A decentralized marketplace for m2m economy within smart cities

As global urbanization continues, resources will begin to run low. Health care will not be able to keep up. Energy demands will exceed current capacity. Where will everyone work? How can governments and policy makers facilitate an environment conducive to economic growth? Cities around the world are working to become what we call "smart cities", an environment for addressing the challenges of advanced urban planning, energy and transportation management and urbanization by combining new technology. They’re using IoT connected devices to do everything from detecting gunshots to monitoring traffic and air quality. According to a report by McKinsey, by 2020 the number of smart cities will be about 600 worldwide, and 5 years later almost 60 percent of the world’s GDP will be generated by them. Digital technologies could be the pivot of economic progress, and Blockchain could be one of them. Since there are no standards and the requirements are not equal in each cities, the technology infrastructure is left up to each of them. That is where Blockchain can be used. Blockchain and Distributed Ledger are able to connect these technologies together. The more technologies we connect using this kind of technologies, the more value can be drawn. Imagine that a city has a digital ledger in which every house has a presence containing all relevant information about itself, from property ownership, mortgage balance and to transactional data like utility use, past and current contractor relationships, and property tax assessment. The city is able to access these in order to better perform administrative tasks related to the property and coordinate services with greater accuracy. The property owner would have a verified, reliable way to perform transactions like hiring contractors to do lawn work, renting rooms, or selling power generated by solar panels installed in the property. Now imagine extending that to the city’s broader infrastructure. A traveler take a autonomous electric bus at the station in order to reach the city center. Knowing from traffic sensor data that there’s a traffic, the bus automatically chooses an alternate path. While the traveler is traveling, thanks to his phone he is able to directly pay the company that offers the transport service in real time. Since the traveler is connected to the city’s public wifi, s/he immediately receives a notification. For this reason the need arises to create an environment in which end users are able to monitor and interact with devices in the city as it may be useful for a citizen to monitor some of these data. The aim of this thesis work is to develop a system that allows the user to purchase and monitor data streams coming from the smart city thanks to the use of IOTA technology.