Distributed Ledger and Smart Contract Based Approach for IoT Sensor Applications

Abstract

Security and traceability of smart sensor data in centrally organized IoT-architectures require a third party of trust. In order to overcome this issue, Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT) apply consensus mechanisms. Current approaches suggest DLT-based IoT-architectures which are static and only provide limited data precision in specific applications. Thus, they rely on custom tokens and additional technologies such as SQL databases. In addition, the design of the applied smart contracts (sc) allow unauthorized access. In contrast, in this paper an adaptable, scalable and purely DLT-based IoT-architecture for secure and decentral software services is proposed. It employs sc for the secure and decentralized interaction between users, software services and IoT devices, such as smart sensors. Thereby, sc are adjustable and their access is controlled by an address comparison of authorized wallets. Finally, a case-study on a sc based software service for an industrial smart temperature sensor demonstrates applicability and benefits of the proposed approach.