Blockchain-based parking sharing service for smart city development

The increased density of the urban population and frequent transportation movement has lead to parking issues in these areas. Many efforts have been made to efficiently utilize the existing parking facilities. Most of these solutions target the large-scale private and public parking facilities; however, the individual parking facilities are not much explored and exploited for reducing the parking issues. In the last few years, the Online-to-Offline (O2O) model has witnessed huge attention from the research community due to its versatile applications in many domains. The main objective of the O2O model is to create service awareness online, allowing potential users to review different offers and then visit local physical places for purchasing. The security of the users' data has always been considered a crucial factor in any public sharing platform. The blockchain model has been regarded as a solid security platform for many public sharing platforms. This work designed a blockchain framework with a novel data verification and role-based Access control method for securing the parking service data. Several experiments are performed using the sawtooth blockchain tool to investigate the performance of the proposed blockchain framework against the baseline approach concerning latency, meantime testing (MTT), throughput, transaction sending rate (TPS), and average response time (ART). The obtained results confirm that the proposed approach is scalable and feasible for smart parking and other IoT-based applications.