FAST DATA: A Fair, Secure, and Trusted Decentralized IIoT Data Marketplace Enabled by Blockchain

Abstract

As the world calls it, data is the new oil. With vast installments of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) infrastructure, data is produced at a rate like never before. Similarly, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) solutions are getting integrated to numerous services, making them “smarter.” However, the data remain fragmented in individual organizational silos inhibiting data value extraction to its full potential. Digital marketplaces are emerging to allow data owners to monetize these data. Yet concerns, such as privacy, security, and unfair payment settlement deter adoption of such platforms. In addition, the state-of-the-art platforms are under the control of large multinational corporations with no transparency between the buyer and seller in terms of payment details, listing, data discovery, and storage. In this work, a novel decentralized platform of a digital data marketplace for IoT data has been proposed. The platform leverages a decentralized data streaming network to host IoT data in a reliable and fault-tolerant manner. The platform ensures fair trading, data storage, and delivery in a privacy-preserving manner and trust metric calculation for actors in the network. In order to study the feasibility of the proposed platform, an opensource library is developed using Hyperledger Fabric and data network layer built on VerneMQ, the library is deployed on a real-time Google cloud platform. The library is tested and results are analyzed for throughput, overheads, and scalability.