Pushing Software-Defined Blockchain Components onto Edge Hosts

TL;DR

This paper proposes customizing blockchain features into software-defined components to enable deployment on edge devices, enhancing IoT network management by leveraging cooperative edge-hosted blockchain resources.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach of encapsulating blockchain features into software-defined components for deployment on edge devices in IoT networks.

Findings

Successful implementation on Edison SoC edge devices

Demonstrated cooperative blockchain resource provisioning

Improved IoT network management capabilities

Abstract

With the advent of blockchain technology, some management tasks of IoT networks can be moved from central systems to distributed validation authorities. Cloud-centric blockchain implementations for IoT have shown satisfactory performance. However, some features of blockchain are not necessary for IoT. For instance, a competitive consensus. This research presents the idea of customizing and encapsulating the features of blockchain into software-defined components to host them on edge devices. Thus, blockchain resources can be provisioned by edge devices (e-miners) working together closer to the things layer in a cooperative manner. This research uses Edison SoC as e-miners to test the software-defined blockchain components.