Monetization Of Crowd-Sourced Fog Node Services Using Blockchain And Smart Contracts And The Adaptation Of Ml For Data Reduction

Author

Faith Nwokoma, Prairie View A&M University

Date of Award

5-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Degree Discipline

Electrical Engineering

Abstract

Fog computing is increasingly becoming the building block for the explosive growth in edge computing as it affords the edge all the capabilities of the cloud with low latency and more decongested internet traffic. It accounts for the limitations found in IoT and other edge devices regarding memory, CPU, and bandwidth. While firms are providing these fog nodes, there remains the issue of data ownership, pricing fairness, and the amounts charged to customers based on the quality of services received. Our work proposed a decentralized blockchain-based fog paradigm that addressed these issues and provides a platform for users to contribute devices (nodes) to the fog network and get incentives when their contributed nodes are used for fog services. Our experiment showed that fairness can be achieved between the users and fog nodes, with both submitting reports of the services rendered or received at the end of every connection. An independent smart contract reviews these reports, runs analysis, and the proper charge is

levied on the user based on the services received. The system met the security core principle of confidentiality, integrity and availability. The feature of this system is enhanced by introducing a data reduction model that sits between the IoT and the fog nodes. This improves the performance of the fog network by reducing the noise and data size from IoT devices processed by the fog network. Our work introduced a system that efficiently handled this by building a machine learning model that utilized the math of principal component analysis and singular value decomposition (PCA/SVD) for data reduction. The unique value of this combination of data reduction and feature selection methods shows that while the data was greatly decreased, the feature of the data was retained. This was verified using standard benchmark datasets and a large private IoT dataset to verify the system's effectiveness.

Index terms - Blockchain, cloud, edge computing, Ethereum, fairness, fog, Internet of Things (IoT), Nodes, Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Quality of Service (QoS), Singular Value Decomposition (SVD).

Committee Chair/Advisor

Cajetan Akujuobi

Committee Co-Chair:

Justin Foreman

Committee Member

Suxia Cui

Committee Member

John Fuller

Committee Member

Olusegun Odejide

Publisher

Prairie View A&M University

Rights

Date of Digitization

4/4/2025

Contributing Institution

John B Coleman Library

City of Publication

Prairie View

MIME Type

Application/PDF

Recommended Citation

Nwokoma, F. (2025). Monetization Of Crowd-Sourced Fog Node Services Using Blockchain And Smart Contracts And The Adaptation Of Ml For Data Reduction. Retrieved from https://digitalcommons.pvamu.edu/pvamu-dissertations/112