Secure Service Provisioning Scheme for Lightweight Clients with Incentive Mechanism Based on Blockchain

Abstract

AbstractThe Internet of Things (IoT) industry is growing very fast to transform factories, homes and farms to make them automatic and efficient. In the past, IoT is applied in different resilient scenarios and applications. IoT faces a lot of challenges due to the lack of computational power, battery and storage resources. Fortunately, the rise of blockchain technology facilitates IoT devices in security solutions. Nowadays, blockchain is used to make reliable and efficient communication among IoT devices and emerging computing technologies. In this paper, a blockchain-based secure service provisioning scheme is proposed for Lightweight Clients (LCs). Furthermore, an incentive mechanism based on reputation is proposed. We used consortium blockchain with the Proof of Authority (PoA) consensus mechanism. Furthermore, we used Smart Contracts (SCs) to validate the services provided by the Service Providers (SPs) to the LCs, transfer cryptocurrency to the SPs and maintain the reputation of the SPs. Moreover, the keccak256 hashing algorithm is used for converting the data of arbitrary size to the hash of fixed size. The simulation results show that the LCs receive validated services from the SPs at an affordable cost. The results also depict that the participation rate of SPs is increased because of the incentive mechanism.KeywordsInternet of ThingsBlockchainService provisioning