The Last Man Standing Technique for Proof-of-Location in IoT Infrastructures at Network Edge

Marat Zhanikeev

doi:10.1155/2019/7317019

Abstract

This paper is divided in two parts. The first part is the story of a failure, where an attempt to generate verifiable Proof-of-Location from WiFi scan results has failed, even when scan results were compared with a small time shift within the same trace. In the second part, this paper proposes to conduct Proof-of-Location transactions in a peer-to-peer fashion. Each peer is assisted by the cloud side which plays the role of both the real-time mediator and public transaction ledger. This paper proposes the Last Man Standing (LMS) procedure which is both a means for ensuring a fair transaction and a natural way to close it. Each transaction results in a coin which can be either shared among transaction participants or owned individually by LMS. Analysis using real mobility traces from various types of urban locations shows that the proposal is valid and will ensure that all the locations within the city will gradually be claimed via the proposed type of transactions while providing independently verifiable proofs for each location. The distant goal of this paper is a next generation Location-Based Service (LBS) which takes the form of a location-based resource economy where each location is a coin compatible with traditional blockchain operations.

Highlights

There is a traceable development path for Internet of Things (IoT) starting from small-scale IoT spaces [1], moving to the scale of a Smart City [2] and recently arriving at the topic of security at network edge where majority of discussion is in some way related to the blockchain technology [3]
This paper treads along the same general line as in [6,7,8], which pack WiFi Access Points (APs) found in WiFi scan results into a spatial-temporal trust structure and use it as PoL
The starting point for this paper is placed at recent research on Proof-of-Location techniques, where the common feature is the assumption that WiFi APs play an active role in helping each user verifies the location

Summary

Introduction

There is a traceable development path for Internet of Things (IoT) starting from small-scale IoT spaces [1], moving to the scale of a Smart City [2] and recently arriving at the topic of security at network edge where majority of discussion is in some way related to the blockchain technology [3]. When it comes to IoT and, broadly speaking, infrastructure at network edge, both the conventional form based on Proof-of-Work (PoW) [4] and lightweight methods better suitable for the resource-starved network edge [5] are discussed. One can improve the odds by accumulating hardware resources and, represent a larger portion of the network (in terms of computing power)

Objectives

Methods

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Conclusion