A Blockchain Protocol for Real-Time Application Migration on the Edge

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) is experiencing widespread adoption across industry sectors ranging from supply chain management to smart cities, buildings, and health monitoring. However, most software architectures for the IoT deployment rely on centralized cloud computing infrastructures to provide storage and computing power, as cloud providers have high economic incentives to organize their infrastructure into clusters. Despite these incentives, there has been a recent shift from centralized to decentralized architectures that harness the potential of edge devices, reduce network latency, and lower infrastructure costs to support IoT applications. This shift has resulted in new edge computing architectures, but many still rely on centralized solutions for managing applications. A truly decentralized approach would offer interesting properties required for IoT use cases. In this paper, we introduce a decentralized architecture tailored for large-scale deployments of peer-to-peer IoT sensor networks and capable of run-time application migration. We propose a leader election consensus protocol for permissioned distributed networks that only requires one series of messages in order to commit to a change. The solution combines a blockchain consensus protocol using Verifiable Delay Functions (VDF) to achieve decentralized randomness, fault tolerance, transparency, and no single point of failure. We validate our solution by testing and analyzing the performance of our reference implementation. Our results show that nodes are able to reach consensus consistently, and the VDF proofs can be used as an entropy pool for decentralized randomness. We show that our system can perform autonomous real-time application migrations. Finally, we conclude that the implementation is scalable by testing it on 100 consensus nodes running 200 applications.