Blockchain and Federated Learning Integrated Architecture for Secure Internet of Things Data Sharing
Keywords:
blockchain, federated learning, Internet of Things, data sharing, security, privacy, decentralized governance, smart contracts, edge computingAbstract
The proliferation of Internet of Things devices has generated vast quantities of sensory and operational data, yet the security and privacy of sharing such data across heterogeneous networks remain pressing concerns. This paper presents a comprehensive architectural framework that integrates blockchain technology with federated learning to establish a secure, decentralized, and privacy-preserving data sharing ecosystem for IoT environments. The proposed architecture leverages blockchain as an immutable ledger for audit trails, incentive mechanisms, and decentralized identity management, while federated learning enables collaborative model training without exposing raw data. The discussion emphasizes system-level trade-offs including latency, computational overhead, scalability, and energy consumption, and examines structural design choices such as on-chain versus off-chain data storage, consensus protocol selection, and the role of smart contracts in automating governance. Infrastructure deployment considerations across edge, fog, and cloud layers are analyzed alongside sustainability metrics related to carbon footprint and hardware longevity. Robustness against adversarial attacks, fairness in reward distribution among heterogeneous participants, and policy implications for regulatory compliance are explored through cross-domain comparisons with existing centralized and hybrid approaches. The paper argues that while the integrated architecture introduces additional complexity, its capacity for transparency, accountability, and user sovereignty offers a viable pathway toward trustworthy IoT data sharing, provided that careful attention is paid to incentive alignment, network partitions, and cryptographic overhead. Forward-looking perspectives on interoperability standards, quantum-resistant cryptography, and decentralized autonomous organizations are discussed to guide future research and deployment.
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This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
