Incentive Mechanism of Data Storage Based on Blockchain for Wireless Sensor Networks

TLDR

The authors propose a blockchain‑based incentive scheme to reward wireless sensor network nodes for data storage. The scheme uses two blockchains—one for node data storage and one for access control—rewarding nodes with digital currency proportional to stored data, employing provable data possession and hash‑based subblock deduplication to reduce computation and store new data only on the nearest node. The approach significantly reduces storage requirements on network nodes.

Abstract

In this paper, the blockchain technology is utilized to build the first incentive mechanism of nodes as per data storage for wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In our system, the nodes storing the data are rewarded with digital money. The more the data stored by the node, the more the reward it achieves. Moreover, two blockchains are constructed. One is utilized to store data of each node and another is to control the access of data. In addition, our proposal adopts the provable data possession to replace the proof of work (PoW) in original bitcoins to carry out the mining and storage of new data blocks, which greatly reduces the computing power comparing to the PoW mechanism. Furthermore, the preserving hash functions are used to compare the stored data and the new data block. The new data can be stored in the node which is closest to the existing data, and only the different subblocks are stored. Thus, it can greatly save the storage space of network nodes.