A blockchain based approach to resource sharing in smart neighbourhoods

Abstract

Sharing resources is a growing trend in today’s world. Sharing allows larger groups of individuals to benefit from available resources, hence optimizing the resource consumption. Sharing however demands a level of trust and control on the outcome: one needs to have confidence that a shared item will be used according to a prior agreement. In this paper we rely on geographic proximity of users to provide as an initial level of trust, and use this trust to develop a platform for sharing digital goods in a geographic neighbourhood. We require the platform to allow users to express their preferences and be confident about the sharing outcome. Our proposed platform uses a permissioned blockchain that is maintained by network providers whose subscribers are in the same geographic area, and use attribute-based access control to specify and control accesses to the shared items. Our proposed system uses smart contracts to enforce the conditions of access. We analyze security of the proposed design and discuss directions for future work.