Secure Hierarchical Processing and Logging of Sensing Data and IoT Events with Blockchain

Abstract

Recently, we have seen increasing popularity of using the blockchain technology to secure sensing data generated by traditional wireless sensor networks and Internet of Things (IoT). One of the biggest obstacles for integrating the IoT and blockchain technologies is the limited throughput of the current distributed ledgers. In this paper, we propose a novel method for hierarchical processing and logging of potentially large amount of sensing data with the blockchain technology, which could drastically address the issue of limited throughput in blockchains. Depending on the scale of the sensing need, two or more levels of processing and logging could be involved, where only the highest level of summative sensor data are placed on the blockchain or a secure distributed ledger. By establishing a strong linkage between different level of data, all lower-level and raw data are also made immutable once the highest level of summative data are placed on the blockchain.