A Fully Decentralized Infrastructure for Subscription-based IoT Data Trading

Abstract

On top of subscription-based pricing models such as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), monetizing the subscription enables the payment of data streams with data usage instead of a particular price for a fixed data set. This pricing model allows data providers to have a better vision of managing budgets and data consumers to have the flexibility to subscribe and unsubscribe. However, unlike static data collections, the streaming data increases difficulties of dynamic data ownership and identity verification. A trustless data trading infrastructure is required where the entities can trade, validate data ownership and data integrity without trusting any service or participants. In addition, an automated subscription procedure is also demanded for the sake of data monetization. In this paper, we leverage usages of distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) to construct a decentralized data trading platform on top of the IoT brokered infrastructure. This approach can efficiently enhance the degree of transparency and scalability. The storage built upon cryptographic message protocols allows transmitting, accessing and validating data streams over distributed ledgers without authorities, and the digital rights of trading participants deserve a guarantee, which is enabled by design.