Positioning of blockchain mechanisms in IOT-powered smart home systems: A gateway-based approach

Abstract This paper reviews a number of existing smart home Internet of Thing (IoT) automation architectures, providing a credible appraisal of that environment, and, furthermore assesses the applicability of blockchain mechanisms to this use case. Specifically, the paper affords the conclusion that in most instances of home automation, a potential topological place to start the blockchain is in the home gateway that supports the processing and computing required to aggregate or in-network-preprocess the data flows from the various appliances; however, the computing and storage requirements may limit this deployment paradigm to a subset of cases. Alternatively, the place to start the blockchain could be in the fog-to-core gateway point, but in this case this process does not fully guarantee end-to-end integrity. The actual Proof of Work (PoW) functionality would likely be in the core network and not in the relatively low computing-power home gateway. Another alternative envisions private local blockchains to be instituted in the home area network, but still not necessarily for all appliance-generated transactions due to the large volume of such status, event, and usage data.