Opportunistic Mobile IoT with Blockchain Based Collaboration

Abstract

The proliferation of Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices has opened up plethora of opportunities for smart networking and connected applications. The large distribution of IoT devices within a finite geographical area and the pervasiveness of wireless networking presents an opportunity for such devices to collaborate. This paper proposes the idea of opportunistic collaboration among mobile IoT devices to share their services and excess computing resources. Opportunistic collaboration among devices over wireless networking requires proper coordination and agreements among the devices in a purely distributed manner. To facilitate the distributive collaboration, we propose a decentralized architecture design using blockchain technology. Through experimental evaluation of a prototype collaborative mobile-IoT system involving RaspberryPis and a Dell IoT edge gateway, we show that our proposed distributed collaborative approach is feasible and comparable to a non-collaborative edge- computing approach from a latency perspective.