Enabling geospatial context in an iot decentralised reputation management system using ethereum smart contracts

Social Internet of Things (SIoT) is a concept that integrates the Internet of Things and human social networks. An SIoT system has to store and manage device reputation values, which are used by end devices to determine the trustworthiness of another one. This device trustworthiness can also be affected by its geographical location. In this work, we introduced an architecture that includes the geospatial context in the part concerned with reputation management. The proposed architecture is based on the cloud-fog-edge architecture and uses the fog layer as the management system. The devices in the fog layer form an Ethereum Blockchain network and store the Smart Contracts. These in turn allow the management functionalities to be carried out in a decentralised, transparent and secure way, which are the advantages of Blockchain. To enable the characteristics with a geospatial component, it is necessary to apply a geocoding technique. This work shows how geocoding techniques can be adapted to cover the main geospatial functionalities and compares two geocoding options (Geohash or S2). The results showed that it is possible to include the geospatial context in a decentralised reputation management system by using hierarchical geocoding techniques, and the experiments showed that both Geohash and S2 can offer a similar performance in the proposed architecture.