## 1 Introduction
In addition, it is believed that a person who wants to provide their hotspot as a gateway for IoT devices may face the challenge presented by paid subscriptions, which may prevent them from providing their hotspot device to an unknown IoT device. When an IoT device wants to connect to the hotspot of an unknown person in a nearby coverage area, authentication and security become the most important factors. Security and authentication issues can be solved by incorporating blockchain and appropriate crypto tokens that perform as incentives for hotspot owners. Blockchain is an immutable, decentralized technology that aims to provide inherent security for the stored data and access by nodes (miners and validators) that are with or without authorization [27; 28]. In this way, a complete business model can be formulated where a distributed hotspot network can be developed that operates in a fully decentralized manner and offers incentives to hotspot owners to rent out their hotspots to serve IoT devices in the vicinity [29; 30; 31]. In this paper, we present a novel idea for an IoT-based, secure, distributed hotspot network to solve the existing problems in creating and deploying a hotspot network that has the potential to succeed as a business model. The main contributions of this work can be summarized as follows:  
* Using IoT devices as sensor data generators under the supervision of nearby hotspots that may be unknown to these IoT devices. * The architecture presented here is a distributed hotspot architecture that can be assimilated with many IoT devices to scale the data generation process. * The presented architecture can leverage highly secure and authenticated hotspot network coverage by using blockchain. * The whole concept behind the architecture is to use a decentralized approach for the connected hotspot devices that can act as distributed gateways. * Such hotspots can earn crypto tokens as rewards for certain activities such as data transmission, coverage stability, validation, and mining. * Authentication and security-enabled hotspot networks can span several miles without requiring existing cellular networks. * Dew computing is integrated into hotspot devices to provide increased computing power and capacity that are independent of the Internet backhaul. * By deploying dew servers in the hotspots, they can be configured to become full-fledged, lightweight, data-only hotspots. * The hotspots that are presented here can perform mining, validation, IoT data coverage, and crypto token collection from the blockchain. * Remote users and application servers can be connected to such secure, authentication-enabled incentive hotspot networks, through which distributed IoT devices can transmit sensor data over long distances. * In this design, IoT devices can be equipped with Wi-Fi and/or LoraWAN antenna modules that can be reasonably deployed according to the data transmission needs (low or high) and distance requirements. * The presented architecture can open a new business model where hotspot owners can earn crypto tokens from their hotspots to reduce subscription and operational costs and make the whole network ecosystem sustainable. The concept paper is organized as follows. Section 2 discusses the related work. Section 3 presents the background idea on various technologies that are used to develop a secure and distributed hotspot network. Section 3 provides a detailed description of the novel architecture. Section 4 concludes this paper with a discussion, the important challenges, future work, and a conclusion.