Blockchain-Enabled Trust Management for Communication-Efficient IoT Offloading in Smart Cities

Abstract

The increasing number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices in smart cities creates several challenges of trust management, resource allocation, and secure offloading. This paper introduces BTM-IoT, a blockchain-based trust management solution to improve the multi-access IoT offloading networks in urban areas. The proposed framework employs a hybrid consensus system that combines Delegated Proof-of-Stake (DPoS) with Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) to make offloading decisions efficiently and securely while keeping the latency and throughput low. A trust-aware offloading optimization model is proposed, which combines the direct and indirect trust evaluation to increase the accuracy of the decisions and attack resistance. Our extensive experiments show that the average reduction in energy consumption of BTM-IoT is 31% over the baseline models, whereas the average reduction in task completion time comes to 27%, and the average improvement in attack detection accuracy is 43%. Further, scalability tests show that it takes only 26% longer to complete when scaling up from 50 to 500 devices, a significant improvement over traditional method. It also provides optimal use of resources, such as CPU, memory, and bandwidth, while delivering an average of 20% improvement in efficiency. Even when analyzed from the overhead of the blockchain, it is light on the IOT device, requiring 0.5 MB of storage and 2% CPU usage. The study results confirm the energy efficiency, scalability and security of BTM-IoT as a solution for multi-access IoT offloading in smart city infrastructures.