BlendMAS: A Blockchain-Enabled Decentralized Microservices Architecture for Smart Public Safety

Thanks to rapid technological advances in the Internet of Things (IoT), a smart public safety (SPS) system has become feasible by integrating heterogeneous computing devices to collaboratively provide public protection services. While service-oriented architecture (SOA) has been adopted by IoT and cyber-physical systems (CPS), it is difficult for a monolithic architecture to provide scalable and extensible services for a distributed IoT based SPS system. Furthermore, traditional security solutions rely on a centralized authority, which can be a performance bottleneck or single point failure. Inspired by microservices architecture and blockchain technology, this paper proposes a BLockchain-ENabled Decentralized Microservices Architecture for Smart public safety (BlendMAS). Within a permissioned blockchain network, a microservices based security mechanism is introduced to secure data access control in an SPS system. The functionality of security services is decoupled into separate containerized microservices that are built using a smart contract and deployed on edge and fog computing nodes. An extensive experimental study verified that the proposed BlendMAS is able to offer a decentralized, scalable and secured data sharing and access control to distributed IoT based SPS system.