Designing a Community-Driven Decentralized Storage Network for IoT Data

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) is an increasingly popular topic in information technology. It comes with a significant amount of challenges, such as the capability of simultaneously processing millions of data points per minute as well as storing petabytes of data. The aim of this work is to create a community-driven decentralized storage platform to process the aforementioned data. To illustrate the concept, a platform collecting air quality data from around the world is taken as an example. Because of censorship and scaling issues, the use of a distributed network is required. To tackle those challenges, blockchain technology is considered. However, current production grade blockchains are not able to process such large amounts of data. A few improvements are further analyzed, but were not retained because of intrinsic issues related to this technology. Finally, an alternative peer-to-peer network, that only relies on blockchain for its security aspect, is proposed instead. It is then implemented and compared to a benchmark example based on Ethereum. The proposed solution has two main assets that make it scalable. First, the data is not stored indefinitely as it is in standard blockchain implementations, and disappears when it is not useful to anyone anymore. Secondly, data can be published without requiring a consensus protocol. As a consequence, this work shows that the proof of concept is decentralized, cheap, community-driven, easy to use, open and fast.