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IOT Proof-of-Coverage Oracles

This page has not been fully updated to represent the latest state of the Helium Network following the migration to Solana on April 18, 2023.

On the Solana L1, all PoC activity is managed by Oracles, greatly simplifying the beaconing process by allowing Hotspots to self-beacon at regular intervals. Additionally, off-chain PoC is much more easily scalable and will remove the limitations on the number of Witnesses per beacon.

The main actors and their relationships with one another are as follows.

Hotspots​

  • Hotspots will now self-beacon at regular intervals, targeting a 6-hour interval at launch.
  • To prevent premature beaconing and replay attacks, the beacon will include some entropy.
  • Hotspots beacon their Challenge and submit it to the PoC Ingest Farm through a Load Balancer proxy.
  • When a Hotspot witnesses a beacon, the Hotspot directly submits the receipt to the PoC ingest farm.

PoC Ingest Farm​

The PoC Ingest farm only performs basic validation that filters out structurally invalid data and then submits both the beacon receipt and the witness receipts to an S3 bucket. The limited duties of the PoC Ingest farms make them easily scalable as the Network grows.

PoC Verifier Oracle​

The PoC Verifier Oracle verifies all the data submitted by correlating witnesses to receipts and confirming the series of events, then submits these processed rewardable and invalid receipts to a separate S3 bucket, including how many shares to give to each Hotspot.