Data Allocation Mechanism for Internet-of-Things Systems With Blockchain

The use of Internet of Things (IoT) has introduced genuine concerns regarding data security and its privacy when data are in collection, exchange, and use. Meanwhile, blockchain offers a distributed and encrypted ledger designed to allow the creation of immutable and tamper-proof records of data at different locations. While blockchain may enhance IoT with innate security, data integrity, and autonomous governance, IoT data management and its allocation in blockchain still remain an architectural concern. In this article, we propose a novel context-aware mechanism for on-chain data allocation in IoT-blockchain systems. Specifically, we design a data controller based on fuzzy logic to calculate the Rating of Allocation (RoA) value of each data request considering multiple context parameters, i.e., data, network, and quality and decide its on-chain allocation. Furthermore, we illustrate how the design and realization of the mechanism lead to refinements of two commonly used IoT-blockchain architectural styles (i.e., blockchain-based cloud and fog). To demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, we instantiate the data allocation mechanism in the blockchain-based cloud and fog architectures and evaluate their performance using FogBus. We also compare the efficacy of our approach to the existing decision-making mechanisms through the deployment of a real-world healthcare application. The experimental results suggest that the realization of the data allocation mechanism improves network usage, latency, and blockchain storage and reduces energy consumption.