Hierarchical Distributed Ledger for IoT using Ethereum

Blockchain

Dr. Irfan Siddavatam

Ms. Ashwini Dalvi
Mr. Shivam Pathak
Mr. Kshitiz Shrivastava

Department of Information Technology

K.J. Somaiya College of Engineering
Outline
Introduction
Motivation
Contribution
Related Work
 Implementation
Conclusion
References
Introduction
 This data gathered by IOT sensors is of
critical value to many companies as
they use this data for analysis to drive
their business needs.
The data generated by sensors is
ubiquitous, keeping track of its
origination and trusting the data
obtained from third party data
generators is merely impossible without
a system in place to handle this issue.
Motivation
 When the sensors are preconfigured by
the data collectors, they can easily verify
the data coming from those sensors for
its authenticity using cryptography.
But if a third party wants to buy that
data, how can they trust the data
collector for the authenticity of that data
i.e whether the data they are buying is
real data or some randomly generated
stream of numbers.
Motivation
The only option left is to trust the
claim made by the collectors that the
data they are providing is authentic.
This project resolves the trust issue
by creating a distributed application
using blockchains by distributing the
trust factor to the entire network
instead of trusting a single entity [
Contribution
 The project provides a platform for buying
and selling of sensor data which also
ensures that the data in the given scenario
is authentic and the ownership of that data
is established from the moment it is created.
We will accomplish this need by keeping
track of each instance of data along with
maintaining a distributed public ledger of all
the transactions happening in the network
regarding data generated by sensor nodes.
Contribution
Listed are some terminologies used for in-
depth explanation of project implementation:
 Farm: It is a network of Iot nodes which
generally includes a number of Raspberry pis
(or some data collecting and computing device)
as sensor nodes and full-fledged computer
nodes as user nodes.
 Farm Manager: This is the machine in the
network which essentially acts as a data
collector and and is the farm head who
maintains and holds responsibility for the farm.
Contribution
Listed are some terminologies used
for in-depth explanation of project
implementation:
Bidders: A user who does not
manage any farm but is interested in
buying the data.
Tokens: It is a representation of real
world data chunk inside the blockchain
and the process creating such instance
of data is called tokenization.
Implementation
Implementation
The network architecture of our
implemented system is hierarchical
which has two levels of blockchain
network viz local and global.
The purpose of having two levels of
blockchain network is to make it more
scalable in an organised manner. All the
networks implemented are private by
design.
There are multiple local farms each
having their own unique blockchain and
a farm manager in it who manages the
Implementation
The local farm blockchain maintains a
distributed ledger of data interaction
between sensor nodes and farm
manager within their own local
network.

And the global blockchain maintains a

distributed ledger of data trading
among the farm managers and
bidders.
Implementation
In each farm, there are 2 to 3 Raspberry Pis
which collect and publish sensor data to
their respective farm managers and this is
registered as a transaction in the
blockchain.
So the local blockchain contains information
about who generated what data and the
essential attributes of the data.
All the trading takes place by tokenizing the
data captured by sensor nodes for a
particular period of time.
Implementation
In local blockchain the raspberry pis
themselves perform the mining work and
hence the sensor nodes themselves
compete to add a block in the blockchain.
While, farm managers only queries the
local blockchain for sensor data and links
that data to the external global
blockchain, they perform mining in the
external global blockchain where data
bidding takes place.
Implementation
For the functioning of the system we have
written two smart contracts one for local
data interaction where the origination of
the data and their attributes are
tokenized and registered in the local
blockchain and another for global data
bidding where farm managers and
bidders sell and buy that tokenized data.
Once the data is bought by the bidder,
the actual data is transferred to the buyer.
Implementation
All the interaction code is written using
solidity language and compiled and
deployed on the blockchain.
The code once deployed cannot be
altered by anyone and hence the actions
performed on the tokenized data is
registered in this immutable ledger.
Implementation
The local smart contract is to record the
data source. This is where the data
production node is registered along with its
unique data identification attributes.
Once the data instance is tokenized and
registered in the blockchain using smart
contract which is deployed on the same
blockchain i.e local blockchain, it is then
sent to the farm manager and the same
transaction is registered in the local
blockchain.
Implementation
Once the farm manager receives the
tokenized data, it registers the new
tokenized data on the global blockchain
which is done by interacting with the
smart contract deployed on it.
 Once that data token is registered it is
then enlisted in the available for bidding
section, where other farm managers and
bidders can bid and hence buy that
data.
Implementation
Further there is a limited time frame for
which the bidding is open, after that the
bidding is closed by the owner farm
manager and the ownership of that data
is transferred to the highest bidder for
the exchange of money.
After that buyer gets the actual data.
 If no one bids on the data, the data is
kept with the owner farm manager itself.
Implementation
Implementation
Implementation
This solution provided in the application
can deal with any type of mass
produced data set trading on a large
scale where the data could be anything
from general environment data to body
sensor data, in our case it is pollution
data.
Conclusion
By building a hierarchical blockchain we have
created an easy to scale solution for data
trading with trust being decentralised to the
entire network.
The design complies with the intuitive nature
of large scale data production environments
and caters to the need of data trading from
the ones who capture it from remote location
and sell it for research and other purposes to
the ones who need it for data processing
irrespective of the geographical location.
References
[1] S. Huh, S. Cho and S. Kim, "Managing IoT devices
using blockchain platform," 2017 19th International
Conference on Advanced Communication Technology
(ICACT), Bongpyeong, 2017, pp. 464-467.
[2] M. Conoscenti, A. Vetrò and J. C. De Martin,
"Blockchain for the Internet of Things: A systematic
literature review," 2016 IEEE/ACS 13th International
Conference of Computer Systems and Applications
(AICCSA), Agadir, 2016, pp. 1-6.
[3] A. Dorri, S. S. Kanhere and R. Jurdak, "Towards an
Optimized BlockChain for IoT," 2017 IEEE/ACM Second
International Conference on Internet-of-Things Design and
Implementation (IoTDI), Pittsburgh, PA, 2017, pp. 173-178.
References
[4] A. Dorri, S. S. Kanhere, R. Jurdak and P.
Gauravaram, "Blockchain for IoT security and
privacy: The case study of a smart home," 2017
IEEE International Conference on Pervasive
Computing and Communications Workshops
(PerCom Workshops), Kona, HI, 2017, pp. 618-
623.
[5] Blockchain based trust & authentication for
decentralized sensor networks. Axel Moinet,
Benoit Darties, and Jean-Luc Baril
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1706.01730.pdf
THANK YOU !!!