Towards a Distributed Record of Measurement Adapters Powered by Blockchain Technology

Abstract

The measurement process constitutes a key asset for supporting the decision-making process. The possibility of implementing a data-driven decision-making strategy is essential in different areas, contemplating different restrictions according to the field (e.g., the processing time in health and finance have different tolerance and latency). The Internet-of-Things (IoT) has emerged as a low-cost, cheap, and certain alternative to increase the coverage area and resolution in a lot of monitoring applications. However, the IoT environment is characterized by the sensors’ heterogeneity. The Measurement Adapter (MA) is a software located at mobile devices connected to sensors directly (e.g., Raspberry Pi), responsible for transforming raw measures to a homogeneous measurement schema based on a measurement ontology, fostering interoperability. The transformation is based on a measurement project definition, where the experimental design is described following the measurement ontology. An MA could transmit measures directly or indirectly. On the one hand, it could send measures to the cloud using its connection. On the other hand, it could collaborate with other adapters informing their measures when they lost the connectivity. Currently, adapters depend on a unified record available on the cloud to know the complete list of adapters involved in the data collecting strategy. In this proposal, a blockchain-based distributed record of measurement adapters is proposed for avoiding such a dependence. This would allow improving the reliability and collaboration schema in real-time measurement strategies applied to IoT-based data collecting systems. An open-source library implementing the described functionality is outlined.