BEI-TAB: Enabling Secure and Distributed Airport Baggage Tracking with Hybrid Blockchain-Edge System

Global air transport carries about 7.3 billion pieces of luggage each year and up to 56 percent of travelers prefer obtaining real-time baggage tracking information throughout their trip. However, the traditional baggage tracking scheme is generally based on optical scanning and centralized storage systems, which suffers from low efficiency and information leakage. In this paper, a blockchain and edge computing based IOT system for tracking of airport baggage (BEI-TAB) is proposed. Through the combination of radio frequency identification technology (RFID) and blockchain, real-time baggage processing information is automatically stored in blockchain. In addition, we deploy Interplanetary File System (IPFS) at edge nodes with ciphertext policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) to store basic baggage information. Only hash values returned by the IPFS network are kept in blockchain, enhancing the scalability of the system. Furthermore, a multi-channel scheme is designed to realize the physical isolation of data, and to rapidly process multiple types of data and business requirements in parallel. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first architecture that integrates RFID, IPFS, CP-ABE with blockchain technologies to facilitate secure, decentralized, and real-time characteristics for storing and sharing data for baggage tracking. We have deployed a testbed with both software and hardware to evaluate the proposed system, considering the performances of transaction processing time and speed.