A Cross-Chain Solution to Integration of IoT Tangle for Data Access Management

Abstract

At present, the Internet of Things (IoT) is rapidly setting off a huge wave of digitalization in traditional industries. In the era of the Internet of Everything, massive data is generated by IoT devices. Recently, Blockchain has attracted more and more attentions in the field of IoT due to its decentralization, traceability, security and so on. Many IoT-oriented data services are built based on distributed ledger technology like blockchains. However, due to the lack of scalability and high transaction costs of the public blockchain, it is hard to directly apply the blockchain technology to IoT scenarios. The recent transaction directed acyclic graph (TDAG) technology, especially Tangle, is suitable for low-latency M2M (Machine to Machine) micropayment transactions in the ever-growing scale of the edge-centric IoT. In this paper, we propose a framework to integrate Tangle into IoT blockchains and build a cross-chain interactive decentralized access model in the context of data management. We employ a consortium blockchain as the control station, and Tangle runs as the backbone of all IoT devices. It is equivalent to opening the off-chain channel of the DAG Tangle structure on the consortium blockchain. Transactions in these channels form the sub-Tangle and then merge sub-Tangle into the main Tangle for confirmation through the notary mechanism. Finally, we implement a prototype of the proposed model and conduct extensive experiments to evaluate its performance. The results clearly demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our framework.