A Survey on Role of Blockchain for IoT: Applications and Technical Aspects

Abstract

In recent times, IoT has emerged as a new paradigm for the interconnection of heterogeneous, resource-constrained, and communication-capable smart devices. It has been anticipated as a key enabler for various domains of applications such as health care, automotive, agriculture, industrial operations, automation, energy, and the next generation of living. However, the current IoT applications face significant challenges in terms of the huge amount of collected data, intensive data exchange, security, privacy, centralized processing, and interoperability. To mitigate many of these issues, blockchain has been identified as a promising innovative technology. Blockchain, in conjunction with smart contracts, has received significant attention both from the industry and academia and offers features such as irreversibility, non-repudiation, proof of provenance, fault tolerance, pseudonymity, decentralized operations and decision-making, and distributed ledger. The integration of blockchain with IoT requires essential insights concerning the application areas, scalability, security, privacy, data college and storage, performance, and governance. Thus, this paper intends to expound on the opportunities and key aspects of using blockchain in the IoT landscape. Specifically, this paper surveys the utilization of blockchain for various IoT applications. Besides, the paper distinguishes different technical aspects and presents the associated research challenges. At last, future research directions are discussed depending on the lessons learned.