SCRT: A Secure and Efficient State-Channel-Based Resource Trading Scheme for Internet of Things

With the development of edge computing technology, the resource-limited Internet of Things (IoT) devices can offload computation-intensive artificial intelligence tasks, such as model training and inference to edge servers through resource trading. However, due to the increase in the number of intelligent applications and the rise of peer-to-peer (P2P) resource trading, the existing resource trading schemes based on the blockchain can no longer meet the needs of efficiency and security at the same time. In this article, a new state channels-based resource trading scheme is proposed for IoT, which can improve scalability without sacrificing security and fairness. In our scheme, most of the trading process could be completed off-chain, and the blockchain is used as an adjudicator to determine malicious behavior according to the users’ actions. Moreover, a method without being reliant on support from third parties is presented to defend against execution forks that must be faced when using the state channels. Finally, the feasibility and efficiency of our scheme are experimentally verified in the realistic testbed.