Blockchain-Enabled Iot Frameworks for Low-Latency Smart City Applications and Distributed Edge Networks

Resumen

Smart city infrastructure, traffic management, utility grids, public safety sensing, and environmental monitoring among its core applications, increasingly depends on Internet of Things (IoT) device networks whose data must be trusted, tamper-evident, and processed with latency low enough to support real-time municipal decision-making, a combination of requirements that neither centralized cloud architectures nor unsecured IoT networks alone adequately satisfy. This paper reviews the technical literature on integrating blockchain technology with IoT device networks and edge computing infrastructure specifically to meet smart cities' combined trust and latency requirements, tracing the foundational blockchain and distributed-ledger literature, the blockchain-IoT integration architecture literature addressing the scalability and resource-constraint mismatches between the two technologies, and the edge-computing literature that has emerged as the primary mechanism for reconciling blockchain's computational and consensus-latency overhead with IoT applications' real-time requirements. The review synthesizes foundational blockchain consensus and smart-contract literature, blockchain-IoT architectural integration studies, and the more recent blockchain-edge convergence literature that distributes ledger and consensus operations across edge nodes rather than a centralized cloud. A single consolidated comparative table positions the major blockchain-IoT-edge architectural patterns against their consensus mechanism, latency profile, and reported smart-city application domain. The paper concludes that low-latency blockchain-enabled IoT smart city deployment depends on deliberately relocating consensus and validation operations to the network edge rather than treating blockchain as a cloud-layer add-on, and identifies lightweight, edge-native consensus protocol design as the central future research prospect.