Blockchain and IoT Integration: A Systematic Survey

By Alfonso Panarello, Nachiket Tapas, Giovanni Merlino, Francesco Longo, Antonio Puliafito. Italian National Conference on Sensors, 2018

637 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The Internet of Things (IoT) refers to the interconnection of smart devices to collect data and make intelligent decisions. However, a lack of intrinsic security measures makes IoT vulnerable to privacy and security threats. With its “security by design,” Blockchain (BC) can help in addressing major security requirements in IoT. BC capabilities like immutability, transparency, auditability, data encryption and operational resilience can help solve most architectural shortcomings of IoT. This article presents a comprehensive survey on BC and IoT integration. The objective of this paper is to analyze the current research trends on the usage of BC-related approaches and technologies in an IoT context. This paper presents the following novelties, with respect to related work: (i) it covers different application domains, organizing the available literature according to this categorization, (ii) it introduces two usage patterns, i.e., device manipulation and data management (open marketplace solution), and (iii) it reports on the development level of some of the presented solutions. We also analyze the main challenges faced by the research community in the smooth integration of BC and IoT, and point out the main open issues and future research directions. Last but not least, we also present a survey about novel uses of BC in the machine economy.

Subfields: Computer Networks and Communications, Information Systems, Radiology, Nuclear Medicine and Imaging

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/383057f972b11b99cbc8c0d3e6c47170e9d95c1c

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Citations in the corpus

Survey on blockchain for Internet of Things (2019, background): “[73] believed that in the blockchain, the generation, verification, storage and transmission of data do not depend on any centralized organization, and each node has the same rights and obligations in the whole network and has the same status.”
Leveraging the Internet of Things and Blockchain Technology in Supply Chain Management (2019, background): “Users can transact with the machines directly and engage in on-demand manufacturing services by sending transactions to a registered machine [131].”
System architecture for blockchain based transparency of supply chain social sustainability (2020, background): “A block in the blockchain network contains a header and a body [58].”
Blockchain 3.0 applications survey (2020, background): “For example, among those scenarios we list cryptocurrencies ([3, 4]), ﬁnance and insurance ([5, 6]) and the Internet of Things ([7, 8, 9]).”
The Future of Healthcare Internet of Things: A Survey of Emerging Technologies (2020, background): “The use of blockchains is helping in the deployment of services in healthcare, smart grids, and smart cities; however, the issues of storage, security, scalability, and consensus are still a big challenge [191]–[193].”
Blockchain for Internet of Things: A Survey (2019, methodology): “The work of [9] gives a categorization of applications of blockchain for IoT.”
IoT for Smart Cities: Machine Learning Approaches in Smart Healthcare - A Review (2021, positive): “…technology in the IoT as a “secure by design” system that can be used to address security concerns in IoT applications, considering the impressive features of blockchain technology such as immutability, transparency, auditability, data encryption and operational resilience, as explained by [2].”
A Survey of IoT Applications in Blockchain Systems (2020, background): “Alfonso et al. categorize IoT blockchains into different domains and survey their challenges [Panarello et al. 2018].”
Security and Privacy for Green IoT-Based Agriculture: Review, Blockchain Solutions, and Challenges (2020, background): “Recently, blockchain-based solutions for IoT security have attracted more attention in [29], [34]–[36].”
Blockchain for AI: Review and Open Research Challenges (2019, background): “Many shortcomings of AI and blockchain can be addressed effectively by combining both technological ecosystems [19], [41].”
Applications of Blockchains in the Internet of Things: A Comprehensive Survey (2019, background): “[19] presents recent research efforts by sorting them in different application areas (smart cities, smart grids, etc.”
Blockchain and Deep Reinforcement Learning Empowered Intelligent 5G Beyond (2019, background): “Since forming blockchain requires a mining task, that is, proof-of-work (PoW), which demands both heavy computation resources and energy, it is hard to widely facilitate blockchain in a wireless network [5].”
Blockchain for 5G-enabled IoT for industrial automation: A systematic review, solutions, and challenges (2020, background): “Moreover, blockchain is different from other distributed systems based on consensus and following properties [25]:”