Blockchains for constrained edge devices

Today’s networks are seeing a large influx of Internet connected devices that reside primarily on the edge of the network. Many of these devices, such as Internet of Things (IoT) devices, are resource constrained both by storage capacity and power requirements that limit a device’s Internet availability. Several interesting architectures have been proposed to address security, device management, configuration, and multi-party interaction concerns using blockchain technology. These architectures require a trusted intermediary to interact with the blockchain on behalf of the edge device. This introduces a single point of failure in trust and security. This paper proposes a novel adaptation of blockchain technology to enable these edge devices to interact and participate with a blockchain without requiring a trusted intermediary. The proposed architecture provides a flexible and extensible framework that enables multi party interactions to take place at the edge of the network. The efficacy of the proposed design is demonstrated through theoretical analysis and by an application to a network of resource constrained IoT devices.