The Design and Implementation of Blockchain-based IoT Edge Gateway

Abstract

With the rapid development of IoT technology in recent years, the scale of IoT devices has shown explosive growth. As the core of the IoT architecture, cloud computing realizes the aggregation of massive sensory data and big data processing, which greatly enhances the value of data. However, given the diversity of IoT applications and the complexity of the deployment environment, the centralized management of cloud computing cannot guarantee data security before IoT data is transmitted to the cloud, and the explosive growth of end devices greatly increases transmission bandwidth and causes high network latency. The new generation of information technology represented by edge computing and blockchain, as an effective supplement to cloud computing, can achieve low latency pre-processing and distributed data security, providing the technical support for industrial, enterprise, and financial sectors with high-security requirements and a large amount of real-time data. This thesis focuses on the IoT chattel finance application with high security and real-time requirements, designing and implementing an edge gateway combining blockchain technology. The edge gateway realizes LoRaWAN-based wide-area communication for and deploys data analysis and processing capabilities. It also offloads some services from the cloud server to the edge gateway, reducing the workload on the cloud server, slowing down the pressure on network bandwidth, and improving data processing efficiency. In addition, to solve the security and trustworthiness problem of data from end devices to processing centers, this thesis also migrates some blockchain services from the cloud server to the edge gateway, which realizes the blockchain function at the edge level. The main contributions of this thesis include the following aspects: (1) Software and hardware system design of the edge gateway: Considering the intelligent, real-time, and reliable requirements of chattel finance industry, the edge gateway integrates LoRaWAN communication, edge data processing, and blockchain technology. In terms of hardware, this thesis prototypes an edge gateway with Raspberry Pi 4B, power, LoRa module, adapter board, 4G module, and antenna. (2) Software development for edge gateway function implementation: Three operating modes of the edge gateway are implemented including gateway transmission, services offloading, and data processing. Through the configuration of LoRaWAN nodes, edge gateways, and servers, the data transmission function under a wide area is realized. By offloading LoRaWAN NS and partial blockchain services to the edge gateway, it ensures the data security from end devices to the blockchain node and reduces the workload of the cloud server. Finally, a data processing module is introduced to the edge gateway to analyze and detect the data before it is transmitted to the blockchain, facilitating data management in the cloud server. (3) Three operating modes of the edge gateway are tested. Further, it verifies that the edge gateway can share cloud server workload by pressure testing of blockchain transaction. And the communication performance of the edge gateway in urban area is also tested.