Lightweight and Reliable Decentralized Reward System using Blockchain

Abstract

Crowdsensing has become increasingly popular in recent years by leveraging the sensing capability of the ubiquitous Internet of Things (IoT) and mobile devices. A critical component to enable effective crowdsensing is a reliable reward system to motivate the participation of crowdsensing. In traditional crowdsensing applications, the assessment of data quality and the evaluation of each participant's rewards are performed by the central server. Hence, their fairness and reliability are based on the assumption that the server will behave correctly. Once the server suffers from software or hardware failures, or even cheats on purpose, the profit of participants cannot be guaranteed. In this paper, we propose a reliable decentralized reward system for crowdsensing by harnessing the blockchain technique. Different from existing blockchain-based crowdsensing solutions that utilize expensive consensus mechanisms in terms of computation or financial cost, we explore the power of reputation system that exists in most crowdsensing applications and securely integrate it into blockchain to design a proof of reputation consensus mechanism. On top of it, an efficient and reliable reward system using blockchain is further designed. We evaluated the performance of our proposed reward system using numerical analysis as well as simulation.