Design Patterns for Blockchain-assisted Accountable Data Dissemination between IoT Devices and Edge Server

Abstract

There is an increasing number of software developers that want to take advantage of blockchain technology in their projects. Among various kinds of applications, IoT (Internet of Things) is recognized as one of the most promising domain to employ blockchain technology due to the highly distributed nature of blockchain. Therefore, many blockchain-driven IoT services (B-IoT) have been developed in recent years. Unfortunately, when running a blockchain, a lot of computational power and storage is used. Owning to the limitation of the power and hardware capacity, IoT devices are usually implemented with none or only part of the functionalities of a full blockchain endpoint, resulting in the advantages of the B-IoT not fully leveraged. With the increase in network bandwidth, advancements in hardware capability, and new blockchain endpoint protocol for low-capacity environments, it is now feasible to locate more functions of a blockchain endpoint on an IoT device. We present the empirical lessons of the authors from building several B-IoT systems in the last few years. We observe that there are several design issues and design decisions to be considered. In this paper, we report two patterns related to the design disseminating accountable data from IoT devices to the blockchain in the edge environments. To explain how these patterns work, we also introduce an “Intelligent Refrigerated Shipping Containers” scenario.