Designing a Blockchain-Based IoT With Ethereum, Swarm, and LoRa: The Software Solution to Create High Availability With Minimal Security Risks

Abstract

Today, the number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices in all aspects of life is increasing exponentially. Our cities are getting smarter and informing us about our surroundings in a contextual manner. However, we face significant challenges in deploying, managing, and collecting data from these devices. In addition, we must address the problem of storing and mining that data for higher-quality IoT services. Blockchain technology, even in today's nascent form, has the potential to be the foundation for a common, distributed, trustless, and autonomous infrastructure system. This article describes a standardized IoT infrastructure where data are stored on a distributed storage service that is fault-tolerant and resistant to distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks and data access is managed by a decentralized, trustless blockchain. The illustrated system used LoRa as the emerging network technology, Swarm as the distributed data storage platform, and Ethereum as the blockchain platform. Such a data back end will ensure high availability with minimal security risks while replacing traditional back-end systems with a single "smart contract".