Applications of Blockchains in the Internet of Things: A Comprehensive Survey

By Muhammad Salek Ali, Massimo Vecchio, Miguel Pincheira, Koustabh Dolui, Fabio Antonelli, Mubashir Husain Rehmani. IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials, 2019

691 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The blockchain technology has revolutionized the digital currency space with the pioneering cryptocurrency platform named Bitcoin. From an abstract perspective, a blockchain is a distributed ledger capable of maintaining an immutable log of transactions happening in a network. In recent years, this technology has attracted significant scientific interest in research areas beyond the financial sector, one of them being the Internet of Things (IoT). In this context, the blockchain is seen as the missing link toward building a truly decentralized, trustless, and secure environment for the IoT and, in this survey, we aim to shape a coherent and comprehensive picture of the current state-of-the-art efforts in this direction. We start with fundamental working principles of blockchains and how blockchain-based systems achieve the characteristics of decentralization, security, and auditability. From there, we build our narrative on the challenges posed by the current centralized IoT models, followed by recent advances made both in industry and research to solve these challenges and effectively use blockchains to provide a decentralized, secure medium for the IoT.

Subfields: Computer Networks and Communications, Information Systems

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3d267bbcce5a599ac9cc42964fefb40e7b49cbb1

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Citations in the corpus

A Survey on Blockchain Technology: Evolution, Architecture and Security (2021, background): “Some survey articles have also presented different Blockchain applications [26], [151] while major review focus has been on Blockchain applications with other technologies like IoT and smart cities [8], [9], [14], [21]– [25].”
Blockchain for 5G and Beyond Networks: A State of the Art Survey (2019, methodology): “On top of IPFS, several blockchain-based storage platforms such as Filecoin or Storij [10] have been applied as an incentive layer to form an entirely distributed file storage system.”
A Survey on Metaverse: Fundamentals, Security, and Privacy (2022, background): “nience for user/avatar management and cost saving in operations [46].”
Enabling Massive IoT Toward 6G: A Comprehensive Survey (2021, background): “Several surveys [18], [19], [27] discussed blockchain for IoT from different aspects.”
Privacy-Preserving Solutions for Blockchain: Review and Challenges (2019, background): “Indeed, [163] provides a comprehensive analysis of the potential applications of blockchain in IoT scenarios, as well as a review of potential challenges including privacy aspects.”
A Survey on Blockchain for Big Data: Approaches, Opportunities, and Future Directions (2020, background): “The study in [19] discusses the use of hash, asymmetric encryption, consensus algorithm, a blockchain structure and a Merkle tree in ensuring a tamper free transaction.”
A Survey and Evaluation of the Potentials of Distributed Ledger Technology for Peer-to-Peer Transactive Energy Exchanges in Local Energy Markets (2019, positive): “Investment and maintenance costs are also reduced due to the adoption of hierarchical storage capacity and a sublinear cost of ownership which grows as O(logM), where M is the number of nodes [46].”
Blockchain for Internet of Things: A Survey (2019, background): “In addition to the deployment of BCoT, there are also several possible interaction manners between IoT and blockchain [8]: 1) direct interaction between IoT and blockchain, in which IoT devices can directly”
Blockchain Meets Cloud Computing: A Survey (2020, result): “…has rarely addressed by prior survey studies, even though some recent studies surveyed blockchain techniques in different perspectives, e.g., digital currencies [20]–[22], security [23], [24], privacy [21], [25], edge-integration [26], IoT-integration [27], [28], and smart city-integration [29].”