TIDES: A Trust-Aware IoT Data Economic System With Blockchain-Enabled Multi-Access Edge Computing

To make good use of valuable Internet of Things (IoT) data assets, this paper proposes a trust-aware IoT data economic system (TIDES) with complete IoT data pricing, trading and protection functions. To ensure reliable and automatic data trading, the entire trading process is automatically performed by smart contracts on a hierarchical blockchain. Moreover, we develop several sophisticated methods to ensure the efficiency and service quality of TIDES. First, a complete evaluation model that takes the data trading profile and reputation into consideration is proposed for both suppliers and demanders to assess the trustworthiness of their trading partners. Second, a client-centric data value evaluation model and a game-theory-based pricing model are used to promote win-win transactions in which the demanders obtain higher quality data at an acceptable price and the suppliers receive higher profits. Third, a dispute arbitration model is invoked to detect suspicious trading and refund these payments automatically. TIDES further utilizes a multi-access edge computing (MEC) architecture to alleviate the huge burdens of IoT devices from blockchain operations, reduce the trading latency, and help mobile devices to trade IoT data. The simulation results have shown the advantages of TIDES in terms of trading time, storage overhead, data trading profit, quality data trading, pricing efficiency, and reliability on data asset management and trading.