Exploiting constrained IoT devices in a trustless blockchain-based water management system

Abstract

We propose a technological framework based on the combination of the Internet of Things (IoT) and Blockchains aiming at incentivizing and rewarding more sustainable water management practices in agriculture. In this context, current IoT-based precision agriculture deployments prefer energy efficiency, which generally translates into power-and-resource-constrained sensing devices. For this reason, often, system integrators of this sector feel the need to interpose third-party hardware intermediaries (e.g., IoT gateways) between sensing devices and blockchain endpoints, so augmenting infrastructural costs and reducing the trustworthiness of the data acquired from the field. In this paper, we present a software architecture specifically designed for a trustless water management system where constrained IoT devices can directly transact sensed data on a public blockchain network. We deploy the proposed solution on off-the-shelf hardware devices and undertake a thorough benchmarking in terms of memory, program size, communication overheads and power consumption. Our results show that, in general, typical IoT devices can be used to directly interact with a blockchain, without severe burden. More specifically, these devices only incur an additional 6% of the energy consumed for their typical interactions with a gateway.