Enabling On-Demand Decentralized IoT Collectability Marketplace using Blockchain and Crowdsensing

The Internet of Thing (IoT) is generating an unprecedented volume of data, facilitating the rise of the Data Economy. Under this ecosystem, the IoT data marketplace (IDM) provides an online platform for IoT data trading. Most current IDM solutions are centralized, serving as an intermediary between the data provider and consumer. They support selling and buying data collections (e.g. pre-collected data sets and data streams). However, as these data collections are historically collected without having any priory requirements and preferences given by the data consumer, it is very likely that most of these data collections cannot fulfill data consumer requirements. Redundancy, poor data quality, inaccuracy and limited financial incentives are common problems for existing IDMs, thereby making them financially ineffective. Due to the temporal nature of IoT data, the issue of pre-collection becomes even more critical as it is not trivial to re-collect data from the past.This paper presents a novel framework with a new on-demand market model, namely Decentralized IoT Collectability Data Marketplace (DCDM) model. Difference from the conventional IDM models where merely data collections are considered as a commodity, our model also involves operational factors such as data provider availability, operationality, contextual and geographical location etc. This empowers our framework to trade not only the dataset but rather an ability of the data provider to fulfill the collection task. Our game-changing approach is realized using a combination of Blockchain and Crowdsensing techniques. We first explore the concept of ”Data Collectability” for IDM, then build a model to deploy our approach on IoT context. Furthermore, we identify potential applications and open research challenges.

I. Introduction

With the proliferation of numerous IoT and mobile devices, an enormous amount of data is being produced at a very rapid rate. With the estimation of over 20 billion devices connected by 2020, it is expected that a huge number of devices will continue to produce data streams containing sensor data observations. According to Forbes, the estimated market size of IoT is around 1.5 trillion USD by 2020 ¹ . However, a key open research challenge is to tap these data streams from IoT devices and build useful applications on top of IoT infrastructure. Most of the existing IoT applications are designed to address a domain specific problem, hence resulting in data silos. The true potential of IoT can be achieved by establishing open data platforms which can potentially host a large amount of data which can be re-used by multiple applications on demand.