Subscription-Based Data-Sharing Model Using Blockchain and Data as a Service

In modern times, many individuals, businesses and the Internet of Things (IoT) integrated industries collect huge amounts of meaningful data daily, which may be beneficial for other individuals and businesses as well. By utilizing this data, future trends to make the right decisions on the bases of facts and figures are analyzed efficiently. In addition to that, many new ways are paved for researchers to utilize this data in their upcoming research. However, due to some major issues like security, privacy and access control of data, data owners avoid sharing data among themselves. Another main problem is the selfish behavior of data owners. Businesses also act selfishly and invest huge amounts of money to collect and maintain the data for their benefits. Therefore, data owners are hesitant to share their data with others without the availability of a fair profit and secure data-sharing platform. Moreover, consumers are not much motivated to buy data from Data Providers (DPs) due to its bad quality and inconsistency. The data provided by data owners is mostly incomplete, outdated, heterogeneous and costly. In this paper, a subscription-based data-sharing model is proposed by leveraging the blockchain technology and Data as a Service (DaaS) concept. In this model, users subscribe to a DP for a specific period to get access to the data and pay according to the subscription plan. The DP keeps receiving revenue recurrently for a long-time, which has a huge profit margin in comparison with selling data at once. Furthermore, two major pricing models, Flat Rate Pricing (FRP) and Usage-Based Pricing (UBP), are discussed to set standards for data owners to monetize their data, and a new hybrid pricing model is also proposed. Blockchain technology is utilized in the proposed model to make it secure, transparent and immutable. To investigate the performance of the proposed model, a private blockchain network is deployed using a web interface provided by MultiChain blockchain. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed model is feasible and efficient. The theoretical discussion proves that the proposed model is beneficial for both data owners and data consumers and has a good scope in the future for data management and trading processes.