ABSTRACT
In this study, a new blockchain protocol and a novel architecture that integrates the advantages offered by edge computing, artificial intelligence (AI), IoT end-devices, and blockchain were designed, developed, and validated. This new architecture has the ability to monitor the environment, collect data, analyze it, process it using an AI-expert engine, provide predictions and actionable outcomes, and finally share it on a public blockchain platform. For the use-case implementation, the pandemic caused by the wide and rapid spread of the novel coronavirus COVID-19 was used to test and evaluate the proposed system. Recently, various authors have traced the virus spread in sewage water and studied how it can be used as a tracking system. Early warning notifications can allow governments and organizations to take appropriate actions at the earliest stages possible. The system was validated experimentally using 14 Raspberry Pis, and the results and analyses proved that the system is able to utilize low-cost and low-power flexible IoT hardware at the processing layer to detect COVID-19 and predict its spread using the AI engine, with an accuracy of 95%, and share the outcome over the blockchain platform. This is accomplished when the platform is secured by the honesty-based distributed proof of authority (HDPoA) and without any substantial impact on the devices’power sources, as there was only a power consumption increase of 7% when the Raspberry Pi is used for blockchain mining and 14% when used to produce an AI prediction. Author
ABSTRACT
The increased implementation of Edge Computing technology has provided The Internet of Things (IoT) with the ability of real-time data processing and tasks execution requested by smart devices. To support this processing the integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) into IoT is considered one of the most promising approach. While AI helps in the analyses of the data, blockchain technology provides a robust environment within which to create a secure, distributed way to share and store data. This paper proposes an architecture that combines the strengths provided by edge computing, AI, and blockchain technologies to provide robust, secure, and intelligent solutions for secure and faster data processing and sharing. The pandemic created by the rapid spread of the novel Coronavirus COVID-19, as well as the tracking of viruses in water sewage to help control the spread of such viruses, were used as our case study for exploring this architecture. To secure the proposed architecture a new concept for consensus mechanism based on Honesty-Based Distributed Proof of Work (DPOW) were devised and tested. © 2020 IEEE.