Mind my value: a decentralized infrastructure for fair and trusted IoT data trading

Internet of Things (IoT) data are increasingly viewed as a new form of massively distributed and large scale digital assets, which are continuously generated by millions of connected devices. The real value of such assets can only be realized by allowing IoT data trading to occur on a marketplace that rewards every single producer and consumer, at a very granular level. Crucially, we believe that such a marketplace should not be owned by anybody, and should instead fairly and transparently self-enforce a well defined set of governance rules. In this paper we address some of the technical challenges involved in realizing such a marketplace. We leverage emerging blockchain technologies to build a decentralized, trusted, transparent and open architecture for IoT traffic metering and contract compliance, on top of the largely adopted IoT brokered data infrastructure. We discuss an Ethereum-based prototype implementation and experimentally evaluate the overhead cost associated with Smart Contract transactions, concluding that a viable business model can indeed be associated with our technical approach.