A Peer-to-Peer Architecture for Distributed Data Monetization in Fog Computing Scenarios

Modern IoT deployments do require considerable investments that might only be justified if the data being gathered could be monetized, which leads to the need for a digital data marketplace. In many cases, the provider of the IoT data needs to process it locally for data curation, aggregation, stream processing, etc. At the same time, the consumer could be interested in nearby data. This scenario resembles a fog computing architecture where companies require being able, keeping data under their control, to securely make it available to other companies in a peer-to-peer fashion, without needing a cloud intermediary (like traditional marketplaces do), thus maximizing the locality of the processing and avoiding the existence of a bottleneck when the intermediary makes the data delivery for accounting purposes. Nevertheless, this imposes a hard requirement: by not having a central marketplace, the peers (seller and customer) need to trust each other, which, in turn, requires enforcing a nonrepudiation schema. In this paper, the authors propose a distributed peer-to-peer architecture for such a data marketplace that takes advantage of the architectural fundamentals of fog computing, in which data processing, filtering, and stream based event generation is done in a fog node along with the data, and where relationships, both commercial agreements and data delivery, are performed directly between producers and consumers without the need of mutual trust thanks to the usage of blockchain principles (e.g., distributed ledger, consensus mechanism). The proposed architecture is validated through a case study involving a set of key issues regarding nonrepudiation commonly identified when moving from a centralized marketplace to a distributed one. Moreover, it is shown that the proposed solution does not bring in any limitation with regard to a centralized marketplace solution, in terms of pricing models (subscriptions, pay-per-use, etc.) or usage conditions (contract duration, updates rate, etc.)