Abstract
In the current centralized IoT ecosystems, all financial transactions are routed through IoT platform providers. The security and privacy issues are inevitable with an untrusted or compromised IoT platform provider. To address these issues, we propose Hy-Bridge, a hybrid blockchain-based billing and charging framework. In Hy-Bridge, the IoT platform provider plays no proxy role, and IoT users can securely and efficiently share a credit with other users. The trustful end-to-end functionality of blockchain helps us to provide accountability and reliability features in IoT transactions. Furthermore, with the blockchain-distributed consensus, we provide a credit-sharing feature for IoT users in the energy and utility market. To provide this feature, we introduce a local block framework for service management in the credit-sharing group. To preserve the IoT users’ privacy and avoid any information leakage to the main blockchain, an interconnection position, called bridge, is introduced to isolate IoT users’ peer-to-peer transactions and link the main blockchain to its subnetwork blockchain(s) in a hybrid model. To this end, a k-anonymity protection is performed on the bridge. To evaluate the performance of the introduced hybrid blockchain-based billing and charging, we simulated the energy use case scenario using Hy-Bridge. Our simulation results show that Hy-Bridge could protect user privacy with an acceptable level of information loss and CPU and memory usage.
Highlights
Nowadays, energy systems are becoming increasingly decentralized, diverse, and distributed.The increasing number of applications for renewable and distributed energy resources (DERs) has led to more energy being generated and consumed locally in microgrids, which is changing conventional centralized energy supply systems [1]
We introduce Hy-Bridge, a hybrid architecture of blockchain developed on the Internet of things (IoT) service layer
IoT energy and utility markets based on the blockchain technology
Summary
Energy systems are becoming increasingly decentralized, diverse, and distributed. The privacy of IoT users is protected by separating the transactions of the power grid from those of the microgrid(s) in this hybrid framework To this end, we introduce a bridge, an interconnection position between the main blockchain and its subnetwork(s). We propose Hy-Bridge to preserve IoT users’ privacy in the billing and charging platform for the energy sector In this hybrid blockchain, an interconnection position called the bridge, is introduced to link the main blockchain to its subnetwork(s). The bridge manages the transactions in two different blockchains to avoid user profiling and user identification To this end, the bridge isolates all the P2P energy transactions of the microgrid and provides anonymization protection to preserve IoT users’ privacy.
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