Arbiter: Improved Smart City Operations through Decentralized Autonomous Organization

Smart cities have emerged as one of the most promising applications of cyber-physical systems (CPS), carrying the potential to serve the various interests of the public and private sectors at large. However, contemporary smart city infrastructure commonly uses heavily-centralized network architectures, reducing failure resilience and application flexibility. This centralization also imposes high barriers to entry for public access, limiting usage and oversight opportunities. To address these limitations, we describe Arbiter, a novel fog- and edge-based communication architecture based on the concept of a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO). Arbiter aims to improve the socioeconomic equity of the local citizenry by (1) acting as a management layer for citywide CPS assets, (2) providing a compliance layer for managing human capital, and (3) offering a data protection layer to ensure that citizens retain full control of their personal data. We then analyze in detail the technical, socioeconomic, and ethical implications of Arbiter, and contextualize its role in the modern smart city.