University Of Sheffield Receives Qtum Foundation & Trusted IoT Alliance’s First Award

The University of Sheffield, U.K. Sheffield has been selected for the $60K grant by the members of the Trusted IoT Alliance on account of winning the Trusted IoT Alliance and Qtum Foundation award for academic research.

The award was given to the Department of Electronic & Electrical Engineering. The university's proposal is designed to expand the blockchain community's experience with how blockchain protocols perform in lower power and low bandwidth environments.

As a unique innovation, the project makes novel use of the Qtum protocol, implementing specially designed “smart contracts” to update a blockchain's individual parameters, thereby ensuring that the data that the sensor measures are accurately transmitted throughout the network.

Qtum, based in Singapore, is an open-sourced value transfer platform which focuses on mobile decentralized apps, or “dapps.”

The proposed project, which will begin immediately, will deploy a pan-European network to connect sensors that measure electrical power reliability and availability. The project will provide cutting-edge hardware prototypes connected to a bandwidth-constrained low power wide area network that will serve as a reference platform for protocol and network testing.

According to Patrick Dai, founder of Qtum, the growth of the Internet of Things will require fundamentally new methods of transmitting vast amounts of data over a global network. He added that the aim of this work is to provide the Qtum community with a better understanding of how current and future features of the Qtum protocol can be applied to the IoT.

Dr. Jonathan Rigelsford, principal investigator for the project on his part said the viability of any massively scaled solution such as the proposed network requires long service life, and long-range, high-reliability radio systems that consume very small amounts of power and utilize a very narrow portion of the increasing crowded radio spectrum.

Also, the project will investigate the practicality of using the IoT network to provide LoRaWAN (Low Range WAN) based data connectivity for power metering and monitoring systems.

Zaki Manian, Executive Director of the Trusted IoT Alliance add that as the IoT grows and demands maximum use of the RF spectrum, knowledge of the sources and causes of power quality disturbances is vital.

The knowledge gained from this project, both theoretical and practical, will be shared via the academic partnership with the Trusted IoT Alliance.