Electrical and Electronic Engineering - Theses
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ItemA Blockchain-based Solution for Sharing IoT Devices( 2022)The Internet of Things (IoT) includes billions of sensors and actuators (which we refer to as IoT devices) that harvest data from the physical world and send it via the internet to IoT applications to provide smart IoT solutions. These IoT devices are often owned by different organizations or individuals who deploy them and utilize their data for their own purposes. Procuring, deploying, and maintaining IoT devices for exclusive use of an individual IoT application is often inefficient, and involves significant cost and effort that often outweigh the benefits. On the other hand, sharing IoT devices that are procured, deployed, and maintained by different entities (IoT device providers or simply providers) is efficient, cost-effective and enables rapid development and adoption of IoT applications. Currently, most IoT applications themselves procure, deploy, and maintain the sensors they need to collect the IoT data they require as there is limited support for sharing IoT devices and their costs. Therefore, there is a need for developing an IoT device sharing solution that allow IoT applications to 1) discover already deployed IoT devices, 2) use discovered IoT device data (IoT data) for their own purposes, and 3) share-cost of IoT device deployment via a “pay-as-you-go” model similar to cloud computing. To address the aforementioned problems, in this thesis we propose, develop, implement, evaluate, and validate a solution namely IoT Devices Sharing (IoTDS). IoTDS enables scalable and cost-efficient discovery and use of IoT devices by IoT applications. IoTDS incorporates services for IoT device registration, IoT device query, IoT device payment and IoT device integration. To support these services, we propose 1) a novel IoTDS ontology, an extension of Semantic Sensor Network (SSN) ontology to describe IoT devices and their data to enable IoT device registration and query services. The IoTDS ontology also provides for describing the payment and integration information that is used by IoT device payment and integration service; 2) a special-purpose blockchain namely IoTDS Blockchain that has been developed specifically to support the needs of the IoTDS services i.e., supporting decentralised and scalable query, integration and payments services for IoT devices and applications. Specifically, IoTDS Blockchain incorporates a distributed semantic triple store and functions to register IoT devices, and specialised transactions for supporting IoT device payments (we propose a new cryptocurrency namely SensorCoin); 3) a novel IoT marketplace (IoTDS marketplace) that offers an interface and a protocol (IoTDS protocol) to support the interactions between IoT devices, IoT applications, IoTDS Blockchain, and IoTDS services. IoTDS solution 1) facilitates IoT devices deployed across the globe by different providers to be queried by any IoT application; we term this global, 2) enables via the IoTDS Blockchain a non-ownership model; we term this IoT-owned i.e., no individual/organisation owns it or controls it, 3) able to handle the vast and ever-increasing number of IoT devices and IoT applications; we term this scalable, and 4) able to support and integrate heterogenous of IoT devices and their data; we term this interoperable. In this thesis, we provided implementation details of IoTDS services that includes IoTDS ontology, marketplace, and blockchain. the IoTDS ontology has been modelled using Protegee and Owl and implemented using RDF. The IoTDS Blockchain and corresponding functions are implemented using NodeJS and Web Socket. The IoTDS marketplace and corresponding IoTDS protocol has been implemented using NodeJS and MQTT. We conducted large-scale experimental evaluation of IoTDS solution by deploying it on Nectar cloud (20 instances) using both real and simulated (5,000,000) IoT devices and IoT applications (5000) to assess and validate the scalability and performance of IoTDS. We also developed and validated a mathematical model that can be used to estimate the performance of the IoTDS with the increasing number of IoT devices. Experimental outcomes show that the proposed IoTDS solution performs great (linear scalability) in supporting global discovery, use, and cost-share of large numbers of IoT devices and applications. The main contributions of this thesis are 1) an IoTDS solution for sharing IoT devices, 2) a survey of techniques for supporting IoT device sharing; 3) a special purpose Blockchain to support sharing of IoT devices, 4) a novel Marketplace to support registration, querying, payment, and integration of IoT devices, 5) a novel protocol for autonomic control of integrating IoT devices and fetching their data, and 6) an implementation and experimental evaluation of the IoTDS solution.