An Edge-based Distributed Ledger Architecture for Supporting Decentralized Incentives in Mobile Crowdsensing

Nowadays, the exploitation of distributed ledger technology (DLT) is increasing among different domains and use cases. Not only within the context of cryptocurrencies, DLT could help the cooperation among untrusted parties in a wide variety of application scenarios. In particular, crowdsensing platforms can benefit from DLT because they need to federate systems belonging to different organizations to share end-user profiles, finally free to move within different domains, maintaining their identity. In this paper, we propose an edge-based distributed ledger architecture for supporting decentralised incentives in a specific mobile crowdsensing paltform called ParticipAct. To motivate the choice we describe two different deployments of ParticipAct, one based on a classical client-server architecture and the other one based on an edge-based model, and we highlight their pro and cons. In particular, our more notable findings rely on an approach based on edge computing and highlight how the three-tier solution improves the scalability, the performance, the security and the fault tolerance of the infrastructure responsible for the management of the federation among untrusted crowdsensing platforms.