The Last Man Standing Technique for Proof-of-Location in IoT Infrastructures at Network Edge

Abstract

This paper is divided in two parts. The first part is the story of a failure, where an attempt to generate verifiable Proof-of-Location from WiFi scan results has failed, even when scan results were compared with a small time shift within the same trace. In the second part, this paper proposes to conduct Proof-of-Location transactions in a peer-to-peer fashion. Each peer is assisted by the cloud side which plays the role of both the real-time mediator and public transaction ledger. This paper proposes the Last Man Standing (LMS) procedure which is both a means for ensuring a fair transaction and a natural way to close it. Each transaction results in a coin which can be either shared among transaction participants or owned individually by LMS. Analysis using real mobility traces from various types of urban locations shows that the proposal is valid and will ensure that all the locations within the city will gradually be claimed via the proposed type of transactions while providing independently verifiable proofs for each location. The distant goal of this paper is a next generation Location-Based Service (LBS) which takes the form of a location-based resource economy where each location is a coin compatible with traditional blockchain operations.