A Blockchain Based Architecture for IoT Data Sharing Systems

Abstract

Blockchain as an emerging distributed protocol has been widely used in IoT systems. Using blockchain as an IoT data sharing protocol provides precious features including consistency, reliability, and traceability. However, such combination brings high cryptography overhead and consensus latency when sharing data from large number of IoT sensors. To address these issues, we propose a novel blockchain based architecture for IoT data sharing systems. In this architecture, data messages signed by IoT sensors are packaged into data blocks and distributed to the blockchain network. We propose a data block structure with identity-based aggregate signature to protect data reliability from malicious sink nodes and reduce the communication, storage, and computing cost of signatures. We also present a multiple state chain structure with a new consensus algorithm which cuts back consensus phases and accelerate the consensus process. Finally, we evaluate the proportion of data in a block and the blockchain consensus latency, which shows a better performance than PBFT in this scenario.