of the blockchain
approach with artificial intelligence for Internet of Things frameworks has addressed var-
ious issues such as digital signature, validation, smart contract, decentralization, secure
sharing, and immutable explainable artificial intelligence. Recently, with the evolution of
smart IoT devices and with their interconnections, data at a huge volume is generating
in a centralized form. Therefore, issues such as space, security and privacy are regularly
generated by the evolution of technology. A decentralized database framework is imple-
mented to address these concerns with the integration of blockchain and AI for IoT [6].
The transaction should be secure, digitally signed, immutable, validated, and explainable
while sharing the transaction with any other person in a network. Such a concept of secure
transaction can be implemented in the majority of applications such as the healthcare sector,
smart-home, agricultural, military, industrial, smart transportation, and many others [7].
The idea of smart contract is implemented by blockchain technology for enhancing network
security, and further, it is stored in a digital ledger [8]. Fakhri et al. [9] proposed a security
model for IoT applications for delivering highly secure and scalable data in a decentralized
manner at fog intelligence. Their architecture resolves the concern of centralization in an
IoT framework.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is implemented in various fields of advanced technologies
like decentralized AI, blockchain (BC), intelligence of things, machine automation and
many others. The integration of artificial intelligence and IoT creates benefits in a way
for collecting maximum number of information and its analysis. Mohanta et al. [10]
presented a study that highlights intelligent machines that eliminates the effects of humans
for the application, such as medical science, automated industries, and others. In recent
years, with continuous evolution in smart and digital technologies, artificial intelligence,
blockchain and IoT have gained attention from various researchers and become the most
popular technologies, providing innovation ideas in many research areas. The fundamental
convergence of blockchain and artificial intelligence for the IoT application is depicted
in Figure 1. This paper presents the discussion of various issues such as privacy, latency,
accuracy, and centralization by the integration of blockchain and AI for IoT applications.
The major contributions of this paper are:
• Blockchain and artificial intelligence is studied for IoT applications.
• Considering the advantages of integrating blockchain and artificial intelligence a
secure intelligent blockchain framework is proposed which includes four intelligences.
The proposed model consists of intelligence at cloud, fog, edge, and device level.
• The proposed methodology for the combination of blockchain methods and artificial
intelligence is provided.
• The qualitative and quantitative analysis of the proposed architecture is presented.
Using parameters accuracy, energy consumption, latency, data privacy and security.
• This work presents the summary of research challenges along with their solutions.
The rest of the paper is organized as: Section 2 dictate detailed literature followed
by proposed methodology in Section 3. Performance analysis is carried in Section 4 and
finally, Section 5 concludes the conclusion of the paper.
Sustainability 2021, 13, 13076 3 of 16

Figure 1. The fundamental integration of blockchain and artificial intelligence for the IoT application.

2. Related Work
AI and BC are the primary techniques representing various IoT applications. Blockchain
technology is capable for providing distributed and decentralized paradigm for the applica-
tions of IoT. Whereas the AI is capable of providing analysis and processing of data for the
application of IoT and thereby providing intelligent decision for machine. The contribution
of various research works is summarized in Table 1.

Table 1. Contribution of this study in relation with existing literature.

Blockchain AI Based Challenges

References Technology Used Architecture
Based AI Blockchain towards Research
Lopes et al. [11] AI and Blockchain Less Yes Yes Less
AlShamsi et al. [12] AI and Blockchain Less Yes Yes Less
Osuwa et al. [13] AI and IoT Less Yes Yes Less
IoT, Blockchain and
Qiu et al. [14] Less Less Yes No
Cloud computing
Yue et al. [15] Blockchain No Less No Yes
Sharma et al. [16] AI and Blockchain Yes No No Less
Yang et al. [17] AI and Blockchain Yes Less Yes Less
Liu et al. [18] Blockchain and IoT Yes No No Less
Sharma et al. [19] Blockchain and IoT Less No No No
IoT, Blockchain and Edge
Wang et al. [20] Yes Less Yes No
computing
Jin et al. [21] Blockchain No No No Yes
Tariq et al. [22] AI and IoT Yes Less Yes Yes
Liu et al. [23] AI and Blockchain No No Yes No

2.1. Blockchain Technology

The blockchain technology represents a collection of blocks, where each of the blocks
consists of four portions, timestamp, transaction detail such as Ethereum and bitcoin, and
hashing of previous and present block. The blockchain technique is a public digital ledger,
Sustainability 2021, 13, 13076 4 of 16

decentralized and distributed network that is used for storing transaction in different
nodes. It provides unique cryptographic value to each block previous and present block;
therefore, any third party cannot access or record the transaction. Each of the transaction in
blockchain technology is signed with cryptographic value by hashing that is particularly
verified by each miner.
Figure 2 presents the basic overview of artificial intelligence and blockchain technology,
where blockchain holds the duplicate value of complete ledger and details about blocks
of each transaction. Blockchain technology provides the capability of sharing the ledger
information in distributed, trusted, secure and decentralized form [11]. The decentralized
storage in blockchain method is utilized for storing large volume data that connected with
current block and earlier block through smart contract. In the current scenario Swarm,
IPFS, LitecoinDB and BigchainDB are few of the databases which are utilized considering
decentralized database [12]. IPFS is an interplanetary file system, which is decentralized,
distributed and point-to-point database connected for transferring common files [13]. IPFS
is also represented as a significant storage database, which is utilized by the blockchain
method for the majority of IoT frameworks in order to attain high throughput [14].

Figure 2. Overview of artificial intelligence and blockchain.

Yue et al. [15] presented three different categories of Internet of Things such as sen-
sor based, internet based, and knowledge based. The internet based IoT represents the
combination of various smart devices, which relate to Internet, and generates a huge
volume of data regularly. The sensor based IoT represents the deployment of sensor de-
vices such as temperature/humidity, and RFID for the collection of data. The knowledge
based IoT represents the collection of knowledgeable information, which is used for IoT
applications [16,17]. IoT is one of the most emerging technologies that uses a variety of
applications, providing unique addresses and communicates among each other through
internet simultaneously. The huge amount of data generated in IoT applications has vari-
ous challenges such as fault tolerance, security vulnerabilities and data privacy. To address
these challenges, various researchers have suggested blockchain technology as a solution
Sustainability 2021, 13, 13076 5 of 16

for IoT applications [18,19]. Blockchain technology involves less delay and significant
computational overhead and energy consumption. There are many applications where
blockchain technology can be implemented for providing security and privacy, such as
Industrial automation, smart home, smart healthcare, agriculture, smart city, and many
others. The blockchain technology provides a peer-to-peer connection among networks
for robustness and authentication against different attacks. The integration of IoT and
blockchain provides the extensive management of data and improves complexity.

2.2. Artificial Intelligence Technology

Programmed machines that can execute a variety of operations such as learning,
identifying, and solving various problems routinely is termed as artificial intelligence.
Machine Learning (ML), Deep Learning (DL) and Neural Network (NN) were implemented
for solving various complex problems automatically, and the benchmark for AI concerns a
human level of reasoning, vision, and speech. Intelligent machines are utilized for making
smart decisions and to remove human tasks in various fields like automatic sensing
applications, medical applications, automated farming and automated vehicle driving [20].
AI technology takes the input of raw data, processes it for performing decision-making, and
at last presents the maximum number of outputs for a specific task [21]. Recently, various
researchers have found many challenges in Internet of Things such as big data analytics,
privacy and security, energy efficiency and traffic congestion. To overcome these issues,
many AI techniques for IoT applications have designs such as such machine learning, deep
learning and neural network. The implementation of deep learning approaches particularly
solves the issue of energy efficiency in IoT. The data association and its prediction are
analyzed for energy management, and it leads designers to select the most significant
settings in controlling the energy consumption [22].
The IoT authentication based on machine learning provides a solution in terms of
security including approaches such as supervised, unsupervised, reinforcement, access
control, and secure offloading for the protection of data privacy [23]. The analytics capabil-
ity of AI for the collection of data in IoT applications provides the identification patterns,
and based on those, more informed decisions are generated for new ecosystems. The basic
approaches and concepts that are used in artificial intelligence are depicted in Figure 2.

2.3. Current Trending Techniques

Many authors have suggested the open research challenges of blockchain for artificial
intelligence and artificial intelligence for blockchain in IoT applications. Vara et al. [24]
have presented the overview for the integration of IoT and artificial intelligence, and
discussed various challenges for the convergence of IoT with AI. Chen et al. [25] discussed
the key characteristics of blockchain technology, applications, consensus algorithm and
the technical issues in the existing research. Debauche et al. [26] presented the importance
of Ethereum-based edger for smart contract, and it is also found that it is a low-price
tool that provides comparatively high accuracy in resource management. Vo et al. [27]
have discussed the advantages of blockchain technology considering artificial intelligence
and security enhancement. Kim et al. [28] discussed the basic concept of blockchain for
artificial intelligence and presented some of the open research challenges in implementing
blockchain for AI. Rao et al. [29] discussed operational levels of IoT such as application
network and perception layer and discussed security issues in each of these layers. Ferrag
et al. [30] conducted research for identifying the potential solution to each challenge in the
integration of IoT and blockchain to improve the safety in supply chain systems. Minoli
et al. [31] discussed how blockchain technology improves the security in IoT applications.
The authors have also conferred the relationship among blockchain and IoT along with
the concerns in blockchain based IoT applications. Qian et al. [32] suggested security
solutions for IoT applications, which include limitation of available IoT based datasets that
are utilized by both study and business communities.
Sustainability 2021, 13, 13076 6 of 16

Hassija et al. [33] discussed all the possible security threats to blockchain technology
and presented some possible real attacks. The authors have reviewed solutions for the
security enhancement implementing blockchain technology. Tsang et al. [34] proposed a
system for the food traceability based on integration of IoT and blockchain. Their proposed
work is self-organized, trusted and a natural solution for intelligent agriculture systems.
Pavithran et al. [35] analyzed the basic structures of blockchain in practical applications.
The authors have discussed development parameter of blockchain by analyzing the present
application and technologies. Cai et al. [36] proposed a knowledge acquisition design for
the analysis of data in cloud layer.
The contribution of proposed study in relation with the existing literature is presented
in Table 1. It highlights the existing research considering various technological parameters
such as blockchain based artificial intelligence and artificial intelligence based blockchain,
various open research challenges and their solutions. The present study significantly differs
from other existing research for providing better integrated discussion impressiveness and
extensiveness for the convergence of blockchain and artificial intelligence for Internet of
Things. Based on the conducted research, an intelligent architecture is presented for IoT
applications by the integration of blockchain and artificial intelligence.
As mentioned in the preceding section, this present work addresses significant chal-
lenges such as centralization, accuracy, latency, privacy, and security in huge amount of
data. This research work is primarily focused on the integration of blockchain and artificial
intelligence at different layers for cloud, fog, and edge in order to address above-mentioned
challenges. Truong et al. [37] proposed a secure framework for IoT applications to deliver
secure IoT data with decentralized network at fog player. Debauche et al. [38] provided the
basic overview of integrating artificial intelligence and IoT for increasing the efficiency and
removing unwanted interruption in IoT applications. Mohanty et al. [39] proposed a frame-
work for the management of security based on blockchain for IoT applications. A secure
blockchain-based deep learning framework for providing reliable data transmission in IoT
application is suggested [40]. Their approach achieves high latency and accuracy in IoT
data. Pan et al. [41] presented decentralized supply management based on blockchain tech-
nology to address the issue of resource management utilizing a dynamic voltage frequency
approach. Considering the benefits of integrating blockchain and artificial intelligence for
IoT applications, an intelligent architecture is proposed and discussed in the subsequent
sections [42].

3. Proposed Methodology
This section describes the proposed intelligent architecture, integrated design of
blockchain (BC) and artificial intelligence (AI) technology for IoT applications. The perfor-
mance of the proposed architecture is measured for four different platforms such as cloud
platform analysis, fog platform, edge platform and device intelligence analysis. A proposed
architecture demonstrates how big data analysis, centralization issues and security issues
are addressed with the integration of BC and AI.

3.1. Overview of Proposed Framework

Figure 3 depicts the layered architecture of proposed integrated artificial intelligence
blockchain design AI-BC for IoT application. The proposed model consists of four oper-
ational platforms such as intelligence at device platform, edge platform, fog and cloud
intelligence platform. The first platform, device deployment, consists of multiple smart
devices with AI and BC implementation. In this platform, a huge amount of data is gener-
ated, which is transmitted to the edge intelligence platform. The second platform, which
is edge intelligence, comprised of an artificial intelligence oriented base station, which is
connected with blockchain at the network edge. In the fog platform, every fog node with
blockchain technology consists of an artificial intelligence enabled base station.
Sustainability 2021, 13, 13076 7 of 16

Figure 3. Layered architecture integrated AI-BC design.

3.2. Transactional Flow of Proposed AI-BC Architecture

The information flow of the proposed AI-BC architecture is depicted in Figure 4.
The flow of information consists of six layers of operation. The first layer is a physical
layer that corresponds to the device deployment phase for the collection of data in real
time. The communication and control layer are responsible for edge computing. The
service and managing layer correspond to the fog computing, and the application layer
corresponds to the cloud computing. Parameters such as temperature (◦ C), humidity (%),
light intensity (lux), weather and location parameters are identified by the physical layer in
cloud computing. In physical layer of different kinds of issues and threats for data privacy
exists while transferring data from one node to another. Blockchain technology in artificial
intelligence is implemented to overcome such issues, where the transaction from one node
to another is carried out in the form of Bitcoin and Ethereum. The collected information
in real time is communicated to the communication level that acts as an intermediate for
communicating data from one node to another. The integration of artificial intelligence
and blockchain for IoT application utilizes a consensus algorithm for achieving security
and scalability.
Sustainability 2021, 13, 13076 8 of 16

Figure 4. Information flow of proposed AI-BC IoT architecture.

The integration of AI in blockchain utilizes a distributed platform of cloud, intelligent

storing and smart contracts that ensures safe validation in this layer. The data transfer
towards the managing layer is responsible for data management and setting the criteria
of infrastructure among networks for the application layer. Integration of blockchain and
artificial intelligence provides cryptography hashing, digital identity, and encryption codes.
At last, the information is transferred to the application layer, which is responsible for
global management. The integration of AI and blockchain implements the deep learning
data analytics tool for ensuring data privacy and security in the network.
In the recent literature, we can find certain evidence about the importance of this
proposed model as a solution to the research gaps. Various applications are enabled with
AI and BC models. Various recent studies related to AI and blockchain shows the relevant
evidences about the importance of the proposed model. At this point, it is also important
to share that, to the best of author’s knowledge, none of literature has been exploited
the AI oriented blockchain and blockchain oriented AI for the IoT applications with a
detailed study. A decentralized and collaborative AI model for blockchain was proposed
to provide the application specific results [43]. Later, authors in [44] proposed a framework
where smart cities are enabled with AI and blockchain for the decentralized auditing using
blockchain technology. An exhaustive literature review has been performed to study the
various challenges, solutions and future scope of the AI and blockchain technology [45].
A detailed study of integration of AI with blockchain [46] and applications of IoT enable
smart cities with emergence of AI and blockchain [47,48] has been discussed by various
authors. Recently, authors proposed a model using blockchain and IoT based cognitive
edge framework for the smart city applications [49].
Sustainability 2021, 13, 13076 9 of 16

4. Performance Analysis of AI-BC Framework

In this section, the performance evaluation of the proposed framework design is
discussed. During the experimentation, an open source Ethereum blockchain platform is
explored. The proposed framework has major differences in terms of its fundamental pro-
cesses while comparing it other existing techniques. Considering this point, the simulations
are favored, and additional platforms are not implemented for the purpose of evaluation.
The network performance is evaluated separately because the network operates separately.
The performance of the proposed design is studied by using the NS3 simulator for the
performance analysis of smart city network. The NS3 simulator is used, as it is beneficial in
computing low resource device performance. Another benefit of using this simulator is
that it increases the performance of overlay network and provides efficient evaluation of
peer-to-peer networks.
The experimental feasibility of proposed AI-BC architecture in Raspberry Pi is mea-
sured in terms of four different metrics such as accuracy, latency, and security/privacy
analysis. The accuracy analysis for the application of object detection is computed, and it is
observed that the percentage accuracy increases with increase in number of edge nodes
and 5345 instances are utilized for deep learning operation. The contribution of more nodes
increases the training dataset and increases the accuracy in object detection. The variation
in object detection time is evaluated for total amount of edge nodes to elaborate the latency
improvement. The analysis of security and privacy is computed by estimating the similar-
ity index and calculated object’s Euclidian distance in IoT smart city network. With the
increase in Euclidian distance the similarity index value decreases. As a result, the security
and privacy in IoT objects is increased with the decrease in value of similarity index.
The performance of the proposed architecture is measured in terms of qualitative
and quantitative analysis. In qualitative measurement, two cases are discussed determin-
ing how the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain (BC) is beneficial for
IoT applications. First case represents artificial intelligence-oriented block chain for IoT
application, and second case represents blockchain-oriented artificial intelligence for IoT
frameworks. In this study, the issues of blockchain technology in IoT applications are
also addressed along with artificial intelligence and described solution for addressing
these issues of artificial intelligence with BC technology by presenting advanced struc-
tures. Whereas in quantitative measurement the performance evaluation of proposed
AI-BC architecture is evaluated and compared with existing state of art approaches con-
sidering performance indices such as latency, data privacy and security, accuracy, energy
consumption and computational complexity.

4.1. Qualitative Measurement

In quantitative measurement two cases, AI oriented blockchain and blockchain ori-
ented AI for the IoT applications are presented. AI on the other hand boosts blockchain
technology by providing accurate prediction and efficient decision making for IoT applica-
tions. Therefore, how AI addresses issues of blockchain is termed as artificial intelligence
oriented blockchain, i.e., case 1, and how BC addresses the issues of artificial intelligence is
defined as BC oriented AI, i.e., case 2.
Case 1—Artificial intelligence oriented blockchain
AI driven blockchain leverages many fields such as manufacturing, Internet of Things
and big data, logistics, healthcare, industrial, and many others. In all these applications, AI
plays a significant role in processing of data or performing automating tasks to process the
information into blockchain technology. It is observed from many experiments that AI can
be as effective as humans at tasks and AI is argued as better as it can function 24*7 without
facing failure or inclined to human error. The implementation of artificial intelligence
for blockchain technology in IoT applications is discussed. There are many limitations of
implementing blockchain technology such as complexity, size of network and high cost
of transaction.
Sustainability 2021, 13, 13076 10 of 16

To address these limitations the artificial intelligence is integrated with blockchain.

These limitations are classified in five categories and depicted in Figure 5. The first category
represents the hardware, which delivers the data from IoT applications utilized by AI and
blockchain. The second category is security and privacy, which supports the cryptographic
hashing and provides digitally signed transactions across nodes in a network. The third
category presents scalability, which determines nodes capability to manage and grow
demand supply for the productivity. The fourth class represents effectiveness, where the
comparison among input and output assessment is observed in terms of timing and energy
consumption for the IoT applications. The fifth category represents the energy consumption
in which the overall power consumed by the miners in blockchain technology is observed.

Figure 5. Classification of artificial intelligence (AI) oriented blockchain (BC) for IoT.

Case 2—Blockchain oriented artificial intelligence

In this case, how blockchain technology addresses the issues of AI is discussed. The
taxonomy of the blockchain oriented artificial intelligence for IoT application is depicted in
Figure 6. The AI issues for IoT application are addressed by integrating blockchain technol-
ogy. There are five different categories of AI issues, which are addressed by blockchain.
These issues are categorized as data sharing, security and privacy, explainable AI, effective-
ness, and AI trust. The first category is data sharing, where the data resources are shared
from one device to another and provide various communication facilities. The second
category is security and privacy, where collected data is communicated from one device to
other in a secure manner and digital signature is provided for each transaction through
cryptographic hashing.
The third category is explainable AI, where the techniques of artificial intelligence
can be trusted and made understandable by human. This category deals with the self and
perceived learning approaches. The fourth category deals with the effectiveness of artificial
intelligence aiming to provide the predictive analysis methods for users. The fifth category
is artificial intelligence trust, which aims to provide problem-solving capability through
neuron science. In this category, various tasks such as risk analysis, information security
analysis, internal analysis and practitioner’s analysis are performed. Blockchain technology
allows distributed marketplaces and management platforms that can be implemented in
many modules of Artificial Intelligence, which comprises computing data, algorithms,
and power. Blockchain driven AI has the potential to process, manage and securely store
Sustainability 2021, 13, 13076 11 of 16

the data without relying on a third party. Blockchain provides the solution for acute
problems of data security and storage, supply chains, government processes, secure voting,
crowdfunding, transactions processing and intellectual property. Hence, blockchains are
progressively adopted for providing the transparency transactions and information to
customers. The potentials are limitless if there’s a technique for blockchain designers to
adopt AI into their platforms.

Figure 6. Classification of blockchain (BC) oriented artificial intelligence (AI) for Internet of Things.

4.2. Quantitative Measurement

In this section, the performance of proposed AI-BC architecture is evaluated and
compared with the existing state of art approaches considering various parameters such
as accuracy, latency, data privacy and security, energy consumption and computational
complexity. The round robin approach and mini approach are the algorithms implemented
for arranging the elements in a group in rational order. The process includes initialization
from top towards bottom, and then again starting from top element of list and so on. This
process takes turns by using computer resources to limit the process for a short time span,
then further suspending the process for giving a turn to the next process. The performance
analysis of proposed architecture is compared with existing research [7,15,24,26]. Each of
the existing studies provides analysis of big data at cloud, fog, edge, and device intelli-
gence. The compatibility of integrated artificial intelligence and blockchain based AI-BC
architecture is analyzed by big data analysis. The performance analysis of various existing
researches is presented in Table 2 in relation with the proposed AI-BC architecture. The
quantitative analysis from the proposed architecture is presented in Table 3. The perfor-
mance of present study is compared in terms of accuracy, latency privacy and security,
energy consumption and computational complexity with the existing techniques. The
percentage accuracy calculation for device deployment intelligence is observed as 75%,
whereas for edge, fog and cloud computing, the percentage accuracy is observed as 78%,
92% and 70%.
Sustainability 2021, 13, 13076 12 of 16

Table 2. Performance analysis of various existing research.

Categories
Schemes
Methods Performance Indices Proposed Approach Platform Application Process
Collaborative Deep
Device deployment Deep Learning and Secure Deep learning
Accuracy and Privacy Ethereum Solidity Learning and generation of
intelligence [7] Blockchain based on BC
candidate block
Deep Learning and Latency, Accuracy and Secure Deep learning
Edge computing [15] Ethereum Solidity and Raspbian Distributive Deep Learning
Blockchain Delay based on BC
Computational Analyzer and classifier of
Machine Learning and Decentralized network
Fog computing [24] Resources and Ethereum Linux and Mininet traffic flow, Attack detection
Blockchain based on BC
Accuracy and mitigation based on BC
Reinforcement Learning Accuracy and Management of resource Ethereum and
Cloud computing [26] Solidity and Windows Frequency scaling
and Blockchain Energy Consumption based on BC Smart contract

Table 3. Quantitative analysis of the proposed model.

Performance Indices

Category Computational Complexity

Latency in Milliseconds Privacy and Security
Accuracy (%) Energy Consumption (%)
Lowest Highest Highest Lowest CPU Usage Memory Usage
Device deployment IoT: 3.2–4.5 and for IoT: 12.1–15.6 and for
75 57.6 58.7 1.2 0.02 -
intelligence [7] Edge devices: 34.2 Edge devices: 25
IoT: 3.5–4.8 and for IoT: 12.5–15.8 and for
Edge computing [15] 78 56.2 59.3 0.59 0.3 -
Edge devices: 37.2 Edge devices: 26
Fog computing [24] 92 0 12 0.8 0.1 - 92 94
55% in comparison with
Round Robin approach and
Cloud computing [26] 70 - - - - - -
25% in comparison with Mini
Brown approach
Sustainability 2021, 13, 13076 13 of 16

The latency is measured as lowest and highest values in milliseconds. At device

deployment, intelligence the observed lower and higher value of latency is 57.6 ms and
58.7 ms. At edge computing, the observed lower and higher value of latency is 56.2 ms and
59.3 ms. At fog computing, the observed lower and higher value of latency is 0.0 ms and
12 ms. The similarity index with highest and lowest value are computed for measuring
security and privacy. The highest and lowest value of similarity index for device deploy-
ment intelligence is in range between 1.2 to 0.02. The highest and lowest value of similarity
index for edge computing is in range between 0.59 to 0.3 and for fog computing it is in
range between 0.8 to 0.1.
The computational complexity is measured in terms of CPU and memory utilization.
At device deployment intelligence, the observed CPU utilization is in a range between 3.2%
to 4.5% for IoT, and for edge devices it is 34.2%. The memory usage at device platform for
IoT is in range between 12.1% to 15.6%, whereas for edge devices it is observed at 25%. At
edge computing, the observed CPU utilization is in range between 3.5% to 4.8% for IoT,
and for edge devices it is 37.2%. The memory usage at edge for IoT is in range between
12.5% to 15.8%, whereas for edge devices it is observed at 26%. The CPU usage at fog
computing is observed as 92%, whereas the memory usage at fog computing is observed as
94%. The reduction of 55% in energy consumption is observed when compared with round
Robin approach, whereas 25% reduction in energy consumption is observed in comparison
with Mini Brown approach.
The comparative analysis of the proposed AI-BC architecture with existing state of art
techniques for intelligent device deployment, edge computing, fog computing and cloud
computing is depicted in Figures 7 and 8. Figure 7 presents the comparative accuracy
analysis of proposed integrated AI-BC architecture, and Figure 8 presents the comparative
latency analysis. The maximum percentage accuracy for intelligent device deployment with
blockchain technology is observed as 75%. The maximum percentage accuracy for edge
computing and fog computing with blockchain technology is observed as 78% and 90%.
On the other hand, the maximum percentage accuracy without blockchain technology at
intelligent device deployment, edge computing and fog computing is observed as 55%, 60%
and 81%. Therefore, there are many applications that can be used by various researchers,
but for each application, the accuracy percentage is always observed as high by using
blockchain for IoT applications. The observed latency with blockchain technology for
intelligent device deployment is 58 ms. Similarly for edge computing and for computing,
the latency is observed as 60 ms and 22 ms. The observed latency without blockchain
technology for intelligent device deployment is 38 ms, whereas at edge and fog intelligence,
the latency is observed as 45 ms and 12 ms. The latency is observed to be higher with
blockchain technology in comparison to without blockchain technology.
The biggest advantage of the proposed system is that it presents the integration of
blockchain and artificial intelligence. The proposed system is a secure intelligent blockchain
framework that successfully addresses challenges of accuracy, latency, and security. The
key benefit of the proposed approach is real time monitoring of energy consumption and
secured transactions. The other key advantages of the proposed scheme considering smart
cities application are as follows:
For the access control, initially the blockchain technology delivers database access
to each participant. Considering the multiple interconnected devices of the smart cities
scenario, the proposed scheme has the capability of providing complete, partial and no
access to the data stored in a single database without causing security and privacy issues.
The proposed scheme represents an incentive mechanism that can be utilized for motivating
citizens to adopt various applications of smart cities.
Sustainability 2021, 13, 13076 14 of 16

Figure 7. Comparative accuracy analysis of proposed integrated AI-BC.

Figure 8. Comparative latency analysis of proposed integrated AI-BC.

5. Conclusions
In this article, an integrated blockchain and artificial intelligence based architecture
was proposed for IoT application. The objective behind this research was to achieve scalable
and secure transaction in IoT at device, cloud, fog and edge intelligence. The performance
of the proposed architecture was analyzed considering qualitative and quantitative mea-
surements. In qualitative measurement, BC oriented AI and AI oriented BC were presented
with standard taxonomy. The experimental analysis was presented for evaluating the
performance of proposed architecture with decentralized and secure big data analytics
for 6G-enabled IoT applications. The experimental analysis presents the efficiency of
proposed architecture in terms of accuracy, latency, security, and privacy. It is observed
from the experimentation that integration blockchain and artificial intelligence successfully
addresses the challenges for obtaining high accuracy and security and less latency through
decentralized network. The integration of blockchain and artificial intelligence successfully
addresses challenges of accuracy, latency, and security, but the computational power issue
was not completely addressed with the proposed framework.
In future work, the proposed architecture can be enhanced by adding machine learning
intelligence such as scaling process and feature extraction to address the issue of classification.

Author Contributions: Conceptualization, A.S., E.P., G.S., A.T. (Alexey Tselykh) and A.T. (Alexander
Tselykh); methodology, A.S. and E.P.; software, A.S., G.S. and E.P.; validation A.S. and E.P.; formal
Sustainability 2021, 13, 13076 15 of 16

analysis, investigation, resources, data curation, writing—original draft preparation A.S. and A.T.
(Alexey Tselykh); writing—review and editing; A.S., A.T. (Alexey Tselykh) and A.T. (Alexander
Tselykh); visualization, A.S., A.T. (Alexey Tselykh) and A.T. (Alexander Tselykh); supervision, A.T.
(Alexander Tselykh); project administration, A.T. (Alexey Tselykh) and A.T. (Alexander Tselykh);
funding acquisition, A.S., A.T. (Alexey Tselykh) and A.T. (Alexander Tselykh). All authors have read
and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.
Funding: The research is supported by postdoc fellowship granted by the Institute of Computer
Technologies and Information Security, Southern Federal University, project N◦ PD/20-03-KT.
Institutional Review Board Statement: Not applicable.
Informed Consent Statement: Not applicable.
Data Availability Statement: Not applicable.
Conflicts of Interest: The authors declare no conflict of interest.

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