The Best of Both Worlds: A General Architecture for Data Management in Blockchain-enabled Internet-of-Things

Abstract

The rapid proliferation of Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices has brought great challenges of data management, i.e., storing, retrieving and manipulating a large volume of IoT data. Conventional IoT systems rely on centralized architectures to manage IoT data, hence suffering from limited scalability, lack of transparency, and single point of failure issues. As such, we employ blockchain as a distributed ledger to support the decentralized approach of data management in IoT systems, where IoT data are stored in the deployed blockchain for further utilization, e.g., retrieve and audit. A general architecture combining blockchain and IoT systems is presented. Nevertheless, as the resource constraints of IoT devices may still exist during the process of data transmissions from IoT devices to the blockchain network, we propose a case study of a learning-assisted resource allocation method to support intelligent data management. The numerical results show that the proposed scheme achieves superior performance compared with baseline solutions.