Outsourcing IOTA proof‐of‐work to volunteer public devices

Abstract

Distributed ledger technologies will play an important role in the communication and data integrity of internet of things (IoT) devices in the future. IOTA is a public distributed ledger that can serve as a scalable, secure and feeless settlement layer for IoT transactions. It enables micro‐transactions for smart devices and offers a highly scalable architecture for network consensus and overcomes the inefficiencies of existing distributed ledgers. Like most mining‐based ledgers, IOTA also require solving a computational puzzle for every request to the ledger to avoid unwanted (ie, spam) content added to the ledger. We propose a system architecture that consumes the available computational resources of public volunteer devices for solving the expensive computational puzzles. We show that our proposed architecture can integrate with the global data and network layer of the IOTA ledger and acts as a middleware for providing computational resources from public volunteer devices to the IOTA network.