Blockchain Smart Contract for Scalable Data Sharing in IoT: A Case Study of Smart Agriculture

The emerging Smart Agriculture based on Internet of Things (IoT) is facing major challenges like data sharing, storage, and monitoring, primarily due to the distributed nature of IoT and massive scale. We performed a review of the literature and found that blockchain performance, scalability, cost, and throughput are the major challenges in adopting blockchain for smart agriculture. To overcome these challenges, this paper proposes a scalable and distributed data sharing system integrating access control for smart agriculture. We demonstrate our approach in a smart agriculture setting, which consists of four tiers that are: smart agriculture, smart contract, Interplanetary File System (IPFS) and agriculture stakeholders (remote users). This paper explains in detail the different components of our proposed architecture. Our approach uses anonymous identities to ensure users' privacy. Our approach is fully scalable because a large number of resource owners can use their data sharing smart contracts to create, update or delete data sharing policies. In addition, our approach does not require transaction fees when the smart contract receives a large number of policy evaluation requests. For the sake of simplicity, we publish and test a single data sharing smart contract. However, in practice, multiple smart contracts need to be deployed to allow each resource owner to securely share agriculture data with stakeholders. Finally, we evaluate the performance of our proposed system on the EOS blockchain to show that the resource consumption (in terms of computing power and network bandwidth) introduced by our framework are insignificant compared to its scalability, cost and security benefits.