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Reearch report
Utilizing Blockchain Technology in IoT
Student Name
ABSTRACT
The paper proposes the utilization of the Blockchain Technology in the IoT devices. The distributed ledger technology of blockchain has materialized as an interesting object of applied science. The concerns that hinder the IoT industry from flourishing can be addressed using Blockchain technology. It can track millions of devices, enable transaction processing among the devices, and provide substantial cost and time savings to various manufacturing industries who intend to use IoT. The issues related to privacy, reliability, scalability can be addressed through the use of blockchain. Decentralized approach of this technology will remove the points of failure offering the devices with a more resilient ecosystem.
The objective of this paper is to analyze the cu
ent trends on the utility of blockchain mechanism in IoT smart devices. The scope of the paper includes the architecture of IoT technology and Blockchain technology. It further demonstrates the use of Blockchain in IoT devices in various industry segments as use cases to gain a better understanding of integrating the two technologies. The combined technology can be beneficial for industries like banking, supply chain and logistics, pharmacy and healthcare and Intellectual Property Copyright. The paper discusses each of these industries highlighting the concerns of IoT and how blockchain can improve the prospects of securing digital data in each of these segments. The study presents possible ways of integrating IoT with Blockchain in a general context. The combined technology offers various advantages of security and authentication of digital data, immutability, and decentralization which are discussed along with the challenges encountered in this integration limiting their utilization. The challenges faced by the researchers are analyzed in depth thus highlighting the common issues and future research prospects.
Observations through this research that blockchain in IoT is creating opportunities and offering competitive advantage for businesses in various markets. Majorly impacting the storage of digital data and its collection, it further involves the transportation of the data over blockchain network. As a distributed technology, blockchain ensures scalability, privacy, and reliability, and acts as a cornerstone for further development of IoT environments. In past few years, the Blockchain technology has remarkably matured and can be counted upon as a favorable solution in accomplishing the objective of integrating it with IoT.
The paper concludes that the analysis of data is extremely important to IoT thus requiring protection throughout the transaction life cycle. Information management is crucial and architecture of an IoT system with blockchain is complex due to the administrative boundaries and lack of compliance policy and procedures for the flow of data. This complexity entails challenges of keeping the data in IoT secure.
Keywords: IoT, Blockchain, decentralization, distributed ledger, integration, smart devices.
Contents
ABSTRACT    0
1.    INTRODUCTION    2
2.    LITERATURE REVIEW    2
2.1.    IoT Technology    2
2.2.    Blockchain Technology    3
2.3.    Utility of Integration of IoT and Blockchain    4
2.3.1.    Use Case: Pharmacy industry & Healthcare    4
2.3.2.    Use Case: Supply Chain and Logistics    4
2.3.3.    Use Case: Banking    4
2.3.4.    Use Case: Intellectual Property Copyright    5
3.    FINDINGS    5
3.1.    Benefits    5
3.2.    Challenges    6
4.    CONCLUSION    7
5.    REFERENCES    8
1. INTRODUCTION
Internet of Things has trended as a technology with substantial impact across multiple verticals with a prediction of billions of devices in use by 2022 (Ericsson, 2017). The IoT technologies shall offer a technological edge to small devices globally. It is capable of connecting people, products, services and places thus offering a wide range of opportunities for value creation. However, the limitation of centralized structures leading to constrained access control pose challenges in this domain of technological innovation. On one hand, the global nature of IoT encourages the construction of new applications for the end user, but lacks the robust security measures that may lead to critical issues like data
each subjected to tampering of data or data loss due to cyberattacks on smart devices. A traditional access control system catered to the scenarios where all the devices are trustworthy and a centralized access control system works well. But this system cannot solve the purpose with mobile IoT devices which may be managed by more than one manager.
Blockchain can alleviate the scalability and security issues related to IoT in several ways. The distributed ledger eliminates the requirement of trust among the participants owing to its immutability. None of the participants can hold the authority over the enormous data generated by the devices. Encryption offered by blockchain makes the devices secure as it makes tampering of data records virtually impossible. Transparency is provided to an extent that any stakeholder authorized to remain on the network can track transactions thus identifying any data leakage quickly. Transaction processing becomes faster. Although it becomes challenging hen the size of the network grows, but distributed ledger supports a considerable number of transactions. The processing overheads of IoT gateways including communication overhead costs, hardware, protocols, etc. is eliminated by establishing trust among the stakeholders.
In this paper, the technology of blockchain is researched to be integrated with IoT devices as a solution to the challenges faced by IoT technology. The adoption of blockchain technology over IoT eliminates the issue of centralized access control. First, the IoT technology is discussed in detail explaining about the three stages of its architecture and the use of sensors, actuators, layers and protocols. This discussion is followed by an overview of blockchain technology and the use of Cryptographic Digital Signature, distributed ledger and consensus algorithm in this domain. The paper further discusses the utility of blockchain with IoT smart devices by demonstrating four use cases namely pharmacy and healthcare, supply chain and logistics, banking and intellectual property copyright. The advantages that this technology integration
ings forth include decentralization, immutability, anonymization and agreement enforcement through smart contracts. However, utility of blockchain with IoT faces certain issues like scalability, interoperability, compliance, security and privacy. The paper concludes by reflecting upon the technologies and highlighting the possibilities of further research in exploring the combination of the two technologies which when exploited to its full potential, shall lead to unprecedented future of the digital world.
2. LITERATURE REVIEW
2.1. IoT Technology
The IoT architecture for a system consists of three stages of physical, communication and application. These are stated as end-device layer, edge-device layer and Server and Backend layer respectively by Ramachandran and Krishnamachari in (Ramachandran, 2018). IoT architecture is a system that comprises of a plethora of sensors, actuators, protocols, layers and cloud services. The first layer comprises of memory constrained battery-operated devices with actuators and sensors. The devices within this layer sense and record data, perform computing and transfer data over the network and have limited capability of storage and computation. Simply put, sensors detect, measure and indicate specific quantity like heat, pressure, etc. by converting them into electrical pulses. Actuators are transducers which are activated once sensors sense the data in order to perform action within their designated environment. In the second layer, the data is collected from the physical layer and transmitted to the IT world using enhanced analytics and pre-processing. The edge IT systems reside near the actuators and sensors. This layer is responsible for defining the networks and several communication protocols required for connectivity so that data can be processed at the edge of the defined network....