Abstract
Several applications can benefit from recording information about the places a mobile entity visits and the length of time it spends there (e.g., shoppers, employees, buses, portable equipment, autonomous robots). This paper presents our approach to recording spatio-temporal presence information in a secure and inviolable way using a Distributed Ledger Technology. We implemented this solution as a middleware service that uses Complex Event Processing on smartphones to record beacon-smartphone proximity data in a blockchain efficiently. We have built upon the previous version of our service to include access control to the stored information. We analyzed the impact of this addition on the service’s performance and observed that it introduced very little overhead while significantly increasing user privacy. Furthermore, we compared the effect of using different blockchain technologies on overall service performance and characterized scenarios where using either IoTeX or Ethereum can be suitable for this type of application.
Highlights
As a large portion of modern business and our social lives encompasses mobility, the places visited by people, goods, and vehicles become testimonials of our activities, goals, state of well-being, and even our intentions
The recent explosion of movable smart Internet of Things (IoT) devices was a key component to the formation of the Internet of Mobile Things (IoMT) [1, 2], turning the information about previous, current, and future positions of these devices into valuable knowledge in our modern economy
We tested the impact of this addition on the service performance and observed that it introduces very little overhead while significantly increasing user privacy
Summary
As a large portion of modern business and our social lives encompasses mobility, the places visited by people, goods, and vehicles become testimonials of our activities, goals, state of well-being, and even our intentions. Plenty of applications can benefit from recording spatio-temporal information about the current and previously visited places of mobile entities, be they employees, vehicles, portable machines, or autonomous robots. Some companies may need to prove irrefutably that they serviced their clients at the correct place for a previously stipulated amount of time or that the maximum waiting time to be served has not exceeded the allowable limit. A public transport service may have to prove that it has complied with its schedule, with each bus arriving and leaving each stop at the right moments. If a company sends a group of employees to a remote professional training session, it might want to check if some did not attend all the course modules
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