22,483 research outputs found
On the Convergence of Blockchain and Internet of Things (IoT) Technologies
The Internet of Things (IoT) technology will soon become an integral part of
our daily lives to facilitate the control and monitoring of processes and
objects and revolutionize the ways that human interacts with the physical
world. For all features of IoT to become fully functional in practice, there
are several obstacles on the way to be surmounted and critical challenges to be
addressed. These include, but are not limited to cybersecurity, data privacy,
energy consumption, and scalability. The Blockchain decentralized nature and
its multi-faceted procedures offer a useful mechanism to tackle several of
these IoT challenges. However, applying the Blockchain protocols to IoT without
considering their tremendous computational loads, delays, and bandwidth
overhead can let to a new set of problems. This review evaluates some of the
main challenges we face in the integration of Blockchain and IoT technologies
and provides insights and high-level solutions that can potentially handle the
shortcomings and constraints of both IoT and Blockchain technologies.Comment: Includes 11 Pages, 3 Figures, To publish in Journal of Strategic
Innovation and Sustainability for issue JSIS 14(1
Architecting a Blockchain-Based Framework for the Internet of Things
Traditionally, Internet-of-Things (IoT) solutions are based on centralized infrastructures, which necessitate high-end servers for handling and transferring data. Centralized solutions incur high costs associated to maintaining centralized servers, and do not provide built-in guarantees against security threats and trust issues. Therefore, it is an essential research problem to mitigate the aforementioned problems by developing new methods for IoT decentralisation.
In recent years, blockchain technology, the underlying technology of Bitcoin, has attracted research interest as the potential missing link towards building a truly decentralized, trustless and secure environment for the IoT. Nevertheless, employing blockchain in the IoT has significant issues and challenges, related to scalability since all transactions logged in a blockchain undergo a decentralized consensus process.
This thesis presents the design and implementation of a blockchain-based decentralized IoT framework that can leverage the inherent security characteristics of blockchains, while addressing the challenges associated with developing such a framework. This decentralized IoT framework aims to employ blockchains in combination with other peer-to-peer mechanisms to provide: access control; secure IoT data transfer; peer-to-peer data-sharing business models; and secure end-to-end IoT communications, without depending upon a centralized intermediary for authentication or data handling.
This framework uses a multi-tiered blockchain architecture with a control-plane/data-plane split, in that the bulk data is transferred through peer-to-peer data transfer mechanisms, and blockchains are used to enforce terms and conditions and store relevant timestamped metadata. Implementations of the blockchain-based framework have been presented in a multitude of use-cases, to observe the framework's viability and adaptability in real-world scenarios. These scenarios involved traceability in supply chains, IoT data monetization and security in end-to-end communications.With all the potential applications of the blockchain-based framework within the IoT, this thesis takes a step towards the goal of a truly decentralized IoT
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