A Privacy-Preserving and Amount-Flexible Multi-Hop Payment Protocol for Autonomous IoT Resource Scheduling

Abstract

The proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) applications and on-demand logistics has fostered crowdsourced delivery systems where dynamic coordination among senders, couriers, and receivers enables efficient lastmile logistics. However, centralized dispatching exposes privacy and reliability risks, including single points of failure and leakage of routing and transaction data. Blockchainbased Payment Channel Networks (PCNs) address these limitations by moving frequent interactions off-chain while maintaining verifiable settlement on-chain. This paper presents a blockchain-anchored privacy-preserving path optimization protocol that supports variable-amount multihop payments over PCNs. By combining Pedersen commitments and lightweight zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs), the protocol verifies transaction correctness without revealing amounts, and employs blind-channel operations to prevent intermediaries from accessing sensitive data. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme achieves strong privacy protection and scalability with low computational cost, making it suitable for blockchain-based IoT delivery environments.