IoT root union: A decentralized name resolving system for IoT based on blockchain

Abstract

A name resolving system services as the entrance to the IoT data, thus protecting the name resolving process and making it straight and simple are critical for the widespread application of IoT services. However, due to the centralized name management structure of the existing IoT name resolving systems, it is hard to secure the name resolving process from being tampered by the root owner of the name resolving system; due to the diversity and heterogeneous of the existing name resolving systems, it is hard to provide an unified name resolving service because the existing name resolving systems can hardly be compatible with each other. Herein, it is necessary to construct a general entrance to the existing IoT name resolving systems, and ensure that no IoT name could be malicious tampered. In this paper, we propose the IoT-RU, a decentralized name resolving system for IoT. To persuade the IoT data service providers to participate in our IoT-RU, we construct its name resolving database on the blockchain ledger. To enable the adoption of the existing IoT naming schemes, IoT-RU integrates various name resolving schemes to resolve the IoT service providers in our system, and leave the job of locating individual IoT devices to the IoT service providers. We further investigate the feasibility of name management and resolving based on the current blockchain architectures. Based on the Ethereum platform, we construct a prototype of our name resolving system, and the corresponding evaluation indicates that our name resolving system manages to provide acceptable and scalable name resolution services.