Incentivizing Services Sharing in IoT with OSGi and HashGraph

Abstract

Service Oriented Architecture is a viable option for developing applications in an Internet of Things (IoT) environment. One important consideration in developing services for an IoT environment is how to incentivize service providers and consumers so that a healthy IoT marketplace can come into practice with a balanced supply and demand for services. We argue that service providers should be specifically incentivized in some form to offer quality services in an IoT environment. In this paper, we present an IoT ecosystem, where each exchange of a service between a service provider and service consumer is logged as a transaction in a distributed ledger. For service sharing, we used OSGi Remote Services implementation of the Eclipse Communication Framework. For the distributed ledger, we used Swirlds Hashgraph. Each OSGi remote service is requested by digitally signing a commitment to use the service and upon service exchange, the signature is logged as a Hashgraph transaction. A proof-of-concept prototype has been implemented with positive results.