A Lightweight Payment Verification Protocol for Blockchain Transactions on IoT Devices

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) promises technical solutions to many important societal problems relating to the environment, healthcare, transportation, etc. One approach to making IoT solutions more cost-effective is the idea of horizontal integration, where sensors and actuators are shared between different applications. In such environments, economic transactions between system components are used to pay for data and services. Blockchain-based overlay networks have been developed to provide such financial mechanism for IoT devices with sufficient processing power and operating system support. However, no practical solutions for low-end devices exist. In addition, existing solutions also require setting up multiple blockchain accounts for a single administrative domain, which incurs high fees when consolidating those accounts. In this paper, we propose a Ticket-Based Verification Protocol, which defines two separate logical entities, contract manager and transaction verifier. Our design limits the need for high-performance embedded systems to only one unit per administrative domain and reduces the processing and networking overhead other IoT devices in that domain.