Blockchain-Based Mobile Crowd Sensing in Industrial Systems

The smart factory is a representative element reshaping conventional computer-aided industry to data-driven smart industry, while it is nontrivial to achieve cost effectiveness, reliability, mobility, and scalability of smart industrial systems. Data-driven industrial systems mainly rely on sensory data collected from statically deployed sensors. However, the spatial coverage of industrial sensor networks is constrained due to the high deployment and maintenance cost. Recently, mobile crowd sensing (MCS) has become a new sensing paradigm owing to its merits, such as cost effectiveness, mobility, and scalability. Nevertheless, traditional MCS systems are vulnerable to malicious attacks and single point of failure due to the centralized architecture. To this end, in this article we integrate MCS with industrial systems without introducing any additional dedicated devices. To overcome the drawbacks of traditional MCS systems, we propose a blockchain-based MCS system (BMCS). In particular, we exploit miners to verify the sensory data and design a dynamic reward ranking incentive mechanism to mitigate the imbalance of multiple sensing tasks. Meanwhile, we also develop a sensory data quality detection scheme to identify and mitigate the data anomaly. We implement a prototype of the BMCS on top of Ethereum and conduct extensive experiments on a realistic factory workroom. Both experimental results and security analysis demonstrate that the BMCS can secure industrial systems and improve the system reliability.