Applying Distributed Ledger Technology to Facilitate IIoT Data Exchange: An Approach Based on IOTA Tangle

Data interoperability is a fundamental dimension in enterprise interoperability. The interoperability of data is concerned with exchanging information coming from heterogeneous sources among different partners. Under the Industry 4.0 context, Internet of Things (IoT) technology has been widely implemented in manufacturing factories which enables the concept of smart factory. The huge amount of Industrial IoT (IIoT) devices are generating large volume of data related to all aspects of the enterprise. The free exchange of these big IIoT data is crucial to enterprise interoperability. However, in practice, the overwhelming part of the industrial data remains siloed preventing the full use of the big IIoT data. Concerns about data security and privacy bring more obstacles to industrial data sharing. With the decentralized and consensus-driven characteristics, distributed ledger technologies (DLT), represented by blockchain, provide reliable solutions to improving enterprise interoperability. This paper explores the application of IOTA in IIoT data exchange. IOTA is a tangle-based distributed ledger designed specifically for the IoT applications. A prototype data exchange system is developed based on IOTA and its data communication protocol, masked authenticated messaging (MAM), to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach.