Untethered: Deployable Blockchains for IoT Environments

Abstract

The popularity surrounding blockchains has naturally led to research into its applicability in many areas. However, Nakamoto-style blockchains possess several characteristics that make them inappropriate for many purposes in the Internet of Things (IoT) domain. Notably, they are powerintensive and require high network connectivity. These requirements are fundamentally incompatible with IoT where nodes may have limited power and sporadic network access. We are designing a blockchain approach for IoT environments called Vegvisir. Vegvisir is a partition-tolerant blockchain for use in power-constrained IoT environments with limited network access. Under the hood, it is a membership-based, directed acyclic graph (DAG)-structured blockchain [1]. It is motivated by and ideally suited for paramedics and firefighters in disaster scenarios. For instance, it can be used to aid in many tasks during disaster response where network connectivity is poor or nonexistent; namely, it is a blockchain, so provides the abstraction of an append-only log of transactions that is tamperproof. Utilizing a distributed trust model, Nakamoto-style blockchains are free from centralized control and single