IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - January/February 2024 - 25

devices rather than in the control center. Each
device is equipped with a basic intelligence on
when to take an action and how to share the
action. Some devices are responsible for collecting
the data, known as collectors and some other
devices are responsible for reacting to the environment,
known as reactors based on the data
from the collectors. For instance, in a CEI cluster
with the objective tomanage the energy consumption
in smart building, a smart bulb may depend
on the environmental data collected by the proximity
sensors, light sensors, and potentially on
the temperature sensors. Hence, instead of relying
entirely on a centrally located control center, the
smart bulb should depend on the knowledge of
proximity, light, and temperature sensors. In this
example, the intelligence of these four sensors
may forma CEI.
Based on the responsibilities, the CMs can be
classified into two categories: collectors and reactors.
Collectors are mainly responsible for collecting
the surrounding data or knowledge.
Examples of collectors may include temperature
sensor, light sensor, solar panel, proximity and
motion sensor, and CO2 sensor. The job of the
reactors is to react to the surrounding environment
based on the shared knowledge by the collectors.
Examples of reactor may include smart
bulb, ventilation system, and room heating system.
It is assumed that the CMs have the knowledge
about other members in the same clusters
and the nearby fog nodes.
One of the primary research issues in CEI is
the security and traceability of the event/data
generated by diverse edge devices. Edge devices
share their knowledge on surrounding environment
among other CMs. As the edge devices are
getting intelligent enough to act on their own, it
is highly essential to securely gather the chain of
events from all the devices for future analysis
and validation purposes. For this, one of the
most suitable technology that can be integrated
to the current edge computing infrastructure is
blockchain, an emerging distributed ledger technology,
as discussed in next section.
Short Background on Blockchain
As the name suggests, blockchain refers to a
sequential chain of blocks or records that is
nearly unalterable and transparent. Each block
January/February 2024
consists of three basic elements: 1) the data payload,
2) a nonce, and 3) hash of the previous
block. Some of the primary research questions
when the blockchain is integrated with CEI are
as follows.
Who, how, when, and where to construct the
blocks or the records?
How to secure the generated data payloads
from the edge of the network?
How to maintain the blockchain?
BLOCKCHAIN-ENABLED CEI
This section details the integration of blockchain
with the edge computing infrastructure that
enables secure CEI. The objective here is to
securely gather the chain of events from all the
CMs for the analysis and validation purposes. As
discussed in the " Background " section, clusters
are formed based on the intelligence capabilities
of the edge devices, regardless of their location,
type, and purpose. As shown in Figure 2, it is possible
for a single CM to be a member of multiple
clusters.
Construction of Data Payload by CMs
at the Edge
The CMs are responsible for collecting the surrounding
data/knowledge and sharing this event
among other CMs in the same cluster and in the
nearby fog nodes. For example, edge device d3
would share its surrounding knowledge with all
the CMs of Cluster-1 and all the edge devices in the
communication range of Fog 1 andFog 4.
For each event, the corresponding CM constructs
a data payload with a set of additional
information/artifacts. The data payload is then
used to construct a block by the fog node. The
content of a data payload depends upon the type
of the CM, i.e., collector or reactor. Figure 3(a) and
(b) shows the set of data fields (described in the
following) in the data payload constructed by collectors
and reactors, respectively.
Previous block digest: It is similar to the hash
value of the previous block in the blockchain.
This value is always obtained from the nearby
fog node, which is responsible for constructing
and maintaining the blockchain. However,
at time t ¼ 0, this value is set to be empty.
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IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - January/February 2024

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