Application of Blockchain in Collaborative Internet-of-Things Services

Abstract

Innovating business processes involves cutting-edge technologies where the Internet of Things (IoT) and Blockchain are technological breakthroughs. IoT is envisioned as a global network infrastructure consisting of numerous connected devices over the Internet. Many attempts have been made to improve and adapt business workflows for best utilizing IoT services. One possible solution is to digitize and automate internal processes using IoT services, in which Blockchain smart contract is a viable solution to establish the trust of process executions without intermediaries. Modern business processes are composed of disparate services; many of them tend to be delivered based on IoT. Interoperating with such services poses major challenges: 1) time for finality settlement of transactions is unpredictable and usually experiencing delay; 2) several implementations of permissioned Blockchain pose a major concern of trust regarding nodes that perform consensus; and 3) trust of process executions and IoT information is the major factor to the success of modern business processes, which require the composition of distributed IoT services. Traditional business processes are mostly managed by a single entity, which induces the problem of trust of process executions. In this paper, a smart contract for establishing the trust of process executions that fits into the IoT environment is presented. A consensus approach with selected validators extended from Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) is introduced to address time and prejudice challenges.