Pervasive Smart Contracts for Blockchains in IoT Systems

Abstract

The blockchain technology has gained tremendous attention thanks to its decentralized structure, immutability, and enhanced security and privacy guarantees. Blockchain has the potential to address security and privacy challenges of Internet of Things (IoT). By hosting and executing \textit{smart contracts}, blockchain allows secure and flexible message communication between IoT devices and traceability in IoT applications. The unique characteristics of IoT systems, such as heterogeneity and pervasiveness, pose challenges in designing smart contracts for IoT systems. In this paper, we study those challenges and propose a microservice-based approach to the design of IoT smart contracts. The proposed service model is aimed to encapsulate functionalities such as contract-level communication between IoT devices, access to data-sources within contracts, and supporting interoperability of heterogeneous IoT smart contracts. The flexibility, scalability and modularity of the microservice architecture model make it an efficient approach for developing IoT smart contracts.