The Merits of a Decentralized Pollution-Monitoring System Based on Distributed Ledger Technology

• Published in: IEEE access Vol. 8; pp. 189365 - 189381
• Main Authors: Lucking, Markus, Kannengieber, Niclas, Kilgus, Maurice, Riedel, Till, Beigl, Michael, Sunyaev, Ali, Stork, Wilhelm
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Piscataway IEEE 2020; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Air pollution; Air quality; Blockchain; Data management; Digital signatures; Distributed databases; Distributed ledger; distributed ledger technology (DLT); Environmental monitoring; Internet of Things (IoT); LoRa; low-energy sensors; Monitoring; Peer-to-peer computing; Pollution; Pollution monitoring; pollution monitoring systems; Product design; Regulations; Requirements analysis; Sensor phenomena and characterization; Software
• ISSN: 2169-3536; 2169-3536
• DOI: 10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3028430

Pollution-monitoring systems (PMSs) are used worldwide to sense environmental changes, such as air quality conditions or temperature increases, and to monitor compliance with regulations. However, organizations manage the environmental data collected by such PMSs in a centralized manner, which is why recorded environmental data are vulnerable to manipulation. Moreover, the analysis of pollution data often lacks transparency to outsiders, which may lead to wrong decisions regarding environmental regulations. To address these challenges, we propose a software design for PMSs based on distributed ledger technology (DLT) and the long-range (LoRa) protocol for flexible, transparent, and energy-efficient environment monitoring and data management. To design the PMS, we conducted a comprehensive requirements analysis for PMSs. We benchmarked different consensus mechanisms (e.g., BFT-SMaRt and Raft) and digital signature schemes (e.g., ECDSA and EdDSA) to adequately design the PMS and fulfill the identified requirements. On this basis, we designed and implemented a prototype PMS and evaluated it in the field. The evaluation shows the effectiveness of DLT-based PMSs that include portable low-energy sensor nodes and demonstrates the applicability of the proposed software design for PMSs in contexts other than air pollution.