To Delay Instantiation of a Smart Contract to Save Calculation Resources in IoT

Abstract

Smart contracts are required to be instantiated in the predeployed stage, which consumes computation resources from then on. It is a big waste in the blockchain whose nodes are composed of IoT devices, as those devices often have limited resources (such as limited power supplies or a limited number of processes to run). Meanwhile, IoT devices are heterogeneous and different smart contracts are required. If those smart contracts are instantiated previously, numerous meaningless addresses are required. In this paper, we propose to delay the instantiation of a smart contract when used and terminate it when not used, which is similar to the life cycle of a variable. Then, a new kind of variable (the wrapping variable) is used to hide details of the instantiation and the address. The smart contract is instantiated in the construction function of the wrapping variable, or even it is delayed to the time when there are requests for it. The smart contract terminates when the variable is out of its scope. Then, different instantiation methods are proposed. Finally, we perform the qualitative comparison between the proposed approach and the predeployment method, and it demonstrates that the proposed methods optimize the life cycle of the smart contract and save calculation resources.