Blockchain-based secure multi-resource trading model for smart marketplace

Abstract

Developments in sensors and communication technology lead to the emergence of smart communities where diverse collaborative applications can be enabled. One such application is the Smart Market Place (SMP), where participants of the smart community can trade resources, such as energy, internet bandwidth, water, etc., using a virtual currency (such as ether). However, most of the existing SMP trading models are proposed to trade a single resource and also restrict a participant to perform only a single transaction at a time. Restriction on multiple parallel transactions is imposed to protect the participants against the double-spending attack in the SMP. This work proposes a secure multi-resource trading (SMRT) model that is based on public Ethereum blockchain. SMRT allows participant of a SMP to trade multiple resources and initiate parallel transactions. Moreover, detailed security analysis and adversary model are presented to test the effectiveness and to assess the resilience of the proposed model against the double-spending attack. The adversary model is based on partial progress towards block production which is influenced by time advantage and average computing power. Furthermore, simulation based analysis and comparison of SMRT is also presented in terms of security, performance, cost and latency of transactions. It is observed that SMRT not only provides protection against the double spending attack, but it also reduces the computational overhead of the proposed model up to 50% as compared to existing trading models.