A Sharding Blockchain Model for Scalable Trust Management in Social IoT

Today, the Internet of Things is a widely recognized phenomenon that generates a significant amount of data and connects many devices. Many products are incorporating electronic components to facilitate their integration and interaction with the Internet. Scalable and efficient trust management systems are required to maintain network reliability, considering the increasing number of IoT devices and generated data. In order to enable scalable trust management in social IoT, this paper presents a sharding-based scalable trust management approach that combines social interactions with smart contract functionality. Through the division of transaction state into smaller segments and the enhancement of trust value propagation among connected devices, sharding techniques in blockchain can offer scalable trust management protocols. When implementing the model on the Hyperledger Fabric platform, we carried out a thorough evaluation. The model calculates trust in terms of trust convergence and success rate efficiently. We have conducted several tests to evaluate the scalability of the model. To boost it, we have also implemented the state sharding. We also conducted a study to highlight the advantages of the sharding strategy on the scalability of the model. The results demonstrate that using shards significantly improves trust management capacity on the blockchain. The proposed method demonstrates the potential application of sharding in blockchain-based Trust Management (TM) for scalable trust management in SIoT.