Front. Comput. Sci.
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11704-018-6524-3
SMER: a secure method of exchanging resources in
heterogeneous internet of things
Yu ZHANG1 , Yuxing HAN
1 Computer Science and Technology Department, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China
2 Engineering College, South China Agricultural University, Guangzhou 510642, China

c Higher Education Press and Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2018
Abstract The number of IoT (Internet of things) connected
devices increases rapidly. These devices have different oper-
ation systems and therefore cannot communicate with each
other. As a result, the data they collected is limited within
their own platform. Besides, IoT devices have very con-
strained resources like weak MCU (micro control unit) and
limited storage. Therefore, they need direct communication
method to cooperate with each other, or with the help of
nearby devices with rich resources. In this paper, we pro-
pose a secure method to exchange resources (SMER) be-
tween heterogeneous IoT devices. In order to exchange re-
sources among devices, SMER adopts a compensable mech-
anism for resource exchange and a series of security mecha-
nisms to ensure the security of resource exchanges. Besides,
SMER uses a smart contract based scheme to supervise re-
source exchange, which guarantees the safety and benefits of
IoT devices. We also introduce a prototype system and make
a comprehensive discussion.
Keywords Internet of things, P2P resource exchange,
blockchain, smart contract
1 Introduction
It is estimated that there are more Than four billion mobile
devices used as sensors today. The number of fixed sensors
is even larger. Consulting company Gartner said the number
of processors, sensors and communications would rise to 36.2
Received November 14, 2016; accepted September 7, 2017
E-mail: yuxinghan@scau.edu.cn
2
, Jiangtao WEN 1
percent in 2015. Although a large amount of IoT devices can
help people better perceive and communicate with world, at
present, vast majority of IoT devices are connected to their
own server or clouds and have their own system. As a result,
computing power, storage and band width of these devices
or servers are not fully utilized and they are idle for most
of the time. This is mainly caused by the following factors:
1) Heterogeneous devices cannot communicate or exchange
resources directly with each other. 2) Even if they can com-
municate directly, resources of these devices cannot be pro-
vided for free, because they will cost energy, band width and
storage spaces etc. 3) Even if resources can be offered with a
price, the major concern is how to make resource exchange
between two less trustable devices successful and reliable.
In order to exchange these resources, some researches have
been done [1–3]. In these researches, IoT devices act as inde-
pendent economic entities and transfer encrypted coins with
each other with encrypted coins as a value scale in P2P re-
source exchanges. However, not only did their work not dis-
cuss about resource exchange problems, but also the secu-
rity model and other abnormal conditions are not involved.
Motivated by such challenges, we propose a secure method
of exchanging resources in heterogeneous Internet of Things
(SMER). SMER system can support heterogeneous IoT de-
vices to exchange resources directly with each other. It is
based on encrypted coins and Blockchain, which guarantees
the security of resource exchanges and resource exchange
rules from malicious tampers. Specifically, it includes follow-
ing features:
Compatibility: SMER system allows heterogeneous IoT
2 Front. Comput. Sci.
devices to communicate with each other on a P2P network.
That is to say, they do not have to transfer their resources
to a central server which may incur data loss or latency. It
also supports automatic, rapid and secure transfer between
devices without support of central organization.
Security: SMER system uses blockchain as infrastructure
of resource exchange rules and trade records, which not only
supports resource exchange between two less trustable de-
vices, but also ensure the openness and non-tampering fea-
ture of resource exchange.
Privacy: Resource exchanges are within several local de-
vices so that data is not sent to any remote server or cloud.
This guarantees the privacy of data and devices.
As depicted above, we need to study SMER and realize se-
curity, rapid and automatic resource exchange. Our target is
to take full advantage of idle resources among heterogeneous
devices.
The reminder of this paper is structured as follows. In Sec-
tion 2, we look into the motivation and challenges in build-
ing such a system. Section 3 provides a discussion of related
research works. SMER system and its architecture are pre-
sented in Section 4. In Section 5, we introduce the operational
model. Section 6 discusses implementation details and evalu-
ation results of SMER and Section 7 discusses overall system
and comments on security and privacy aspects. We conclude
the paper and briefly discuss our future work in Section 8.
2 Motivation and challenges
2.1 Motivation
Resource exchange between devices will bring significant
benefits to the development of Internet of things. Firstly, as
discussed in Section 1, many devices (including both IoT de-
vices and servers) are idle for most of time. Therefore, an ef-
ficient resource exchange mechanism can prevent these idle
resources from being wasted. Secondly, the number of IoT
devices is very large, so central network is not suitable. But
P2P network can give full play to the potential of Internet of
things. SMER system is a P2P network in which every de-
vice is an independent economic entity. They can sell their
own resources or buy resources provided by other devices.
And since there is no central node, SMER system has unlim-
ited scalability in theory. Thirdly, because resource provided
by other devices are not priced, we need a “currency” to price
those resources. Besides, this mechanism can encourage de-
vices to offer their resources.
In our work, we created a P2P system that a huge amount
of heterogeneous devices can exchange resources in a prof-
itable, secure and private environment. Every device in this
system is an independent economic entity that can offers
its resources and buy resources from other devices. What’s
more, every device in SMER will strictly obey the resource
exchange rules, and smart contract mechanisms of SMER
system ensure the exchange rules cannot be tampered or de-
stroyed. Besides, security and privacy of all devices are well
protected.
2.2 Challenges
Based on above motivations, in this subsection we discuss
various issues and challenges in creating a large resource ex-
change system, which can support massive heterogeneous de-
vices.
Resource exchange network Because central server
based systems would introduce huge latency and bring about
problems of low performance and security problem, we have
to build a secure P2P network as foundation. Besides, this
system has to serve as a fundamental financial platform. This
is because participants in resource exchanges have to act as
independent financial entities that have their own wallets, ad-
dresses and private keys for automatic selling and buying.
Heterogeneous devices Because the resource (e.g., com-
puting power, storage or bandwidth) of a single device is
limited, it is meaningless to exchange resource among a few
homogeneous devices. In order to take full advantage of re-
source exchange, there must be a lot of heterogeneous de-
vices, and their resources (e.g., ARM MCU, CPU, and GPU)
can be combined to complete one task. As a result, how to
distribute and manage these resources is a big challenge.
Resource exchange mechanism In the human world,
people use paper contracts to define rules of resource ex-
change with an authority department in charge of the compul-
sory execution part. However, in IoT, there are no third parties
involved in P2P based resource exchanges. Therefore, exist-
ing models cannot be taken as references. We need to design
a new mechanism which has the following functions: 1) Re-
source exchange rules are transparent to all devices involved.
2) A single device cannot modify or destroy the content of
exchange rules. 3) Judgment of these rules is compulsory. 4)
This rule provides a scale that can price the resources.
Security problem Security problem is always the weak-
ness of Internet of things. People are concerned about
whether their smart devices are controlled or monitored by
crackers. Security problems are more serious in resource ex-
change. We have to ensure the money of devices is not stolen
 Yu ZHANG et al. SMER: a secure method of exchanging resources in heterogeneous internet of things
by others and malicious devices who do not pay for the re-
source. Besides, we have to prevent resource exchange rules
from being modified. In a word, we must guard interest and
security of both resource providers and resource buyers.
3 Related work
The resource exchange of devices. Authors in [2–5] work
on issues and challenges in existing distributed application
processing frameworks (DAPFs) in developing, implement-
ing, and executing computational intensive mobile applica-
tions within mobile cloud computing (MCC) domain. The
authors in [6] integrated resource of idle IoT devices and
use map reduce mechanism to allocate tasks. He also built
a prototype system that is consisted of a controller, an an-
droid phone and several sensors installed with Contiki OS.
The controller receives missions from a phone and allocate
them to IoT devices according to a map reduce based al-
gorithm. At last, controller will transmit results back to the
phone.
Although these studies have discussed about how to recon-
stitute idle IoT devices to a cloud that can provide computing
power and storage, these services are free of charge. That is
to say, resource provider devices cannot get paid in resource
exchanges. The authors in [7] propose an incentive model
to encourage idle mobile phones to offer their resources ac-
tively and participate in resource exchanges. However, There
are no third parties to monitor whether these incentive mech-
anisms are followed, or to prevent these mechanisms from
being modified by malicious devices. What’s more, strange
resource provider devices and resource demander devices do
not trust each other. As a result, it is an important problem
about how to exchange resources under low-trusted condi-
tions.
IoT devices on blockchain Business value department of
IBM propose “Empowering the edge” and a white paper of
“ADEPT: An IoT Practitioner Perspective” in 2014. The au-
thor of “Empowering the edge” argues that Internet of things
should not be composed of several central servers and many
small devices. Instead, it should be a P2P network that are
comprised by a lot of edge devices. ADEPT is an IoT finan-
cial platform that give every device an independent account,
so that they can send bills to each other. Other functions in-
clude the exchange of messages and files. They also designed
a prototype washing machine and displayed it on CES2015.
The washing machine can automatic contact customer ser-
vices or retailers when it is in trouble or short of laundry.
3
It can also automatically pay for them after the transaction
is successful. In [8], EC Ferrer propose a method that can
combine blockchain with other distributed systems, such as
robotic swarm systems, to provide necessary capabilities to
make robotic swarm operations more secure, autonomous,
flexible and profitable. Sikorski et al. etc. [9] introduce appli-
cations of blockchain technology related to the 4th Industrial
Revolution (Industry 4.0) and present an example to employ
blockchain to facilitate machine-to-machine (M2M) interac-
tions. However, these studies are only discussed about the
payment function between devices. The issue of resource ex-
change between heterogeneous devices is not involved. In [1],
Dominic Worner in Zurich university described a prototype in
2014 that take bitcoin as the measurement for sensors. Their
prototype are build on the bitcoin network that every device
have a bitcoin account. And they use bitcoin script to iden-
tify these devices and realize simple information exchanges.
Christidis et al. [10] describes a framework to create a mar-
ketplace of services between devices.
However, these works just simply use payment function of
the Blockchain. In practical, there are many complex rules
in resource exchange among devices, some even attached to
one another . As a result, a comprehensive model are needed
to realize a security, profitable and automatic resource ex-
change between heterogeneous IoT devices under low trust
conditions, and ensure effective usage of idle resources.
4 SMER architecture
SMER is a secure system of exchanging resources in het-
erogeneous Internet of Things. In this section, we start with
an introduction of basic concepts in the combination of IoT
and Blockchain. Then a layered architecture is specified. At
last, based on this architecture, we propose the framework of
SMER and introduce mechanisms of each module.
4.1 The relationship between IoT and blockchain
Resources of devices come at a price. They include comput-
ing power, spaces for storage, bandwidth and energy con-
sumption etc. Free resource supply is only suitable within a
company, but it is not suitable for the entire eco-system of IoT
resource exchanges. Therefore, we need a mechanism that
can compensate resource providers. However, the currency
in human world is issued and controlled by banks. A single
device cannot open an account in a bank. What’s more, the
transaction could be fully controlled by banks. As a result,
it is impossible to meet the requirement of a large amount
4 Front. Comput. Sci.

of devices to exchange resources. Therefore, SMER system account security and transaction records are also within its
uses an encrypted currency and Blockchain as the basis for responsibility.
resource transaction.
Encrypted currency In this paper, encrypted currency
is used as the API of a uniform value measuring methodol-
ogy. Because both encrypted currency and resource exchange
rules of IoT devices are programs, encrypted currency is de-
signed for IoT devices. Each device has a unique public key
and an unique private key. Public key records the wallet ad-
dress so that others can transfer money to the owner. Private
key is only known by the device itself and is used to authorize
transactions. On the other side, because different resources of
devices come at different prices, the resource demander de-
vice needs encrypted currency as a scale to pay the resource
provider device fairly.
Fig. 1 The layered architecture of SMER system
Blockchain It is the basis of encrypted currency. In es-
sential, Blockchain is a P2P distributed database. Each de-
Exchange rules layer is designed to regularize resource ex-
vice is free to register an account on Blockchain. Transfer
changes. Like a contract, it specifies behaviors of resource
between devices are free, and without any third-party re-
providers and resource demanders, as well as penalty for vio-
strictions. Transfer records of encrypted money will be writ-
lating rules. Resource exchange rules in this layer can link to
ten into a block, which will be appended to Blockchain by
device accounts in financial infrastructure layer, and then op-
computing powers. After being added to Blockchain, transfer
erate these accounts according to pre-defined content. In ad-
records will not be revoked. Then it is visible to all devices.
dition, this layer is also responsible for security of the rules.
As a result, an unilateral modification will not change any
The resource exchange layer is responsible for managing
information in Blockchain.
heterogeneous devices and their resources. It offers uniform
Blockchain can also be understood as a general ledger, so
and standard interface for both devices and their resources.
balance of a device can be calculated by Eq. (1):
As a result, devices in this layer only need to ask or offer their
balance = totalrevenue − totalexpenditure. (1) resources, but do not have to care about the communication
When a resource demander device asks for a checkout, problem of heterogeneous architecture.
Blockchain will traverse all blocks to compute the balance The hierarchical architecture brings huge benefits to
so as to check whether deals can be completed. Similarly, SMER system. That is to say, SMER system will not specify
resource exchange rules can be written into Blockchain. Ac- the type or way of devices to exchange resources, but through
cording to the principles of P2P distributed database, resource the content of rules in exchange rules layer to restrict their be-
exchange rules are copied to all devices and any unilateral havior, and arbitrate the result of the resource exchange. That
modification is illegal. This ensures the security and trans- is to say, exchange of resource can be achieved by any means,
parency of resource exchange. What’s more, resource ex- as long as it can be monitored and verified by exchange rules.
change rules and device accounts are in a same Blockchain. Therefore, heterogeneous IoT devices can exchange their re-
Hence rules can operate directly on device accounts accord- sources directly and freely in SMER system.
ing to results of resource transactions so as to complete the
4.3 Framework
financial part.
Corresponding to the layered architecture, we propose the
4.2 Layered architecture
framework of SMER system. Three levels of layered archi-
As shown in Fig. 1, SMER system is constituted of a financial tecture from bottom to top correspond to devices’ account
infrastructure layer, an exchange rules layer and a resource module, resource exchange rules module and IoT devices
exchange layer. Financial infrastructure layer is the basis of module, respectively. As shown in Fig. 2, SMER system is
resource exchange. It is responsible for creating and manag- consisted of two parts: IoT devices and the Blockchain.
ing accounts for each IoT device. Besides, transfer accounts, The IoT devices part This part is divided into re-
 Yu ZHANG et al. SMER: a secure method of exchanging resources in heterogeneous internet of things
source exchange devices and Blockchain maintenance de-
vices. Resource exchange devices can be divided into re-
source provider devices and resource demander devices. The
resource exchange is conducted through the P2P network and
without any third party interferences. As long as these actions
can be monitored and verified by the Blockchain, the way of
resource exchanges can be various. For example, the comput-
ing power can be provided via map reduce way, the storage
space can be provided through distribute storage mode, data
can be exchanged even by a direct transmission, etc.
Fig. 2 The framework of SMER system
Blockchain maintenance devices are also known as miners.
In PoW mechanism, they provide computing power to sup-
port normal operation of the Blockchain. In PoS mechanism,
devices that have a higher stake at the currency (i.e., hold a lot
of coins) can determine the next block. Precisely because of
the support of these devices, transaction records and resource
exchange protocols of the whole network can be constantly
written into the Blockchain. Logically speaking, resource ex-
change devices are separated from Blockchain maintenance
devices, they may be on a same physical device in real world
applications. But it should be noted that most IoT devices
have very constrained computation power to maintain the
Blockchain in PoW mechanism. In practical, there are some
special devices suitable for Blockchain maintenance. In PoS
mechanism, poor computer power is not a problem.
The Blockchain part From the perspective of the archi-
tecture model of SMER, this part is superimposed on IoT de-
vice network. And it is constituted by accounts of devices
and resource exchange rules. The account module is respon-
sible for managing informations for all IoT devices, as well as
mechanisms of transfer, security and other aspects. The role
of account module is similar to a bank, but it is not attached
to any third party and exist on all devices. By means of co-
regulatory mechanisms, account module virtualizes a third
5
party financial supervisor. The resource exchange rules mod-
ule is made up of a series of smart resource exchange con-
tracts. Different smart contracts have different content, like
resource exchange rules of computing power, storage, data,
and so forth. It gives a detailed description on the actions
of two sides in the process of resource exchange. Only if
content in smart contracts have been fulfilled (e.g., resources
have been provided), actions (e.g., transfer the money) that
specified in advance in contracts will be enforced. The smart
contract also stipulate appropriate measures to take if these
terms have not been fulfilled. In human world, the contract is
handed over to a third party (e.g., a lawyer) and enforced by
law. However, there are no third parties in the world of de-
vices. Therefore, on the one hand, these smart contracts have
to be written into the Blockchain to ensure its security and
anti-tamper, on the other hand, they need the permission to
operate directly on devices’ accounts.
5 Operational model
In SMER system, a manufacturer will write unique ID,
accounts and hardware information of devices into the
Blockchain presenting their beginning of life when they are
at the factory. Once registered, these devices will become a
unique entity in the Blockchain throughout its life. What’s
more, because of the security mechanism of the Blockchain,
information of devices cannot be modified. This means the
Blockchain itself becomes the most trustworthy database.
Therefore, as shown in stage 1 of Fig. 3, heterogeneous de-
vices with an authentic and unique identity can take part in
basic financial activities on the Blockchain, which acts a third
party supervisor here.
Fig. 3 The operation model of SMER system
Because of the complexity of the resource exchange’s pro-
cess that contains many stages and possibilities, only simple
transfer between devices’ accounts cannot meets the needs of
6 Front. Comput. Sci.
the resource transaction. Hence we need a mechanism that
with contract functions and the enforcement power to ensure
the resource exchange to go smooth. In Fig. 3, phase 2 and
phase 3 are actually performed simultaneously. IoT devices
are in constant interaction with the smart contract. If a condi-
tion in a smart contract is reached, then a corresponding ac-
tion will be triggered. In the mean time, the status of this con-
tract is changed and a new condition will be presented. This
process will continue until the contract is finished. SMER
system takes a resource exchange smart contract as a state
machine. Both sides of resource exchange are depending on
status of contracts to decide the next move.
Any person or even devices can create a smart contract
with a unique address. Once the address of a contract is
known by people or devices, content of this contract is visible
to them too. Thus the resource exchange contract is transpar-
ent to everyone, and each device has right to decide whether
to participate in the contract.
The type and content of the resource exchange smart con-
tract cover many aspects. For clarity, we use the example of a
data processing contract. As shown in Fig. 4, there are three
virtual participant in this smart contract: a resource provider,
a resource demander and a smart contract. It should be no-
ticed that the smart contract itself is not an independent en-
tity in P2P network. In fact, it is existing in all devices across
network, and the mechanism of Blockchain ensures its safety
and enforcement power. In this paper, we assume both sides
in this resource exchange know the address of the smart con-
tract and agree content of it.
Fig. 4 The process of the resource exchange
Registering the resource provider device As shown in
phase 1 of Fig. 4, if a device is willing to provide its com-
puting power for this data processing service, it will send a
request to this smart contract. After receiving the request, the
contract inquires informations of this device in Blockchain
to check whether its capacity and credit are enough for data
processing. If it could, as shown in phase 2 of Fig. 4, the
contract will return a acceptance, a unique ID and its status.
The ID is the identity of this resource provider in resource
exchange, and the status is responsible for recording which
stage the contract is at and what actions should be taken. In
this contract, initial status is IDLE which means data process-
ing service is available now. There may be a lot of resource
provider devices and resource demander devices in real sit-
uation. In order to clearly describe this process, we assume
that there are only one resource provider and one resource
demander.
Getting the resource provider devices list As shown in
phase 3 of Fig. 4, the resource demander sends a request to
the smart contract to fetch lists of resource provider devices.
In phase 4, the smart contract returns a list which contains
IDs and details of available resource provider devices. Then
the resource demander will choose one provider in that list
according to their credit in a reputation system. This problem
is out of the scope of this paper and not be covered here.
Data processing preparation stage Because it is a data
processing contract, the resource demander device has to
send raw data to a specified address according to the contract
(The specified address is a encrypted address on the Internet,
which is designed by the resource demander and can be ac-
cessed by the resource provider). Then, as shown in phase 5
of Fig. 4, the resource demander sends a request to the con-
tract asking it to check the data. The contract will change
the status to CHECKING_DATA after receiving the request.
After monitoring status changes of the smart contract (Phase
6), the resource provider will check the data in specified ad-
dress and change status of the contract according to the re-
sult (Phase 7). If the result of raw data checking is passed,
the resource provider device will send a request to the smart
contract asking it to change status to READY. Otherwise the
status will change back to IDLE. After submitting raw data,
the resource demander device will keep listening to the status
of the contract (Phase 8). If the status changes to READY,
it could move to the next step. If the status changes back to
IDLE, it indicates that the data checking is failed, and it has
to check whether the raw data is correct and re-upload it later.
Data processing stage After the status becomes READY,
the resource demander device will send a request to the con-
tract asking for processing the raw data (Phase 9). Along with
the request, the processing fee is sent to the smart contract at
 Yu ZHANG et al. SMER: a secure method of exchanging resources in heterogeneous internet of things 7

the same time. The smart contract will host the processing berry Pi, a mac-book, a laptop and 3 servers. All devices are
fee and check whether it has reached the minimum of data in a local area network (LAN). The purpose of using differ-
processing cost that predefined in the contract. If the fee is ent types of devices is to simulate resource exchange between
enough, the contract will change the status to PROCESSING heterogeneous devices.
which means that the resource provider device can start pro- Table 1 The devices list
cessing the raw data (Phase 10). Once the resource provider Device CPU GPU RAM OS
is finished, the resource provider will send the processed data RaspPi Cortex-A7 900MHz \ 1GB Linux 3.18
to a predefined address, besides, it will also send a request to Laptop Inter core2 1.2GHz \ 2GB Window 7
the contract asking it to change status to FINISH (Phase 11). server1 Inter XeonE3 3.5GHz \ 32GB Linux 3.16
server2 Inter XeonE3 3.5GHz \ 32GB Linux 3.16
Checking and payment stage When the resource de-
server3 Inter XeonE3 3.5GHz GTX240 1.34GHz 32GB Linux 3.16
mander device finds the status turns to FINISH (Phase 12), mac Inter core i5 1.4GHz \ 4GB MacOS X
it will check the processed data at a specified address. If the
checking is passed, it will send requests to the contract asking The Blockchain is build by Ethereum. Ethereum is a decen-
it to change status to IDLE and pay for the resource provider tralized platform that runs smart applications exactly as pro-
device. Otherwise, the status will be changed back to PRO- grammed without any possibility of downtime, censorship,
CESSING (Phase 13). Once finding the status of the contract fraud or third party interference. And the language of smart
has changed back to PROCESSING, the resource providing contract is solidity. In this experiment, we create a private
device will re-process the raw data. If the status steps for- Blockchain in local network.
ward to IDLE, the resource provider is available again and it In this prototype, the type of resource exchange is comput-
can continue to serve other resource demander devices. ing power. Specifically, a resource demander device have a
It is not difficult to find that the smart contract is largely number of raw pictures with 24-bits BMP format and want
played a role of a state machine. Heterogeneous devices do resource provider devices to compress them to JPEG format.
not need to communicate with each other directly, they just Specifically, this experiment used the PIL library of Python to
have to perform an appropriate action depending on the sta- complete image process tasks, the JPEG quality values is 50.
tus of the contract. This solves the communication problem All network adapters and switches are in a same LAN, and
between heterogeneous devices. On the other side, since the all of them support a maximum transfer rate of 100 Mbps.
device in the Blockchain is unique, the smart contract can The resolution of one raw picture is 800×600 and its size is
easily determine corresponding permissions of each device. 1.4MB.
As a result, devices cannot modify the status of the contract The purpose of this experiment is to verify the validity of
arbitrarily. For instance, a resource provider device is not able the proposed resource exchange model and progress. Security
to change the status from FINISH to IDLE and get the host- and fraud problems are discussed in next section.
ing fee from the contract. Only the resource demander device In the first place, we used Ethereum to set up a private
can perform this operation. Blockchain on a LAN and connect all devices to it. In or-
In practical, there is no way every device in resource ex- der to understand the experimental process, we built a Web
change abides by the law like they do in this example. There page to monitor the whole experimental process. As shown in
must be some malicious devices or people that focus on find- Fig. 5, there are six devices in the Blockchain and the average
ing vulnerabilities to obtain improper benefits. Besides, the network hash rate was 500Mhz.
processing time is also necessary to be specified because we
cannot allow data processing for too long or with unlim-
ited retries after it failed. These contents are discussed in
Section 7.

6 Implementation and evaluation

In order to verify the validity of the model in this paper, we

have created a proof of concept implementation of SMER.
As shown in Table 1, our prototype system includes a Rasp- Fig. 5 Show the devices’ list
8 Front. Comput. Sci.

Then we create a resource exchange smart contract accord- As shown in Fig. 6, the time needed by the server is the
ing to the procedure in Section 5. It contains following func- shortest, and the Pi is significantly slower than the server be-
tions: “call for processing”, “finish” and “confirmation”. cause its hardware limitations. Due to data transfer times and
confirmation times of the Blockchain, the speed of SMER
Algorithm 1 Smart contract: call for processing
system for one bmp compression is the lowest. Besides, the
1: function callForProcess(id)
2: if msg.value >= 6 then
number of resource exchange devices is very small (i.e., only
3: tr.status=“PROCESSING” 4), so average confirmation time of one block is 29.4s. While
4: else normal confirmation time ranges from 9s to 18s (These re-
5: send coins back sults are based on the Ethereum official Blockchain records
6: end if that has already been opened to public).
7: end function

In function “callForProcess”, the contract receives the pro-

cessing fee from a resource demander device and check if it
is no less than 6 eth. If the fee is sufficient, the contract will
change its status to PROCESSING and a resource provider
device will start processing data. What’s more, processing fee
is hosted by the contract until the exchange is complete.

Algorithm 2 Smart contract: finish

function finish(id)
2: if msg.sender == resourceproviderdevice then
change the status of Smart Contract to “FINISHED”
4: end if
end function Fig. 6 1 BMP

In function “finish”, the contract will change its status to The next step is dealing with multi-pictures. Figure 7(a)
FINISHED only if this request is coming from the resource to Fig. 10 show comparison from 10 pictures to 200 pictures
demander device. respectively.

Algorithm 3 Smart contract: confirmation

function confirm(id)
if msg.sender == resource demander device and tr.status ==
“FINIS HED” then
3: change the status of Smart Contract to “CONFIRM”
Smart Contract send bitcoins to resource provider device’s wallet
end if
6: end function

In function “confirm”, when the status is FINISHED and

the message sender is the resource demander device, the con-
tract will send entrusted fee to the resource provider device.
In this experiment, Raspberry Pi is a resource deman-
der device, and server1 is the resource provider device. The
Raspberry Pi has a raw picture of BMP format and wants
the server to compress it to JPEG format. All remaining de-
vices are responsible for maintaining normal operations of
the Blockchain. For the purpose of a contrast analysis, we
recorded the processing times of the Pi, the server and SMER
system independently for 50 times. Figure 6 shows compari-
son among three ways.
Fig. 7 10 BMP
We can find that the more pictures contained in one task,
the more efficient the SMER system will be. When one task
contains 50 bmp pictures, average time of SMER system is
equal to that of the Pi. When the quantity grows to 100 and
200, the advantage of SMER system is obvious.
We can conclude that SMER system is fit for heavy calcu-
 Yu ZHANG et al. SMER: a secure method of exchanging resources in heterogeneous internet of things
lation task. Because the data transfer time and confirmation
times of the Blockchain can be ignored as compared to pro-
cessing time. And when encountering a task that requires low
computation, the device with weak MCU can complete itself.
So in this situation, there is no need to use SMER system.
Fig. 8 50 BMP
Fig. 9 100 BMP
Fig. 10 200 BMP
The above results are based on single resource provider
9
device. The following experiment includes three resource
provider devices (i.e., one server with GPU, one server with-
out GPU and one laptop in Table 2), and the raw data include
200 bmp pictures. In this experiment, there are three com-
puting architectures (i.e., CPU, GPU and ARM MCU), two
operation systems (i.e., Linux and Windows). However, due
to the compatibility feature of the SMER system, a resource
demander does not need to care about the problem brought
by these heterogeneous devices. In other words, this process
is transparent to resource demander devices. SMER system
can assign tasks automatically to all resource provider de-
vices and processing fee will be allocated according to the
proportion of completed tasks.
The configuration of resource provider device is shown in
Table 2, and concrete calculating methods of their computing
power are as follows: there are 4 cores and 2 threads in Inter
Xeon E3 CPU, and its basic frequency is 3.5GHz, then the
computing power of this CPU is 28GHz (3.5 × 4 × 2). There
are 96 cores in NVIDIA GTX 240 GPU, and its processor
clock is 1.34GHz, then the computing power of this GPU is
128.64GHz (1.34 × 96), and the sum of computing power of
this server is 156.64GHz. Computing power of all devices are
listed in Table 2.
Table 2 The devices list
Device CPU GPU Computing power
Laptop Inter core2 1.20GHz \ 2.40GHz
server1 Inter XeonE3 3.5GHz \ 28GHz
server3 Inter XeonE3 3.5GHz GTX240 1.34GHz 156.64GHz
The proportion of final rewards is shown is Fig. 11. By
comparing computing powers in Table 2 and proportion in
Fig. 11, we can find that rewards are closely related to the per-
formance of devices, which proof that SMER system can hide
heterogeneity among different resource providers and pro-
vides a virtual device for resource demander. What’s more,
devices providers can get paid in proportion to their comput-
ing power contribution, regardless of their heterogeneity.
The time consumption and its comparison are shown in
Fig. 12. From the result we can find that overall computing
time is reduced from 1050 seconds to 625 seconds. SMER
system is fit for multi-task, because several servers can deal
with these tasks in parallel.
In this experiment, we use JPEG compression to simulate
computing power exchange between devices. For verifying
the validity of processed data, we use both feature points
matching results and file parameters.
On the one hand, SMER system randomly chooses some
raw pictures and their corresponding processed pictures, and
10 Front. Comput. Sci.
then extract SIFT features [11] from these pictures. In order
to measure the similarity with objective data, these two pic-
tures are matched with FLANN algorithm [12]. As shown in
Fig. 13, the similarity result between raw data and processed
data is 97.8%. The result of our experiment on all 200 pic-
tures indicates that the average similarity result is 98.2%, the
maximum result is 99.8%, and the minimum result is 96.6%.
Based on these results, we set the minimum similarity thresh-
old to 96%.
Fig. 11 Time comparison
Fig. 12 Income comparison
Fig. 13 Image matching result
On the other hand, SMER system also checks processed
file header blocks and file size to check the compression rate.
As described in the beginning of this section, we have set the
JPEG quality values to 50, and the compression ratio for test
images in this experiment is around 15:1.
However, the focus of this experiment is not data valida-
tion. The JPEG compression is a schematic simulation of re-
source exchange. The situation may be more complicated in
practical.
7 Discussion
Security problem SMER system takes a resource exchange
smart contract as a state machine. Both sides of resource ex-
change are depending on the status of contracts to decide the
next move. But in Section 5, we notice that in stage 13, the
status of the contract has set to FINISH by resource deman-
der. This operation must be completed by the demander itself.
If other people or devices can access this operation, then the
result is disastrous. To avoid other similar problems, SMER
system will record ID and addresses of resource provider de-
vices and resource demander devices at the start of the re-
source exchange. As we discussed in Section 5, the iden-
tity of a device is recorded in the Blockchain at the factory
and can not be modified. Then each message that received by
the contract will include the identity of the sender device, so
the contract can strictly control the operation of each device
based their identities.
In order to validate the security of SMER system, we
have deployed the smart contract in Section 6, which trans-
action hash in the top of Fig. 14(a). As shown in Fig.
14(b), We can find relevant informations (e.g., Block height,
transaction hash etc.) of the smart contract in Ethereum
Blockchain data query system. Besides, we can also get
the address of the smart contract in the fifth row (i.e.,
0xad9d4a791A3dc19f6B7CfEf816868982836A13b7).
Fig. 14 Deploy the smart contract into Blockchain. (a) Contract deploy
transaction; (b) contract information
Then, we call the function “finish” in this smart contract
(i.e., algorithm 3 in Section 6), but the message sender is
the resource provider device instead of the resource deman-
 Yu ZHANG et al. SMER: a secure method of exchanging resources in heterogeneous internet of things
der device. In function “finish”, the status of the task can
be changed to FINISH, but only the resource demander de-
vice has the right to do so. When a device send a request to
this function (as shown in Fig. 15(a)), the smart contract will
match the public key between this message sender and the re-
source demander device, if it does not match, this request is
considered invalid. As shown in Fig. 15(b), we can not find
relevant informations of the request in the Blockchain.
Fig. 15 Invalid request. (a) The transaction of the request; (b) query results
in Blockchain
Another important security problem is about the
Blockchain of SMER system. If a malicious device that has
more than 51 percent computing power than whole network,
it can trick the Blockchain by a double payments. Specifi-
cally, this malicious device pays a resource provider device
with some coins and gets resources, then it quickly completes
another resource transaction and pay another device some
coins. Next, it provides full computing power to package the
latter transaction to the Blockchain and ignore the first one.
The consequence is that malicious devices get resources in
the first resource exchange without paying. However, this
bitcoin network’s problem is not difficult to solve in SMER
system. Because all devices in real-name system of SMER
will have a formal identity at the factory (i.e., a real-name
registration system), the resource exchange smart contract
can automatically determine whether a device is qualified
for resource exchange. Besides, when a large number of de-
vices are involved in SMER system, it is very difficult for a
single device to provide more than 51 percent of the whole
network’s computing power.
Disputes In practical, there must be some disagreements
between both sides. For example, a resource provider de-
vice believes there are no problems with processed data, but
a resource demander device argues that problem is not ad-
dressed. Then we will introduce a third party to do the arbi-
tration. This third party could be either an organization or a
device. Authority and behavior of the third party are written
into smart contract in advance, which has authority to send
11
hosted coins to either a provider or a demander. Obviously,
such third party significantly reduces efficiency of resource
exchange because it is opposed to quick and easy principle of
resource exchange between devices. However, in normal cir-
cumstances, devices will perform strictly in accordance with
requirements of the smart contract and resource provider de-
vice also has the self-test mechanism to avoid interferences of
the third party. Therefore, the involvement of the third party
is mainly to prevent some malicious devices.
Privacy problem In order to exchange resources
with world wide devices, smart contracts can be ac-
cessed by all devices in SMER system. However, each re-
source exchange smart contract has an unique address like
“0x8a82740b5b528475e34c5b2bf342554c06c10e56”. Con-
tents of contracts can only be known if you have their address,
and device’s ID is similar to that format. Therefore, although
theoretically all smart contracts and devices are visible to the
whole network, other devices cannot find them if they do not
know their addresses. Besides, if you want to change these
addresses, you just need to re-issue a smart contract.
Failed to fulfill an contract There are many cases that a
comprehensive contract should consider. In addition to suc-
cessful resource exchanges, there are many counter exam-
ples. For example, a resource provider device may fail to pro-
vide resources, or a device is suddenly offline. In general, the
smart contract will specify a range of codes of conduct for
both sides in advance. For instance, there is no way for a re-
source provider device to get paid until it completes the task.
And it must complete tasks or provide resources within stipu-
lated time. Besides, the third party will be introduced to cope
with distributes. On the other hand, a resource demander de-
vice will lose its coins if it terminate the contract after the
provider’s task is done.
8 Conclusion
There is an increasing number of IoT devices recently. But
most of the utilization rate of devices are very low, resulting
in a lot of waste of resources. Therefore, this paper proposes
a secure method of exchanging resources in heterogeneous
Internet of things (SMER). SMER system makes it possible
for devices to exchange resources in a security, profitable and
convenient way. This paper introduced a framework and an
operational model of SMER system and designed a prototype
system based on mechanisms of SMER. In Section 7, we dis-
cussed about security problems, privacy problems and etc. In
future work, 1) we will introduce map reduce mechanism into
12 Front. Comput. Sci.
SMER system that allows devices provide their computing
power and storage in a more precisely and convenient way.
2) Resource exchanges among a large number of devices will
produce large amounts of data, including resource consump-
tion data, cash flow data and etc. We will train these data
using proper models to obtain reasonable resource exchange
mechanisms. 3) The resource exchange at macroscopic level
lacks effective ways to model uncertain factors, environmen-
tal changes and interactions between individual devices and
therefore cannot analyze resource exchange issues in micro-
level. Therefore we will study on some economical gamed
principle and methods such as Nash Equilibria and etc. to an-
alyze and model resource exchanges issues at a micro level.
Acknowledgements The work was kindly supported by Nanjing Yunyan
Information Technology Ltd and Microsoft.
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Yu Zhang received the master degree from
information and engineering university,
China in 2011. He is currently working
toward the PhD degree in the department
of computer science and technology, Ts-
inghua University, China. His current re-
search interests include Internet of things,
Blockchain, and E-business.
Yuxing Han received her BS from Hong
Kong University of Science and Technol-
ogy, China and PhD from UCLA, both in
Electrical Engineering. She is currently
a professor in school of engineering at
South China Agriculture University, China.
Her research area focuses on virtual reality,
multimedia communication over challeng-
ing networks, and big data analysis.
Jiangtao (Gene) Wen received the BS, MS,
and PhD degrees with honors from Ts-
inghua University, China in 1992, 1994 and
1996 respectively, all in Electrical Engi-
neering.
From 1996 to 1998, he was a staff
research fellow at UCLA, where he con-
ducted cutting-edge research on multime-
dia coding and communications. Many of his inventions there were
later adopted by international standards such as H.263, MPEG, and
H.264. After UCLA, he served as the Principal Scientist of Pack-
etVideo Corp., the CTO of Morphbius Technology Inc., the Director
of Video Codec Technologies of Mobilygen Corp, the Senior Direc-
tor of Technology of Ortiva Wireless and consulted for Stretch Inc.
Since 2009, Dr. Wen has held a Professorship at the Department of
Computer Science and Technology of Tsinghua University.
Dr. Wen is a world-renowned expert in multimedia commu-
nication over hostile networks, video coding and communications.
He has authored many widely referenced papers in related fields.
Products deploying technologies that Dr. Wen developed are cur-
rently widely used worldwide. Dr. Wen holds over 30 patents with
numerous others pending. As Senior Member of IEEE, Dr. Wen is
an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions CSVT.