Efficient Blockchain-Empowered Data Sharing Incentive Scheme for Internet of Things

In recent years, with many devices continuously joining the Internet of Things (IoT), data sharing as the main driver of the IoT market has become a research hotspot. However, the users are reluctant to participate in data sharing due to security concerns and lacking incentive mechanisms in the current IoT. In this context, blockchain is introduced into the data sharing of IoT to solve the trust problem of users and provide secure data storage. However, in the exploration of building a secure distributed data sharing system based on the blockchain, how to break the inherent performance bottleneck of blockchain is still a major challenge. For this reason, the efficient blockchain-based data sharing incentive scheme is studied for IoT. In the scheme, an efficient data sharing incentive framework based on blockchain is proposed, named ShareBC. Firstly, ShareBC uses sharding technology to build asynchronous consensus zones that can process data sharing transactions in parallel and deploy efficient consensus mechanisms on the cloud/edge servers and asynchronous consensus zones in sharding, thus improving the processing efficiency of data sharing transactions. Then, a sharing incentive mechanism based on a hierarchical data auction model implemented by a smart contract is presentedto encourage IoT users to participate in data sharing. The proposed mechanism can solve the problem of multi-layer data allocation involved in IoT data sharing and maximize the overall social welfare. Finally, the experimental results show that the proposed scheme is economically efficient, incentive-compatible, and real-time, with scalability, low cost, and good practicability.