A Blockchain-Based Auction Framework for Location-Aware Services

Abstract

As a critical factor in ensuring the growth of the electronic auction (e-auction) domain, the privacy and security of the participants (sellers and buyers) must always be guaranteed. Traditionally, auction data, including participant details, are stored in a third party (auctioneer) database. This leads to a high risk of a single point of failure in terms of privacy and security. Toward this end, blockchain technology has emerged as a promising decentralized communication paradigm to address such risks. This paper presents a blockchain-based auction framework as a decentralized e-auctioning framework for location-aware services. In particular, the framework consists of three components: pre-auctioning, main auctioning, and post-auctioning processes with four algorithms. Our primary focus is on location-aware services, such as storage space rental, apartment rental, transport hire, and parking space rental. The trading volumes are expected to be high; hence, simplifying the design is a crucial requirement. In addition to the benefits of eliminating the centralized entity (the auctioneer), fees are redistributed among participants as rewards. Further, we incorporate a service quality monitoring method that ranks the services provided by participants. This ranking allows participants to determine the rank of other participants with whom they wish to trade. We have conducted several experiments to evaluate the proposed framework’s cost feasibility and to ensure the ease of the business flow.