Cost-effective IoT devices as trustworthy data sources for a blockchain-based water management system in precision agriculture

This paper explores how the energy-efficient integration of IoT-based sensing and blockchains, an innovation in the field of Digital Infrastructure technologies, can be used to incentivize virtuous behaviors in agricultural practices. The novelty of the study lies specifically in the unprecedented use of constrained sensing devices as trustworthy data sources for a permissionless blockchain. Furthermore, we show how our research results, advancing the State-of-the-Art in the IoT and blockchain interactions, can support the interests of a diverse set of water management stakeholders in a concrete use-case implementation. To assess our contribution and validate our results we use a system architecture comprising constrained IoT devices for measuring water consumption used as direct data-source actors, a public blockchain infrastructure, and smart contracts that represent the interests of different water management stakeholders and regulate the distribution of incentives amongst virtuous farmers. Further validation on the usability of our results is obtained through the real implementation of a complete use case featuring the Ethereum network as a public blockchain and where six different types of IoT platforms are individually assessed for impact on the IoT devices, in terms of energy, processing time, and available memory. The findings show how solutions based on the proposed architecture can be implemented with only 6% of additional energy budget compared to the normal operations of the IoT devices. Besides showing new means to energy-efficiently integrate IoT data sources in a permissionless blockchain, the validation results make our contribution a strong candidate for use in automated and incentive-based irrigation water management systems as well as a key component in fostering increased sustainability of the whole agricultural sector.