An Edge Intelligent Blockchain-Based Reputation System for IIoT Data Ecosystem

Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) devices generate and collect massive amounts of industrial data. Monetizing the flood of data generated by the IIoT devices has enabled the creation of the IIoT data ecosystem, where individuals and businesses may trade data. With the rapid expansion of the online data trading industry, the necessity for an edge intelligent reputation system is becoming increasingly important as more individuals and services connect online. In recent years, researchers have proposed blockchain-based reputation systems as a means of offering anonymity, security, transparency, and mutual trust for both providers and customers in Industry 4.0. Unfortunately, they focus on the decentralized reputation system with a single certificate authority, which creates the concern of a single point of failure (SPOF). Moreover, researchers paid little attention to the performance measures of these blockchain-based reputation systems to demonstrate their usability in a real IIoT data ecosystem. This article proposes a robust edge intelligent blockchain-based reputation system capable of avoiding failures by enhancing the Raft consensus mechanism. We provide extensive security analysis and simulation experiments to demonstrate the performance of the blockchain-based reputation system for the IIoT data ecosystem using different metrics, such as transaction throughput, latency, and resource consumption.