Consortium Blockchain-Based Federated Sensor-Cloud for IoT Services

Abstract

This work addresses the problem of ensuring service availability, trust, and profitability in sensor-cloud architecture designed to Sensors-as-a-Service (Se-aaS) using IoT generated data. Due to the requirement of geographically distributed wireless sensor networks for Se-aaS, it is not always possible for a single Sensor-cloud Service Provider (SCSP) to meet the end-users requirements. To address this problem, we propose a federated sensor-cloud architecture involving multiple SCSPs for provisioning high-quality Se-aaS. Moreover, for ensuring trust in such a distributed architecture, we propose the use of consortium blockchain to keep track of the activities of each SCSP and to automate several functionalities through Smart Contracts. Additionally, to ensure profitability and end-user satisfaction, we propose a composite scheme, named BRAIN, comprising of two parts. First, we define miner's score to select an optimal subset of SCSPs as miners periodically. Second, we propose a modified multiple-leaders-multiple-followers Stackelberg game-theoretic approach to decide the association of an optimal subset of SCSPs to each service. Thereafter, we evaluate the performance of BRAIN by comparing with three existing benchmark schemes through simulations. Simulation results depict that BRAIN outperforms existing schemes in terms of profits and resource consumption of SCSPs, and price charged from end-users.