DLT-based Data Mules for Smart Territories

Abstract

Many services that are taken for granted in smart cities are not even remotely available in dislocated areas yet, due to the lack of or too costly wide area network connectivity. With the aim to offer a practical and secure way to transport data and allow for communications in such constrained scenarios, we focus on the problem of incentivizing to data mules, i.e. devices dedicated to enable the data transfer even in the absence of the Internet. Our solution combines the use of several distributed technologies for verifying the correct behavior of all the participants and incentivize them. We focus on the use of state channels to support the flow of smart-contract-based tokens as a form of payment, in a condition where participants communicate only with others in physical proximity. Furthermore, we validate the viability of the application through the simulation of peer-to-peer interactions between the participants. In this work we achieve positive results in terms of communication latency and percentage of client nodes which are able to benefit from the system.