Toward Secure Data Sharing for the IoT Devices With Limited Resources: A Smart Contract-Based Quality-Driven Incentive Mechanism

Abstract

With the rapid deployment of Internet of Things (IoT) devices in various industries and fields, the massive amount of data produced by these devices can yield greater value through sharing. A critical challenge in the data-sharing process is ensuring that the data are high quality. However, the quality of data provided by a large number of IoT devices is impacted by the variability of factors contributing to the data quality (DQ). Effective and safe sharing of perception data by the limited resources of IoT devices is a problem worth investigating. In this article, we propose a smart contract-based and DQ-driven incentive mechanism. First, a smart contract is proposed to realize security in the data-sharing process, while the proposed DQ evaluation mechanism ensures the quality of the shared data. Second, a two-layer Stackelberg game of nested coalitional (TLSNC) scheme is designed to obtain the maximum overall social welfare according to the trust score obtained during DQ evaluation while satisfying the limitation of loose and insufficient computing resources. Moreover, we designed a smart contract for automatic execution of the data-sharing transaction and used a trusted execution environment (TEE) to complete the security calculation of shared data. Finally, the numerical results reveal the effectiveness of the DQ evaluation mechanism and the security of our TEE-based model. Based on the proposed scheme, sustainable incentives for user participation and high-quality data sharing can be achieved. In addition, our system can significantly improve the overall social welfare compared to traditional solutions.