Blockchain-Based Secure Crowdsourcing in Wireless IoT

With the explosive growth of interconnected smart devices and sensors, the Internet has been entering the Internet of things (IoT) era and revolutionizing many aspects of our daily life. Meanwhile, crowdsourcing has been considered as a promising technology to realize collaborative intelligence. Therefore, more and more IoT-based crowdsourcing applications are emerged to take advantages of the widely distributed IoT devices to sense, collect, and analyze data with the aim to solve complex and nontrivial tasks. However, there exist many technical challenges to be addressed in the IoT-based crowdsourcing, such as security, privacy, and incentive provision. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based architecture as an integrated solution to realize the secure and trustworthy crowdsourcing in wireless IoT. We first overview the challenges in the traditional crowdsourcing system. Then, we briefly introduce the background of the blockchain and smart contract, and propose a blockchain-based crowdsourcing architecture. In particular, we elaborate the utilization of smart contract on the specific phases of crowdsourcing. By deploying the smart contract instance, we confirm the proposed blockchain-based architecture is feasible.