A robust retail POS system based on blockchain and edge computing

Abstract

New Retail has recently become one of the hottest concepts in the world, particularly in China. Many Internet technologies like Cloud Computing have been employed to address the limitations of the traditional retail industry, and significant progress has been made towards this direction. Despite these achievements, an intractable issue faced by the existing cloud-based retail POS systems is that they cannot provide continuous services when the Internet connections are interrupted. Towards this issue, in this paper, we leverage two new technologies, Blockchain and Edge Computing, to design and develop a new robust retail POS system. More specifically, this type of POS systems deployed in a retail store can use blockchain networking, trustworthiness, and security. We take all cash registers as nodes to build a POS blockchain network and store transaction records in the blockchain network to deal with unexpected network interruptions. Once the Internet connection recovers, a node in the blockchain network will be selected as a POS edge computing server to synchronize data with the POS cloud and resume regular communication between them. The advantages of the robust retail POS system over traditional POS systems include less dependency on the Internet in case of sudden interruptions and little or no hands-on intervention required for changes in our POS system caused by external changes.