Blockchain and IoT Technologies Enabled Waste Management in Smart Cities: A Survey

By tracking and monitoring city activities in real-time, both the Blockchain and Internet of Things (IoT) concepts are essential for developing smart city applications. Urban waste management is one of the most important concerns related to smart city applications, and it may create conflict to our society's health and environment. As a consequence, waste bins are installed throughout the city to handle municipal urban waste management, however, these bins might overflow, damaging the environment and causing public disturbances. As a result, a real-time remote monitoring system is required, which alerts the municipality community or a waste management agency regarding the level of garbage present in the waste bins. To solve the above-mentioned points, this proposed model uses Blockchain and IoT-based architecture for urban waste management in smart cities. The proposed architecture consists two types of end-user sensor nodes: UWBLMU (Urban Waste Bin Level Monitoring Unit) and RWBLMU (Residential Waste Bin Level Monitoring Unit), which are used to track waste bins in urban and residential areas respectively. This article addresses an introduction to Blockchain and IoT, as well as the interaction of wireless communication technologies of Blockchain and IoT, and Blockchain applications for IoT in urban waste management.