A Blockchain-enabled decentralized settlement model for IoT data exchange services

IoT data exchange services are emerging to connect various and distributed IoT data sources, which facilitate data owners exchange their IoT data flexibly. Traditional IoT data exchange services rely on a centralized third-party to negotiate the settlement of trades between data consumers and providers. Such settlement model suffers from issues including single point of failure, extra settlement fee, un-transparency of settlement details, to name a few. New settlement model is imperative to overcome such limitations. Blockchain is an innovative technology that is competent in governing the decentralized network, which poses great opportunity to implement fair settlement in decentralized manner. In this paper, we propose a Blockchain-enabled settlement model for decentralized IoT data exchange services. Firstly, Bitcoin-based time commitment scheme is adopted to build fair and autonomous settlement model. Furthermore, to enhance the accountability of all transactions, an optimized practical Byzantine fault tolerant consensus protocol named ReBFT, is proposed to enable all members involved in the IoT data exchange application achieve identical shared ledger recording all transactions. Finally, experiments are conducted to verify the feasibility of our proposal.