Managing smart home appliances with proof of authority and blockchain

Abstract

With the advance in technology and growth in standard of living, smart homes have become a reality. Smart homes consist of home appliances and devices that communicate with each other to address the needs of the residents. These appliances generate, share and consume lots of data which are private and sometimes safety critical to the residents. Managing them is a challenging task. The current frameworks for managing home appliances are centralized in nature. Such frameworks force smart home residents to trust the service providers or a third party. These frameworks are also prone to hacking, compromise of data and a single point of failure. Availability of services can also never be guaranteed with such frameworks. Technologies such as blockchain and smart contracts can help to manage these appliances. In this paper, we study the scope of blockchain technology in smart homes. We propose, implement and evaluate a blockchain based approach using Proof-of-Authority as the consensus mechanism for managing appliances in smart homes. In addition, we compare the performance of our system with the traditional Proof-of-Work based system.