A Game-Based Secure Trading of Big Data and IoT Services: Blockchain as a Two-Sided Market

The blockchain technology has recently proved to be an efficient solution for guaranteeing the security of data transactions in data trading scenarios. The benefits of the blockchain in this domain have been shown to span over several crucial security and privacy aspects such as verifying the identities of data providers, detecting and preventing malicious data consumers, and regulating the trust relationships between the data trading parties. However, the cost and economic aspects of using this solution such as the pricing of mining process have not been addressed yet. In fact, using the blockchain entails high operational costs and puts both the data providers and miners in a continuous dilemma between delivering high-quality security services and adding supplementary costs. In addition, the mining leader requires an efficient mechanism to select the tasks from the mining pool and determine the needed computational resources for each particular task in order to maximize its payoff. Motivated by these two points, we propose in this paper a novel game theoretical model based on the two-sided market approach that exhibits a mix of cooperative and competitive strategies between the (blockchain) miners and data providers. The game helps both the data providers and miners determine the monetary reward and computational resources respectively. Simulations conducted on a real-world dataset show promising potential of the proposed solution in terms of achieving total surpluses for all involved parties, i.e., data providers, data consumers and miners.