Towards a Trustful Game-Theoretic Mechanism for Data Trading in the Blockchain-IoT Ecosystem

This paper introduces a data trading system based on the blockchain network, where a trusted data aggregator collects data from the Internet of Things (IoT) device owners and sells them in the format of different packages to multiple buyers. In this paper, we formulate infinitely repeated games between rational buyers that are competing with each other to obtain the required data records. Buyers update their bidding strategies to maximize their profits based on the outcome of previous games. We validate the existence and uniqueness of the Nash equilibrium in a one-shot game, finite, and infinitely repeated games. To ensure data owners’ privacy, a novel trust mechanism design is used to impede untruthful buyers to win the game. To prevent the use of a third party such as an auctioneer, all of these methods are implemented as smart contracts on the Hyperledger blockchain. We provide extensive analysis to demonstrate that the proposed system satisfies the properties of completeness, soundness, computationally efficiency, truthfulness, budget balance, and individual rationality. Lastly, we provide simulation experiments to demonstrate the performance of our blockchain network using different metrics, such as transaction throughput, latency, and resource consumption under different parameters.